Fact: Kleenex tissues were originally intended for gas masks
When there was a cotton shortage during World War I, Kimberly-Clark developed a thin, flat cotton substitute that the army tried to use as a filter in gas masks. The war ended before scientists perfected the material, so the company redeveloped it to be smoother and softer, then marketed Kleenex as facial tissue instead.
Good.
Fact: You can thank the Greeks for calling Christmas âXmasâ
In Greek, the word for âChristâ starts with the letter Chi, which looks like an X in the Roman alphabet.
âSnawâ is the only one Iâve heard of really. Some people might add the F word before or after 
âSneesl, Feefle, Flinkdrinkinâ never heard of. 
In Victorian England, showing affection in public was just not on, so flowers or rings would be carried or worn to convey covert messages.
Women would often wear flowers or carry small posies of a specific type to indicate that perhaps they were courting and not looking for a husband, or that their love was absent (their sweetheart away at sea was a common theme).
Alternatively they might carry a different flower to indicate that they were single and looking for a husband.
A chap might then give her flowers of a type to tell her he was interested in her. She might then wear a type of flower to indicate that she was interested in him, or a different flower to indicate that she was not.
It was a wonderful system and it meant that a chap would know before he ever asked a girl out if he was in with a chance.
Rings could also be used to indicate the same sort of thing. The one most people in the UK are familiar with is the wearing of engagement and wedding rings on the third finger of the left hand.
Again, a ring on a different finger would be used to encourage suiters, or a different finger to discourage them, and again once approached by a man, whether or not she was interested in him.
Other countries and other cultures wear these rings on a different finger. For example, Prince Albert wore his wedding ring on his little finger (no, not him from Game of Thongs).
My friend from Romania and his wife from Belgium both wear their weddings ring on their right hands.
When my Lovely Cousin gave me a ring as a christmas present, I looked up the correct etiquette in an old book called Enquire Within Upon Everything that had all sorts of advice including the Language of Love. As a result I wore it on the third finger of my right hand as a Friendship Ring.
When we got married, swapping it from my right hand to my left in church was a symbol of the change in our relationship from friendship to friendship and marriage.
A similar system was (and perhaps still is) used in the Gay community by clipping a bunch of keys to different belt loops on their clothes. Left, right, front back etcetera could be used to let others know if they were gay or bi, looking for a partner or already taken.
Again it was a really useful system that saved a lot of embarrassment, and arrests.
This is the sweetest thing! 
Thatâs very interesting Fruitcake, thank you. 
Debbie Harry,singer and rock star,is really called Angela Tremble.
Just did it, successfully!
The mobile phone operating system, âAndroidâ was originally written in order to run a camera! That makes sense, given that itâs such an atrocity!
Chlorinated water â as in a swimming pool â doesnât have a smell at all. What youâre smelling is the chlorine reacting with chemicals on our bodies and oxidizing them: that smell is coming off us.
I must admit, that sounded like too long a time to me too.
In the earlier days of wirefree phones, I remember that the BT female voice giving you options, and telling you to press 1,2,3, star, etc., would refer to the hashtag symbol as âsquareâ.
âFor xyz, press squareâ.
I always preferred the term âsquareâ, but then the American version, âhashtagâ took over. 
80s music
Matthias Mauch, an engineer from Queen Mary University in London, decided to take 17,000 songs off the Billboard 100 ranging from 1960 until 2010 and break them down scientifically. They measured things such as timbre, harmony, and chord changes to provide a âfossil recordâ of the history of pop music.
The overarching finding is that music has been forever changing, and has generally actually been quite diverse over generations. That is to say, not all pop music, even in a particular era, âsounds the same,â as many often complain about. Except for one period of time: the 1980s.
While 1983 is described as one of the most significant years in terms of change, after that most of the popular music of the era adopted that same sound, creating the most homogenous decade of any in the study.
It was not until 1991, when hip hop and grunge burst into the mainstream, that diversity and popular music went hand in hand again.
If you were into â80s music, characterised by Phil Collins-style synth drums and rip roaring arena rock guitars, you had plenty to choose from.
For those @Psmith who have an eclectic taste in music and like some diversity, the 80s was a lackluster decade for you.
So, there you have it!
It would take a climber more than 30 seconds to fall from the top of Everest! âHey, HoneyâŠI can see our house from - CRUNCH! Oh, HoneyâŠI hit a planet coming in the opposite direction! Whoopsie!â.
My work here is done.I wonât mention it ever again 
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was actually christened Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart.The Greek version.
OTOH:
Researchers in Spain came to the conclusion after tracking the timbre, pitch and volume of nearly a half-million songs released between 1955 and 2010. They found that in this music dataset â which spanned rock, pop, hip-hop, metal and electronic genres â the transitions between chords (a string of notes played at the same time), note combinations, tone and instrument choices all became less and less diverse over time. Meanwhile, the songs grew intrinsically louder.
In short, thereâs been âa progressive homogenization of the musical discourse,â Joan SerrĂ of the Spanish National Research Council and colleagues wrote in a paper published yesterday (July 26) in the journal Scientific Reports. âIn particular, we obtain numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations (roughly speaking, chords and melodies) has consistently diminished in the last 50 years.â
Whereas in 1960 you might have heard startling chord transitions, unfamiliar instruments and variation in the volume over the course of a song played on the radio, tunes today restrict themselves to the âfashionableâ set of chords and note combinations, and maintain a uniformly high volume from beginning to end.
Although no one had previously quantified the trend toward louder music, many in the recording industry colloquially refer to the effect as the âloudness war.â More and more these days, when a new album is being digitally mastered, engineers compress and distort the recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude, sacrificing sound quality in the process.
Thanks mainly to the Beatles.
Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murder and lived to the age of 66.
During WW2, Britain declared war on Japan about 9 hours before the USA did.
Not in 1960 - they came later ⊠and, IMO, they owed an enormous debt to George Martin, whose ârecordâ was astoundingly âdiverseâ:
