Fishin'

"Famed baseball pitcher James Augustus Hunter got his nickname "Catfish" when he was a kid growing up in N.C."

Hunter was actually given that name by the owner of the Kansas City Athletics back in 1965. The name stuck even after he joined the Yankees in 1975.

Bug repeller?

"Eating garlic will repel insects."

As described in the U of Connecticut Health Center news:
Dr. Thiruchandurai V. Rajan, chief of pathology at the University of Connecticut Health Center, was inspired to check out the effects of garlic on repelling mosquitoes because a colleague's wife was feeding garlic to her horse. He learned that it's a common practice throughout the United States to feed garlic to horses and dogs to prevent mosquito bites. In his experiment, dozens of human test subjects took garlic capsules or placebos and then inserted arms into a mosquito cage to see whether it had any effect on the number of bites they received.

It didn't. Rajan suspects that a longer experiment in which subjects eat more garlic for longer periods might show some improvement. The question is whether eating so much garlic would be more effective at driving away insects or friends.

Garlic ticker

"Garlic cuts cholesterol level."

According to the U of Connecticut health dept. the " effect of garlic consumption on reducing cholesterol is lower than the reductions that occur with changes in diet and use of statin drugs. The percentage of change is too low to recommend
garlic consumption as a treatment."

Marco Polo in China?

"Marco Polo, in The Adventures of Marco Polo, describes his sojourn in China."


Historian Jonathan Dresner on the History News Network has this to say about it:

'Marco Polo did not go to China...Marco Polo did not work for the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Yes, it was possible to make the journey, and yes, some non-Chinese did serve the Yuan. But the errors in his Travels cannot be glossed over as "a traveler's tendency to exaggerate (especially in regard to numbers)" and his absence from Yuan records (which were pretty well kept) cannot be slipped by with "may have been employed" and the distinct likelihood that Polo was simply embellishing translations of Chinese gazetteers he picked up in Persia is not clearly expressed by "Scholars have long regarded Marco Polo's book, if used carefully, as an important historical document."'

C mark

"In order for a work to be copyrighted it must actually show the copyright notice with the date."

Copyright today follows the Berne convention. Templetons explains it htis way: "...almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. The default you should assume for other people's works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you know otherwise."

Tornado Vs windows

"To equalize air pressure during a hurricane leave your windows open."

From the Tornado Project
The idea that moving one thin pane of glass is going to protect a roof or house from one of the most violent natural forces on the planet has a certain absurdity about it...To get to the very center of a mature tornado (where the pressure may be low enough to cause some explosive effects), the windows would have to endure 100-200 mph winds in the walls of the vortex. Those winds would be laden with boards, stones, cars, trees, telephone poles, and the neighbor's roof shingles as well as wind pressure of more than 100 pounds per square foot. This barrage would blow more than enough ventilation holes in the building to allow any pressure difference to be equalized.

Another Earthquake

"Tens of thousands of people died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake." (A teacher I had once told me this number.)

According to the Berkeley Seismological laboratory some 3000 died.