162 Rousing Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
How did a cell phone help discover the oldest known sentence written with an alphabet, and what did the sentence say?

Marcia Smith 0:09
I can only guess what is Merriam Webster’s most researched word

Bob Smith 0:14
answers to those and other word questions coming up in this episode of the

Unknown Speaker 0:18
off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith.

Bob Smith 0:37
Welcome to the off ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy, take a side road to sanity and get some perspective on life. Okay, Marcia Merriam Webster’s most researched word, yes,

Marcia Smith 0:55
every year they pick the most researched word. This is the 2022, word. You want to guess what it is?

Bob Smith 1:03
Does it have something to do with COVID or the Coronavirus or something like that?

Marcia Smith 1:07
Not the number one word? No.

Bob Smith 1:09
Can you give me any clues?

Marcia Smith 1:12
Okay, it’s a common term used today all the time by especially by young people, okay? In language, yes, yes, language and it actually means psychological manipulation, or is it gaslighting? Yes, that’s it. Okay, yes, gaslighting. And you know where it stems from? From the famous movie, 1938 movie called gaslight. Which did you ever see it? No, I didn’t. It’s it’s really cool. The husband’s trying to convince his wife, she’s going insane, and he keeps turning down the gas light, and so she says it’s getting darker in here. And he says, No, dear, no, it’s not. It keeps making it darker and darker. Okay, so that was the most researched word, and it’s psychological manipulation or grossly misleading someone you always you hear people say he’s trying to gaslight me quite often. You want to guess some of the other words. They’re kind of all words that come right out of the

Bob Smith 2:07
news. Oh, really. Okay, came out of the news. So top stories in the news. There were a lot of things that came out of the Queen Elizabeth’s death. There are all these little rituals, British rituals people never heard of before. Was any related to that Queen

Marcia Smith 2:19
Consort. That was a word. It’s the king’s Camilla.

Bob Smith 2:23
Oh, okay, all right, so his companion, yeah, who isn’t a royal, but it’s the queen, Queen Consort. All right, what are some of the others then? Okay,

Marcia Smith 2:30
oligarch, that’s the very rich having political influence in places like Russia. Another top one. What’s the strain of COVID, COVID Right now,

Bob Smith 2:42
omicron, that’s

Marcia Smith 2:43
it, codify. That’s come up a lot. Oh,

Bob Smith 2:46
that probably came up after the Supreme Court case abortion, Roe versus Wade. So codify is like how you basically take something and turn it into law, you codify it.

Marcia Smith 2:56
Okay, that’s it sentient, giving artificial intelligence a human like quality. And this is one of my favorite, lomi, which is a combination of soil mixture. And why I like it is because millions of people looked up this word because it was the answer in a wordle test. Oh, okay,

Bob Smith 3:13
which sounds like one of my old friends, lomi. I remember him in the neighborhood, down to earth guy. What can I say? Yeah, he was wonderful. Okay, all right. Marcia, how did a cell phone help discover the oldest known sentence written with an alphabet? And what did the word say? Oh,

Marcia Smith 3:29
this, I want to hear the answer to I don’t know, but I’d like to know. Okay, first

Bob Smith 3:33
of all, the sentence, it’s believed to be 3700 years old, and it says, May this Tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard. Oh, my God. It’s like, let’s root out the lice. And it’s believed that sentence was engraved 3700 years ago on a tiny ivory comb, about the size of a child’s thumb. Oh, my God, it was found in Israel on a comb. Here’s a picture of it. It’s a tiny little thing, yeah, little teeth there. Yeah. It’s the writing of the Canaanites, an ancient people credited with developing the earliest forms of what would be today’s alphabet. The New York Times reports that the 17 letters on the comb form the oldest full sentence ever found.

Speaker 1 4:16
I’ll be darned. Isn’t that interesting about lice? Who knew so how did a smartphone help reveal that? Was the question, wasn’t it? Yeah. All right,

Bob Smith 4:24
so this artifact, this little thing, had been in storage for five years in Israel, and then in 2022 a researcher from Hebrew University retrieved it and put it under a microscope, and she focused on the comb, then she took a picture of the whole artifact, and that’s when she zoomed in like we do with our fingers on our pictures, and she found these 17 letters, each less than a 10th of an inch long. Wow. So she sent that picture to her fellow researchers. They were all stunned. She said everybody had had this comb in their hand, but no one saw the inscription. No kidding. That

Marcia Smith 4:57
is hard to believe, isn’t it? Yeah.

Bob Smith 4:59
So a calm a phone and a misunderstanding, and lice, lice, get rid of that lice. It’s always been a problem, and people care. How

Marcia Smith 5:09
long ago was that? 3700

Bob Smith 5:11
years ago?

Marcia Smith 5:12
That is a little while ago. Okay, so Bob, I’m gonna go to famous movie line. Okay, okay. I’m gonna give you choices, and you’re gonna tell me different things, like the first famous line I’m going to give you is from Casablanca. You have to tell me which line is it. Is it? Play It Again, Sam, play it Sam, or play as time goes by. Sam,

Bob Smith 5:34
I think he said, play it Sam. You did it for her. Now do it for me. I think it was that. Play it Sham, play it yourself.

Marcia Smith 5:42
I’m feeding you. These aren’t play it Sam, play it you did it for her. You do it for me. You’re right. It was play it Sam, but it was infrared Bergman that said it. She said, play it Sam. Oh, really, yeah. And then later, Humphrey Bogart said, yeah, you played it for her, play it for me. No kidding. So he

Bob Smith 5:59
didn’t even say it original, yeah. So then after she left, he said, you play it for her. You play it for me. He was angry.

Marcia Smith 6:07
So here’s a quote from a famous mobster movie. Say hello to my little friend. UNQUOTE is that from the Godfather Scarface or Dirty Harry?

Bob Smith 6:17
Wow. I only saw two of those. That’s enough. Sounds like a Clint Eastwood line. Actually say hello to my little friend.

Marcia Smith 6:25
What am I giving you? Of these, your portfolio voices. I

Speaker 2 6:30
didn’t even think of this. Probably from Scarface. That’s it. Okay, you deduced it because

Marcia Smith 6:34
you saw the other dude, yeah, Al Pacino, who portrays a Capone like character, said it. I don’t want to know what he was referring to, but I assume it’s a gun. Hopefully. Okay, here’s one. There’s no crying in baseball. Who did Tom Hanks say that to Gina?

Unknown Speaker 6:55
What’s her last name? Well,

Marcia Smith 6:56
they’re using their real names, Evelyn Gardner, Doris Murphy, or Dottie Hinson,

Bob Smith 7:01
I think he said it did. Doris Murphy, Evelyn Gardner, okay. She

Marcia Smith 7:05
was crying because the hanks character said to her, start using your head. That’s the lump three feet above your ass. Oh,

Bob Smith 7:12
geez. I don’t remember. They don’t either. Tom Hanks actually said, Yeah, you know, they

Marcia Smith 7:17
know her own that. I don’t remember that line, but everybody remembered, there’s no crying in baseball. Yes, yes. All right, according to the good, bad and ugly Bob, there are only two kinds of people. What does the first type have? Is it spurs, cojones or loaded guns? Which movie was this good, bad and the ugly? Did you see that? Yes, I

Bob Smith 7:37
did. Okay. Again, clean, but I can’t remember what he said. No, I don’t know the answer to that. Well,

Marcia Smith 7:45
just guess you got one in three. Cohonis. I would have thought that too, the full quote delivered by the character called Blondie in the 1966 Clint Eastwood movie. You see in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig you dig.

Bob Smith 8:03
Oh dear, dig your grave.

Marcia Smith 8:05
Okay, the last one here. Okay, okay, what Scary Movie had the creepy line there? Here,

Bob Smith 8:13
the little girl that was in the

Marcia Smith 8:15
poltergeist. That’s it. I didn’t even have to give you the three choices. Yeah,

Bob Smith 8:19
she saw them coming on the TV set. Yes, yes.

Marcia Smith 8:21
I remember that? Oh, I do have one more. That was one of our first dates.

Bob Smith 8:24
You remember that? Yeah, we were going to see a romantic movie, and we went to see the poltergeist.

Marcia Smith 8:31
So enamored with you who saw the movie. Oh, gosh, what? Meg Ryan movie features the line I’ll have what she’s having. Was it You’ve Got Mail Sleepless in Seattle, or When Harry Met Sally, it’s

Bob Smith 8:44
When Harry Met Sally, that’s right, with Billy Crystal, that’s right. Okay, I’ll

Marcia Smith 8:47
have what she’s having. Who said it? Do you remember that that was the director’s mother? Yes, it was. And the director was Rob Reiner. That’s it, okay

Bob Smith 8:55
for you? Okay, yeah, yeah. That’s a great thing to be get your parent in a film you’re producing. I

Marcia Smith 9:00
hope our kids remember that, oh, when

Bob Smith 9:02
they start producing their own. Okay, absolutely, okay. I’ve got a question for you. What’s the very first sport that women played in the Olympics? Any idea, what’s the very first this was the 1900 Olympics.

Marcia Smith 9:16
1900 Well, what were they playing? Well, actually, there

Bob Smith 9:19
were five games. Women could compete in this first Olympics. They could compete in golf. That was one of them. Five games were played. What was the first

Marcia Smith 9:28
swimming, croquet? Oh, I was gonna say that. And I thought that wasn’t an Olympic sport, but it was,

Bob Smith 9:33
yeah, it was croquet. And then the others were equestrianism, or horse riding, golf, sailing and tennis. There were 997 athletes in the 1900 Olympics, and 22 were women. So that first year, they were only 2.2% of the athletes.

Marcia Smith 9:50
Oh, gosh. Well, here, Bob, here’s here’s one of your favorite subjects, the NFL. The largest defeat in NFL history was the Chicago Bears over. With the former Washington Redskins in 1940 want to guess what the score was? Oh,

Bob Smith 10:05
what the score was, so it probably went up be above 40. Yeah, was it in the 70s? It was okay. What was like 79 to nothing? Or

Marcia Smith 10:15
it was 73 to zero? I

Bob Smith 10:17
remember this. I remember, yeah, I remember reading about 1940 No, I wasn’t there. Okay, that’s a good one. All right, I got some more word origin questions here. Marcia, all right, Paisley. Where does that word come from? It’s

Speaker 1 10:32
a place name. Paisley. It’s a place name. Yeah. It got its name originally from a place Oh, Paisley in England. No, not Pilsley England, not where your relatives come from.

Bob Smith 10:44
PAISLEY Scotland. Oh, really, yeah. Now, originally, that pattern is from India or Persia. Yeah, it’s been in the Middle East and Asia since at least 200 ad but when its European popularity boomed and imports couldn’t keep up with the demand, various cities produced their own, including the town of Paisley in Scotland. So they produced a copycat, a knockoff, of the original designs, but the name of the design now is Paisley. I’ll be darned. Isn’t that interesting? Yes, okay, another one, Chantilly lace. Ah,

Marcia Smith 11:15
well, that’s lace from Chantilly.

Bob Smith 11:18
Where’s Chantilly? Well,

Marcia Smith 11:19
you everybody knows

Bob Smith 11:20
that. Okay, then I’m asking you, if everybody knows, you could tell me where is Chantilly? Where

Marcia Smith 11:26
I say everything is England, but I’ll say, since it’s lace, where’s that place you went to and brought me back the lace? Brussels, Belgium. Is it from Brussels?

Bob Smith 11:35
No, it’s from France. Chantilly. Doesn’t that sound like a name in France, yes, of course, yeah, the style of lace making dates back to the 1600s the majority of lace was actually produced elsewhere, but this lace gets its name from the town of Chantilly in France,

Marcia Smith 11:51
in France, Okay, one more NFL question, and this you should know, because it is famous history, Okay, the 1972 Miami Dolphins were the only NFL team to do, what

Bob Smith 12:05
the only NFL team to do? What the Miami Dolphins, I have no idea. Oh, okay,

Marcia Smith 12:11
good. They went 16 to zero and even won the Super Bowl. They had one perfect NFL season. Wow. 50 years ago, I remember that team. Never happened again. I

Bob Smith 12:22
remember that team because I think their quarterback was actually from Evansville, Indiana, and his name was Bob greasy, and he was from Evansville, Indiana, which I was living about 75 miles from there at the time. So it was a big deal. That’s

Marcia Smith 12:33
exciting. Big deal. Very exciting. All right, I

Bob Smith 12:36
have a question for you on singing sand, singing sand? What is singing sand? Answer the question, you have 12 seconds. Thank

Marcia Smith 12:44
you. It is sand when you’re walking on it that squeak so loud it sounds like it’s singing. Well,

Bob Smith 12:49
it’s kind of like that, but it’s not when you walk on it, according to Britannica, during sand avalanches, yeah, some desert dunes vibrate like musical instruments, really creating a massive noise. Scientists call the dunes singing sand. And for the record, they say the sand usually sings in the notes of G, E or F, really. So if you ever hear singing sand, I will

Marcia Smith 13:12
Google that. Actually, I want to hear it. Does it do a little song? I

Bob Smith 13:16
don’t think there’s a little song and dance pattern or anything like that said in the Sahara, something like that. Okay, singing sand Marsha, that’s what it’s all about. For a break, my

Marcia Smith 13:25
dear. Okay, it’s

Bob Smith 13:26
time to take a break. We’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’re back with the off ramp for the Cedarburg Public Library and the CPL radio internet station, and, of course, all of our podcast platforms around the world right here. Bob and Marcia Smith with questions. Okay, Marcia, we had the question on the oldest sentence found, yes, this is not written by that person. Oh, okay. But who is the oldest known author in the world? She’s the subject of a metropolitan museum exhibit right now.

Marcia Smith 14:01
So it’s a woman. I was going to say Plato, or Homer,

Bob Smith 14:04
or Herodotus or something like that. No people would say that. But now they believe the earliest known author was a woman named and houdana, who was writing more than a millennium before them, really and houdana. And houdana is believed to have been a priestess and the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad and a 1927 there was a disc from Mesopotamia found that was dating to around 2300 BC at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur you are. It bore the name enhu dwana, written with a starburst symbol, and included her image. And in the century Since that discovery, 42 of her temple hymns and three stand alone poems have been identified. Her work also includes an account of sexual abuse, too sexual harassment. There’s a piece of writing that describes her abuse at the hands of a corrupt priest of him, she wrote he has turned that temple into a house of ill. Repute, forcing his way in, as if he were an equal. He dared approached me in his lust, translated with an exclamation point, some pretty hot stuff, huh? Things don’t change. That passage is believed to be the first reference to sexual harassment in World Literature. Well, what

Marcia Smith 15:17
was her people? Was she a Sumerian?

Bob Smith 15:19
Yes, it was the ancient Sumerian city of Ur is where they found this. Her works can be seen in this exhibition, “She, Who Wrote” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Marcia Smith 15:29
Wow, that’s pretty amazing. I never heard of her. So Bob, Yes, where is the most elevated border in the world?

Bob Smith 15:37
The highest border in the world? It’s the one between China and what is the other country? It’s one that goes through Mount Everest. Very good. Yeah, and Nepal, yes, yeah.

Marcia Smith 15:50
It’s the world’s tallest mountain, and it’s the world’s highest border. It goes right through the summit. The border does. And did you know they just recently found three more feet. They re they remeasured it. Yes, they keep re measuring it, yeah, they keep doing it. And both sides did, and they found it was three feet taller. So it comes in now at 29,032 feet. Wow. 29,032

Bob Smith 16:15
and who plants that sign up there that says, This is my country. Hey,

Speaker 2 16:20
recently, do you remember this NASA set a spacecraft called Dart which careened into an asteroid, and it claimed success in knocking that asteroid off course? Yes, I do. That asteroid that was hit was a small asteroid which was orbiting a larger asteroid as it moved in space. Did

Marcia Smith 16:36
you know that? No, at that part, I

Bob Smith 16:37
didn’t know. I didn’t either. And prior to the NASA collision, the smaller asteroid took 11 hours, 55 minutes to rotate around the big one after it was hit, it took 32 minutes less. It was 32 minutes faster. Oh, while NASA’s experiment was like running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid of Giza, that golf cart was going at 14,000 miles an hour. That bodes

Marcia Smith 17:00
well for the future, yeah, fast

Bob Smith 17:02
enough to change the asteroid speed and therefore its path. So a future asteroid threatening the world, NASA has at least one way to handle it. So

Marcia Smith 17:10
was, was Earth in imminent danger of this? Or were they just practice? This

Bob Smith 17:14
was a test. They thought, well, here, let’s see. Look at that out there. Let’s see if we can hit one. You know, tap that thing, yeah, and it was called Dart, which meant double asteroid redirection test. Well,

Marcia Smith 17:23
I like that. Okay, Bob, here’s an intriguing question, where do 99% of Finnish people visit at least once a week? Finnish

Bob Smith 17:33
people finish. These are not finished. People like it’s the end of their life. They’re from Finland, okay? Finlanders, they visit spas. No, okay. Where do they visit?

Marcia Smith 17:44
They go to saunas. Okay,

Bob Smith 17:46
well, I guess that’s what I was thinking when I said spa, yes.

Marcia Smith 17:48
But just as England loves its tea and the Netherland loves its bicycles, Finland loves its saunas, and they go so much that 99% of Finns go at least once a week. That’s hard to believe. I

Bob Smith 18:02
read that earlier, too. Yeah, they go to a sauna. So it’s a big deal where, when you’re living in the sub Arctic climate up

Marcia Smith 18:08
there, of course, when I lived, did I tell you that up in Marquette, Michigan, where it was always so cold, and a lot of finlanders lived up there that, yeah, they’d go in the sauna, and then they come out and jump in a snow bank, and it was certainly got your organs pounding. You

Bob Smith 18:24
got your blood rushing. So you did that once and wrote an article about it as a reporter, didn’t you? Yeah, that was fun.

Marcia Smith 18:32
Yo, it was thrilling. There were around 3.3 million saunas in the country of just 5.5 million people. So didn’t

Bob Smith 18:41
you do one on skinny dipping? And actually skinny dip or jump into the ice water or something like that’s just something was in my imagination. Okay. Anyway,

Marcia Smith 18:50
the Saunas are everywhere. Homes, offices, even factories and underground mines have their own saunas. Wow, they’ve totally believed in the health benefits of that of a sauna. Yeah, I bet they do, and it’s backed by research coming out today that shows visiting these saunas and steamy sites, it’s associated with a reduction in the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and other conditions. Maybe

Bob Smith 19:15
we should move on to my boring question, what’s the origin of the word interconnect, not Inter? Intercourse, Marsh, it’s intercom. It

Marcia Smith 19:24
is titillating. Oh, boy. Okay,

Bob Smith 19:26
what’s the word?

Marcia Smith 19:27
What’s the origin of the word, communication, between rooms. Between rooms, okay, intercommunication. Is it anywhere close to that? Inter

Bob Smith 19:36
communication? Yes, okay. It goes back to the telephone industry, starting in the 1890s large companies began purchasing private branch telephone exchanges to link their multiple locations, and these inter communicating telephones became known as intercoms, I see,

Unknown Speaker 19:53
so that’s where it came from. Finland Bob think

Bob Smith 19:57
they don’t need intercoms. They

Marcia Smith 19:58
don’t need intercoms. It’s come right? Okay, okay, Mr. History, where was the primary starting point of the Oregon Trail?

Bob Smith 20:07
It was in St Louis. No, not in St Louis. No, I thought it started in St Louis. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 20:12
that was that. I think that was what’s his name and what’s his name. Oh, Lewis and Clark,

Bob Smith 20:16
that’s right. So the Oregon Trail started, was

Unknown Speaker 20:19
it farther north, Independence, Missouri. Oh, okay, so

Bob Smith 20:22
Independence Missouri was the start of the Oregon Trail, not St Louis, so they’re both in Missouri. So yeah, do I get any points for that at all? No, okay, all right, Marcia, I have another factoid on language and writing. I think this is interesting. Now, visualize the letter A, okay, the DNA of the earliest alphabet can be found in writing, and the letter A is an example. The letter A looks a bit like a cow staring at you. We talking capital or small capital A, okay, two legs supporting a head. Okay. That corresponds to the Hebrew letter aleph, a, L, E, P, H, which corresponds to the ancient Semitic word for ox. So look at a letter, a think of an ox looking at you, and that’s what that’s where that letter actually came from. The symbol for ox going back 1000s of years. That’s kind of fun.

Marcia Smith 21:10
Uh huh. Okay, Bob is the air dryer. Bob on an airplane than in the Sahara Desert.

Bob Smith 21:15
I think it is. Yes, it is.

Marcia Smith 21:18
The Sahara has around 25% humidity and the average airplane cabin has 20% so if your passages are drying up and you’re hacking on a plane, it’s because of the lack of humidity.

Bob Smith 21:30
Well, that makes sense. Yes, I always thought the air was very dry on a plane. Yes,

Marcia Smith 21:35
it is. Can I give you one quick factoid of American Airlines saved $40,000 after removing one Olive from its salads in the 1980s

Bob Smith 21:48
Oh, my God, see that shows you even the smallest thing, yeah, the smallest thing adds up. God. So they removed olives and how much, oh, one olive, one Olive from a salad, yeah. And they saved, what, $40,000 Oh, my God. Well, you know, lunches were better on planes back They sure were. They don’t have olives. Now, I’ll tell you that. No, lucky to get a salad. You gotta beg for them, all right? Two more names and where they came from, Rottweiler. Rottweiler, that’s a dog, right?

Marcia Smith 22:17
Rottweiler? Is that from a German town? Yes, Rottweil.

Speaker 2 22:22
Oh yeah. Rottweil, Germany, that’s where they originated. They were used to herd livestock and pole carts. So that came from there. Okay, limo, limousines, right. So, so

Marcia Smith 22:32
are we talking about the full word limousine or the full word limousine? Where does it come from? Limousine. And the

Bob Smith 22:39
first limos were built in 1902 really. Wow, that they got their name from a French region, Limousin, l, I m, O, U, S, I N, either because people thought the cloth covering on the back of the cars resembled the distinctive hoods worn by shepherds in Limousin, or because limousine drivers wore similar cloaks to protect themselves from the elements. And one more, the Charleston

Marcia Smith 23:02
is that it isn’t from the dance North Carolina. No,

Bob Smith 23:06
not Charleston. North Carolina is that where Charleston is? No, it’s Charleston. South Carolina Marshall, and that’s the answer. Yeah, the Charleston was popularized in a song of the 1923 Broadway show running wild. The choreography for the show is most likely original, but the style came from the Juba dances. Juba J, U, B, A, the moves that originated among slaves on plantations, variations of which remain popular with African Americans in southern cities like Charleston, South Carolina. So they named the dance after Charleston, South Carolina, Marcia, South Thank

Marcia Smith 23:39
you. I know that you know, geography is my life. Bob,

Bob Smith 23:42
well, I always cover those things like Charleston and the Carolinas. See everybody, okay, let’s

Marcia Smith 23:47
cover it. Yeah, the term aloof. Bob, you know, meaning emotionally or physically removed from something. Usually it’s snobbish or snooty. The word aloof, you know, where that comes from? No, huh? The word Loof is one of those nautical terms. We always say everything comes from nautical terms from the early 16th century, and it meant windward direction, or the weather side of the ship. That was the Loof. And the helmsman directed the ship into the wind to keep it from blowing into the coastal line, right. So his command was hold aloof. And it took on the general meaning of keeping clear, keeping clear or

Bob Smith 24:27
avoiding something.

Marcia Smith 24:28
Yeah, the coastal line.

Bob Smith 24:30
Wow, that’s pretty cool. So it was a nautical term, yeah, that’s good, okay, aloof.

Marcia Smith 24:35
And here’s another word question, how did the word lemon become associated with a disappointing purchase or investments

Bob Smith 24:42
with lemon laws and all that?

Unknown Speaker 24:44
Yeah, well, that’s

Bob Smith 24:45
a good question. Is it because lemons disappoint when you eat them first? Because they’re sour? That’s

Marcia Smith 24:51
a good guess. Yeah. No, no,

Bob Smith 24:52
that’s what I would think. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 24:54
This goes back to 1910, and the first rotating slot machines, which actually pay. It off in chewing gum back then, but, and as it is today, if a lemon symbol comes up, right, there’s no payout you lost, because in the chewing gum, they didn’t have the flavor lemon. Oh, is that? They had cherries and they had other things, but they didn’t have lemons. Lemon comes up. You

Bob Smith 25:18
don’t get your chewing gum. I’ll be darned, that’s funny. Oh, that’s good. Okay.

Marcia Smith 25:23
To date, what do you think approximately Bob, the speed of the fastest tennis ball serve has been, well,

Bob Smith 25:31
I imagine it’s like baseball approaches 90 miles an hour or something like that. Well, that’s

Marcia Smith 25:35
a human hand throwing it, but this is a racket hitting it, so it’d probably be faster. Okay, what’s

Bob Smith 25:41
the answer? 163.7

Marcia Smith 25:44
miles per hour. Whoa, no, don’t

Bob Smith 25:46
want that thing coming up my face, right in your

Marcia Smith 25:48
eye, or something. Oh, my God, was hit by Australian tennis star Sam growth in 2021 Geez. 160

Bob Smith 25:57
miles an hour, 63 plus. Okay, and then the term Jay Walker, this is a good one. Why is Jay Walker? Why does that mean a person who’s crossing the street at the wrong place? Because, because the term Jay meant something years ago. Do you know what it was? No. Jay was slang for foolish person.

Marcia Smith 26:15
Really you’re Jay Yeah.

Bob Smith 26:17
So when a pedestrian ignored street signs, he was a Jay Walker. That’s where it came from. I didn’t know that Jay. I thought maybe it was the shape of the you know, he looped around here to there, and I looked like a J But no, Jay meant you’re foolish.

Marcia Smith 26:36
So Bob, here’s a quote from one of my favorite writers, Nora Ephron, what my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you. That’s kind of my thinking today. It’s

Bob Smith 26:52
my thinking on yard work too. Yeah. But so far I’m still doing Yeah.

Marcia Smith 26:55
We are stuck. Oh, my and here’s one by Norman Vincent Peale. The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. Oh,

Bob Smith 27:07
that’s true. Isn’t

Marcia Smith 27:08
that a good one? It’s

Bob Smith 27:09
absolutely true. Yeah, all right. Well, that’s it for today. We hope you’ve enjoyed our trivia treasures, facts, and should

Marcia Smith 27:16
I tell you how good you did today? No, I

Bob Smith 27:18
don’t want to know all your voices were so good, let’s move on. Okay, that’s it for today. I’m Bob Smith. I’m

Marcia Smith 27:25
Marcia Smith. Join us again. We’ll

Bob Smith 27:26
move your turn next time with more fun trivia here on the off ramp.

The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library. Cedarburg, Wisconsin, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai