Today I Learned

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Fun fact: The main protagonist in Fired On Mars (animated sci-fi comedy, 2023) did that.

Edit: He also did that on everything everybody else owned, until he'd used up all the company labels and caused somebody to lose their thumb in an accident with an unlabelled bottle of strong acid.

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 26 Mar 2025, 4:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, that he makes money for performing dissections and that's why he was poking around women's reproductive systems looking for things that didn't already have a name.

Things about math that I've never known before.

Domestic blood pressure meters are more awkward and unreliable than I thought they were, and that's saying something.

Are you struggling with it mate

Aldi is short for "Albrecht Diskont"

Who knew

And did you know that there's been some kind of civil war in the Albrecht family for years, and that it's a wonder that Aldi has survived. In Germany it's split into Aldi North and Aldi South! It's the latter (Aldi Süd) that operated in the UK.

How do you know all that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi

I sometimes forget about Google and Wikipedia

Damn straight I'm struggling with it. Measuring scientific medical things and controlling the accuracy was my career for years and I was a dab hand at it, but blood pressure isn't a science, it's a black art. I'm down to using a cheapo meter and couldn't understand why it was giving me such high readings. Then the previous owner casually announced that it's notorious for overestimating. So I've had to derive a formula to convert its numbers into something like reality.

And you wouldn't believe the palarva - don't do anything strenuous for half an hour, don't eat, drink, watch videos, use a computer, talk, or have scary thoughts, then sit upright and perfectly still for 5 minutes, then hold your arm in just the right position, press the button, and don't be surprised if it's falsely high because the body sometimes feels a sense of shock when the cuff tightens for the first time, so take a couple more readings, but wait a few minutes between them or you might collapse the vein and get false low readings, then calculate the average and hope to Christ it's something like correct.

Yeah I hear you

I hate having my BP done
I have white coat syndrome

The seven Koopalings are all named after musicians except one, he is named Morton Koopa Jr.
He was named after Morton Downey Jr., who was the host of a trashy talk show in the late 80s when I was in my preteens. I hated the show, so when my brother and I got Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES I didn't know what to think when I read in the manual that one of the Koopa kids was named after him, except that the Koopalings are usually pretty mischievous and bratty so I guess it kind of fits.

I knew Ludwig Von Koopa was named after Beethoven, but I didn't know the others were named after musicians, too. I don't even know what genre of music they played.

Mine's always bad when they take it, and they say it might be the whitecoat thing. But it's fine when I take it just after I've woken up. Funny thing is they've got a blood pressure machine in Walmart, and that always gives me a high result. I think it's the Walmart experience that does it. It's always horrible in there, and of course the machine has to have a touch screen that doesn't work properly. And it wants to know your date of birth, height and weight. And the seat's uncomfortable and you have to be a contortionist to get your arm in the hole. Enough to wind anybody up.

"Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" is a palindrome.

Sounds enough to give you an aneurysm never mind high BP

I don't think a Walmart or anything Asda would be the best place for me either