So there’s only one person left on Gilligan’s Island. If you had Ginger in the castaways’ pool, then congrats. TV was better when there were only five or six channels and everyone huddled around the set on a Wednesday night to watch seven knuckleheads on a desert island trying to get reception from a radio made out of a coconut. But the real legacy of a show like Gilligan’s Island is that the two single girls on the show gave rise to one of the most important debates in popular culture.
Read moreHey, Cat Brain!
Researchers at Vanderbilt University have determined that dogs are smarter than cats. Turns out dogs have bigger brains, and more importantly, dogs have roughly 530 million neurons in that brain, while cats have about 250 million. The experts say that neurons in an animal’s cerebral cortex are a hallmark of intelligence. I knew this. We all knew this. The people at Vanderbilt are seemingly working on getting degrees in obvious.
Fur. Feathers. Fins.
Fun Facts: Animals
Life is mostly about the pursuit of knowledge and, therefore, the collection of fun facts. All my fun facts were harvested personally…They started as a physical book purchase from Amazon, then moved to a Kindle download where I bookmarked them by hand; at the conclusion of a book they were transcribed into a Snoopy Moleskine, and finally, they appear here for your personal wonderment.
- Albatross spend 95% of their lives over open oceans; wandering albatross have the longest wingspan of all birds, 12 feet tip to tip; they can fly four million miles over a lifetime.
- The sperm whale that attacked and sunk the whaling ship Essex in 1820 (the real world Moby Dick) was an 85 foot long male, weighing 80 tons with a 20 foot wide tail.
- Penguins can cool their stomachs (using them like little refrigerators) to a temperature that slows digestion, they can therefore regurgitate and eat the same food over the course of days.