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Reflections
Goldfish win the battle of the chromosomes : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisGoldfish win the battle of the chromosomes
| by Roger Matile
| 1/11/2007
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Have we all recovered from our Christmas cheer yet? The New Year’s champagne corks all recovered from under the sofa?
Well, don’t worry if you miss one or two; you’ll find them next spring when it’s time for the annual spring cleaning dust-up.
We survived just fine at the Matile manse. Plenty of family and friends around including a pre-holiday visit from (and I’m really not making this up) the U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone and his wife, who have been a faithful subscribers for years. It was perhaps a little less posh than your average diplomatic reception, but the pickled herring was good and so was the Fox Valley reisling.
Now we’ve completed taking down all the cheery Christmas stuff we dragged out of hiding back when the got the big snow storm in early December—haven’t we? It’s always sort of sad, but satisfying as well, to pack things away for another year. The ornaments my wife and I hung on trees when we were kids, the newer decorations given to us as gifts from friends and family, and the things we bought along the way all create a long link to the past that is renewed each holiday season.
And we always seem to come across another batch of old Christmas and New Year’s cards that somehow got tucked into the bottom of a storage box, reminding us of friends and relatives as a sort of holiday time capsule. Actually, we recall reading (and putting in a pre-Christmas column) that the average American household gets 28 or so Christmas cards every year. We usually get a few more than that, and I’m sure some households get a lot fewer. But each and every one of them still goes by the good old U.S. Mail, and through the hands of our intrepid mail carriers.
And along with all the cards and catalogs for really neat things, of course, comes the wretched junk mail. But not all junk mail is created equal. Some is actually sort of interesting. For instance, here are a few things I never would have found out (much less thought about) if I hadn’t opened all the mail that arrives here a the newspaper office (each and every day that I show up for work):
A kangaroo cannot jump if its tail is lifted off the ground—it needs its powerful tail for pushing off. Which is illegal in the NFL. You could look it up.
If you are in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and you turn and start marching due north, which country’s boundary will you cross first? The U.S. Windsor is just across the Detroit River from Detroit, Mich., and that’s where you’d end up.
According to comedy writer and magician Robert Orben: “The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than 30 percent of the people in the world.”
The Reuters News Service, one of the first news services to provide political, economic and general interest news to European newspapers, began by using pigeons to carry messages between telegraph lines.
I have a list of holiday hints here that suggests: “Have a dinner party back-up. Keep store-bought entrees and desserts readily available in case of a cooking mishap.” For most folks these days (at least from what I see in the supermarket check-out aisle), actual home cooking as opposed to warming up that store-bought food is most people’s fall-back position.
Unlike most other instruments which can be tuned, no two cymbals sound exactly alike.
Says here the pretzel was first made by monks in southern Europe as a reward for children who learned their prayers. It is shaped to represent the crossed arms of a child praying. Or so it says.
A hedgehog’s heart beats 300 times a minute, on average.
Clara Barton was not just the nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was also the first woman clerk of the U.S. Patent Office.
The largest fish in the world is the whale shark. It weighs up to 15 short tons—more than twice as much as an African elephant.
The words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” were written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861 after she visited Union Army camps around Washington, D.C. Her words were put to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and the rest, as they say, is history.
Minneapolis, Minn. is home to the world’s four largest wheat flour milling companies.
The fall (equal to six ells each of which equals 20 nails) is a traditional unit of distance equal to about 18.6 feet. The fall is an old Scottish measurement. A Scots furlong was equal to 40 falls (226.8 meters) rather than 40 rods (16.5 feet), and the Scots mile was equal to 320 falls (5,952 English feet).
The only head of government to give birth to a child while in office during the last century was Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who had a child in January 1990.
Bacteria were first observed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant, in 1676. In fact, van Leeuwenhoek is often called the father of bacteriology.
The homeland of the very first person processed at Ellis Island was Ireland. Annie Moor was from County Cork, and passed through Ellis Island on Jan. 1, 1892.
Humans normally have 26 chromosomes. A goldfish, on the other hand, has 94. What does this tell us? Well, for one think, he with the most chromosomes does not necessarily get the most enjoyment out of donuts.
The horn of the rhinoceros is made of keratin, the same thing your fingernail is made of.
Finally, the tropical manchineel tree is so poisonous even the rainwater that drops from its leaves can poison human skin. And on that happy note, I bid you adieu.
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