180 Bird Brain Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
Up to 3.5 billion birds migrate across North America every spring. Why don’t we see them?

Marcia Smith 0:08
Okay? What famous actor was buried with a gold whistle

Bob Smith 0:13
answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and

Marcia Smith 0:18
Marcia Smith. You

Unknown Speaker 0:35
Music. Welcome

Bob Smith 0:36
to the off ramp, a chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity.

Marcia Smith 0:43
Sure, Bob, this is sanity. Okay, all right. Marcia,

Bob Smith 0:47
bird migration,

Marcia Smith 0:49
yeah, why don’t we see them? Huh? Yeah, it

Bob Smith 0:50
happens on a planetary scale. And there are 3.5 billion birds migrate across North America, spring alone. Why don’t we see them?

Marcia Smith 1:00
We see a hell of a lot of Canadian geese, yeah, twice a year, right? But what about the rest of those? Boyd’s all the

Bob Smith 1:07
other birds, 600 species. Why don’t we see them? It’s not

Marcia Smith 1:10
because they fly too high. They can’t fly too high, right? No, it’s not that they travel at night.

Bob Smith 1:15
That’s exactly right. All that traffic, 3.5 billion birds, crossing the North American continent and similar numbers across South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. And except, like you said, for a flight of geese here and there, we just don’t see it. It’s been invisible. Well now there is a new website called Bird cast. I like that, yeah. It lets you take a look at the birds. It’s a joint product of three universities, Cornell, Colorado, State and the University of Massachusetts. And you can track the birds live as they fly across the continent, your state, even your county. What they do is they take 140 radar stations, and they show each night’s migration, and then you can see numbers. So you might be watching their dashboard and see something like this, 101,294,800 birds have crossed Texas so far tonight, really, that’s what it said last Sunday night. Did

Marcia Smith 2:11
you look No? Oh,

Bob Smith 2:12
I’ve read an article on it. So they have a digital counter there tracks the total number of birds estimated to have flown over an area, and the direction and the counter goes up and down in speed as more birds fly. So it’s a pretty cool thing. Well,

Marcia Smith 2:28
we gotta tell our friend Randy about that. Yes,

Bob Smith 2:31
he may know about it all that. Yeah, he’s a birder Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Ty bird calls the site a corrective to our human centric view of the planet. No, that’s nice. It is, isn’t it? All these creatures, and we kind of ignore them, but don’t realize it’s happening up there.

Marcia Smith 2:47
Okay, flying on what famous actor was buried with a gold whistle.

Bob Smith 2:51
It could have been Humphrey Bogart, because his wife said in that movie, she goes, Just give me a whistle. Whatever. That line was, a famous line.

Marcia Smith 2:59
Oh, my God. Lauren Bacall, yes. Humphrey Bogart died in 1957 and his wife Lauren Bacall placed a small gold whistle among his ashes. It was engraved with a famous line she said in the movie to have and have not if you need anything, just whistle. Isn’t it sweet? It was their first film together, and mark the period when they fell

Bob Smith 3:21
in love. What a sweet thing to do, yeah, to bury that with your husband. Yeah? That

Marcia Smith 3:25
is just so sweet. Well, that whistle, have you ever seen that movie? It’s, you know, it’s one of those golden oldies.

Bob Smith 3:30
You know, there are certain movies that I know the names of, but I never saw, so I never saw that film. I guess we should watch

Marcia Smith 3:36
that. It’s like from the 30s. You know, it’s 40s,

Bob Smith 3:39
is it? Yeah, she was a young woman. She was about 19 when they met.

Marcia Smith 3:43
Yeah, I can’t believe she fell in love with old, craggy Bogart. Give me a Bogart. Bob, you played

Bob Smith 3:47
it for her. You played it for me. That’s

Marcia Smith 3:48
right, yeah. Play it again. Play

Bob Smith 3:50
it again. Sham Humphrey, you didn’t really say that. All right, what do you got? Well, let me see what have I got here. More questions on animals. Okay, I’ve got a question on an animal that took down the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in 1987 it’s not a bull, it’s not a bear. What was it? What animal once took down a stock exchange

Marcia Smith 4:12
because of their extinction? It got in the mess of things. It got in the mess of things.

Bob Smith 4:17
It was an errant squirrel. Oh, and he literally, somehow he got into the wiring or something, and he caused the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. That’s funny, to lose power for 82 minutes. What was that? It was 1987 and that one squirrel kept an estimated 20 million shares from being traded. That’s a good little fact. It is from britannica.com Okay,

Marcia Smith 4:41
I got a question. I think you’ll know, but I wonder if our listeners all do here, the most prestigious acronym in show business is E, got E, G, o, t, what does that stand for? Robert?

Bob Smith 4:53
I don’t know if I know that one. Do I Yes,

Marcia Smith 4:57
there are only eight. 18 people in history that have an EGOT.

Bob Smith 5:03
Oh, they have an Emmy, a Grammy Tony. And what’s the O?

Marcia Smith 5:06
That’s the big one. Well, an Oscar, yeah, of

Bob Smith 5:10
course, yes, an EGOT. Okay,

Marcia Smith 5:11
yeah.

Bob Smith 5:12
So that’s the term they use for those people. That’s

Marcia Smith 5:14
right, they’re EGOT winners. And can you name any, uh, name a few of the top Barbra

Bob Smith 5:20
Streisand probably has, absolutely has to be a singer for the Grammy aspect of it. See who else would be that, let me see, and we’ll think he had him. I’ll just name a few. He never had a movie and a record at the same time. Whoopi Goldberg,

Marcia Smith 5:36
Oh, really. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, John Legend, Richard Rogers, Helen Hayes, Rita Marino, John Gielgud, Audrey, Hepburn, Melvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks and Mike Nichols, okay,

Bob Smith 5:48
okay, I get the idea. But when did people like Helen Hayes and Whoopi Goldberg win Grammys for audio recordings? Well, I’ve

Marcia Smith 5:56
got the answers. Helen Hayes was the first female EGOT winner. Oh, she won a Grammy in 77 for the Best Spoken Word for great American documents. Okay, Whoopi Goldberg won her Grammy in 85 for Best Comedy recording was called direct from Broadway. Oh, I didn’t know that. And get this Bob. So far, only four of the 18 e got winners were women, Helen Hayes, Whoopi Goldberg, Audrey, Hepburn and Rita Marino. Wow.

Bob Smith 6:23
Who did it first? Who was the first person to earn an EGOT?

Marcia Smith 6:27
Richard Rogers of Rogers and Hammerstein. Oh, so a composer and Harry Belafonte, who recently died, was also an EGOT winner. Okay? And once again, an EGOT means you’ve won an Emmy Award for TV, a Grammy for recording, an Oscar for film, and a Tony for live theater. EGOT,

Bob Smith 6:45
I got it all right. Marcia, have I got a question for you? Oh, fire away, honey. I’ve got some bird questions. Ah, surprise, after talking about the bird migrations, several varieties of birds weigh less than a coin. What is the lightest known bird? What is the species hummingbird? That’s right, it’s the broad tailed hummingbirds. They weigh less than a nickel, and the bee humming birds of Cuba weigh less than a dime. They’re often mistaken for an insect, huh? Isn’t that amazing? That’s

Marcia Smith 7:17
Wow. That’s That’s small. Okay, one more. What

Bob Smith 7:20
bird can hold three gallons of water in its bill

Marcia Smith 7:23
now? Oh, okay, it’s got to be a pelican, that’s right, the

Bob Smith 7:26
American white pelican. And it doesn’t use that storage for, you know, eating. It’s just temporarily, yeah, when they’re hunting for fish, they dump the water in. They swallow their prey. Their bills have a larger capacity than their bellies. How

Marcia Smith 7:40
can they not swallow all that water if? How did they get rid of the water and keep the fish? It’s just like

Bob Smith 7:45
having it in your mouth. You don’t have to swallow everything you have in your mouth. You know, you can spit it out.

Marcia Smith 7:50
That’s not easy. That’s what they do. Oh, three gallons, though. Yeah, that’s a lot. You’ve seen a gallon of milk. Imagine three of those. Jeez.

Bob Smith 7:56
That’s a lot. It is hard to believe. All right, okay, one

Marcia Smith 8:00
more award question. I’m gonna mention each award, and you tell me how it got its name. Okay, Emmy, that’s TV award.

Bob Smith 8:07
Let’s see the Emmy. That is the that’s one. I really don’t know how it came

Marcia Smith 8:12
this is pretty obscure. Okay, it was originally named Ike, which was the nickname for iconoscope tube used early in television cameras. Oh, my goodness, yes, but changed it to Emmy, the nickname for image orthocon camera. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, it was an Emmy originally, yeah, the name stuck, but was later modified to Emmy because the award itself depicts a woman with wings who was modeled after the wife of the man who designed it. It was TV engineer Louis McManus. His wife name was Emmy. Emmy, yeah. And he designed the award using her as the mom. I’ll be darned. And so they just said, Okay, it’s Emmy. Forget Emmy. And then

Bob Smith 8:55
Oscar was named after, I think Oscar was the name of somebody said it looks like my uncle Oscar. I think it was a woman, exactly right, worked at the Academy Awards offices.

Marcia Smith 9:05
The prevailing rumor is that she was the academy librarian, and she joked about the back of the silhouette looking just like her uncle Oscar.

Bob Smith 9:15
And I’m the Tony. I think that’s named after a Broadway actor or director, right?

Marcia Smith 9:20
Yes, for outstanding achievement, the Tony, which is live theater, was named after Antoinette Tony Perry, an actress, producer and theater director who was co founder and Secretary of the American Theater Wing. Okay, she had some heavy credentials. Did you say what a Grammy was? Yet, that’s the easy one

Bob Smith 9:39
gram of phone. Yes, yes, the grammar phone. So

Marcia Smith 9:42
those are how the four big show business awards got their name. Speaking

Bob Smith 9:46
of names, okay, we have two months here. I’m gonna go to and tell me where they came from. The month of May. Where does that get its name from? My middle name? Marcia May. No, it’s not from your middle name. Marcia.

Marcia Smith 9:59
Okay, it has another May, May, May, I may. Why? Don’t know

Bob Smith 10:04
the earth goddess Maya, m a i, a whose domain was to nurture and oversee the growth of plants. That was the inspiration for May. The Latin word may ores, which means elders, was also tied to the time of year when the elders were celebrated. Okay, only in the spring, otherwise, get back in the box. June. What do you think that’s named after

Marcia Smith 10:27
the Roman emperors?

Bob Smith 10:28
Not an emperor, but a Roman god? Okay,

Marcia Smith 10:31
let’s say juniper. I think that’s a flower The Goddess, the goddess of

Bob Smith 10:38
Juno. Juno, her purview included marriage, children and the overall well being of women.

Marcia Smith 10:43
Is that why everybody wants to get married in June? It probably is. Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? She

Bob Smith 10:48
was the mythological wife of Jupiter, who was the king of the Roman Pantheon. And Jupiter,

Marcia Smith 10:53
I bet you, they were party favors.

Bob Smith 10:55
That sounds like a boy. Hey, here they come, June and Jupiter. Yeah, the Latin word juvenis, which means young people may also have had some influence on the naming of the month, but it’s all related to romance youth and June and juniper goddess Juno. I’ll be darned. So that’s how May and June got their names.

Marcia Smith 11:13
All right. Okay, Bob, why do we honor the dead by putting flowers on their grave?

Bob Smith 11:20
Is that a practical thing was that it had something to do with, I hate to bring this up, the smell of things when people die,

Marcia Smith 11:27
that’s a good guess. I bet you that was part of this thing, except

Bob Smith 11:31
some flowers there, because the corpse has been there for a little while. You know could be but I don’t know. Is that it, or is it just a rebirth? It’s

Marcia Smith 11:40
a tradition that goes back 13,000 years. Wow. According to Reader’s Digest and would they

Unknown Speaker 11:46
lie? They’ve been around that long. I didn’t know that

Marcia Smith 11:50
in Israel, archeologists discovered skeletons that had been placed on a bed of Blooms a layer of mud preserved impressions of the sage and figwort flowers, so they were laid on it. And I’ll bet you’re right, it doesn’t say it, but sage and figwert, I don’t know what the heck a fig word is, but sage would smell good.

Unknown Speaker 12:11
Interesting, huh? Yeah, 13,000 years, it

Marcia Smith 12:13
goes back and we it’s just a tradition we still do.

Bob Smith 12:16
All right, Marsha, I’ve got a new vacation destination for you. All right, let’s do it. Where can US citizens go to mine? Diamonds? Africa? No, Russia. US citizens. That’s a clue. Marcia, it’s in this country. In this country, where can US citizens go to mine? I don’t know diamonds.

Marcia Smith 12:37
I don’t know where we have diamonds. Is it the South. Yes, it’s somewhere in the South. Okay, so, okay, somewhere in the south there’s actually a park. Really? Diamond Park? Yeah,

Bob Smith 12:46
diamond Park,

Marcia Smith 12:48
is it really? It’s

Bob Smith 12:49
Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas.

Marcia Smith 12:52
No kidding. I’ll

Bob Smith 12:53
tell you more about that after we take this break. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’re back Bob and Marcia Smith and the off ramp. We do this for the Cedarburg public library every week, and then it goes out on podcast platforms all over the world. Well, in this country, Marcia, there’s a place called the Arkansas Crater of Diamonds State Park. It’s the only working diamond field in the United States, and a farmer who owned it in 1906 found the first diamond, really? Yeah, it’s owned by the state. You can go for a small fee, and you can search the grounds for diamonds. So how many do you think have been found? There? A lot, or a little, quite a few. I could tell you how many were found, uh, so far since 1982 and how many were found since 2022

Marcia Smith 13:41
really? Yeah, altogether, I’ll say

Bob Smith 13:44
1000 Okay, multiply that by 35 No kidding, 35,000 diamonds have been found by park visitors since 1982 in 2022 500 were found alone.

Marcia Smith 13:58
Why don’t we go over there?

Bob Smith 14:00
I knew you were gonna say that. Why are we going there? Why don’t we visit there? The largest one ever found was called the Uncle Sam. It weighed 40 carats, 40.2 carats. Yeah, that’s in the Smithsonian. And then in 1990 the Strawn Wagner, a 3.3 carat white diamond was found there, and the state bought that one. It said they bought it. It was worth $34,700 that’s on display at the park center. And then the most recent one was a 3.29 brown carrot diamond found this spring. So, yeah, well,

Marcia Smith 14:33
what’s the deal? Do you have to pay to get in there, to give you a shovel? You pay, I

Bob Smith 14:37
think it’s a small amount, like $13 something like that. And then, yeah, then you just go looking.

Marcia Smith 14:42
They probably have a senior discount. Well, they

Bob Smith 14:44
buy Well, there we go. So a new vacation destination, crater of diamond State Park. I knew you’d like that. That’s near Murfreesboro, Arkansas,

Marcia Smith 14:51
okay, all right, Bob, that that’s pretty curious. How come I never knew that? Well,

Bob Smith 14:57
I’ve been keeping it from you, Mike,

Marcia Smith 14:58
I’ve never known anybody. Go there either, okay, I think

Bob Smith 15:01
it’d be fun just to save in there. And you looked, you know, some people have tips like go during the middle of the day because the sun shines on, oh, that you can see it. More things like that.

Marcia Smith 15:11
Okay? Bob triple A, okay. Not to Alcoholics Anonymous, but

Bob Smith 15:14
the American Automobile Association, yes.

Marcia Smith 15:18
What situation prompted the formation of this group? I

Bob Smith 15:22
think it was accidents, wasn’t it, or was it the lack of good roads? I think it might have been the because I think they promoted the, you know, paving of roads in America. Yeah, that’s

Marcia Smith 15:31
excellent thought process, but absolutely wrong, really. According to Isaac Asimov, it was formed originally for the purpose of providing scouts or lookouts who could warn motorists about police traps. That’s what it was for. That’s it. It was for speed traps. Yeah, oh my goodness, that that so if you joined, you’d get a heads up at police ahead.

Bob Smith 15:54
No kid. That

Marcia Smith 15:55
is bizarre. How

Bob Smith 15:56
did they provide it? I mean, did they just have people out there? No, the American Automobile Association,

Marcia Smith 16:02
yeah, I think they quickly moved on to other things, more worthy. Oh,

Bob Smith 16:08
yes, they are more worthy. Yes, from humble beginnings, and, you know, kind of bad beginnings, that’s what they were doing to something like you said, more noble. Yeah, American automobiles,

Marcia Smith 16:18
great maps, don’t

Bob Smith 16:19
they? Yes, and they, they used to have a service where they would, you know, map out something for you. But now we’ve got all these, you know, ways, and we’ve got Google Maps and all of that. I wonder how many people use that service.

Marcia Smith 16:29
I don’t know. You know, our friends, the fines do.

Bob Smith 16:32
That’s right. Okay. Marcia, how did fake news lead to an unusual custom for British royal births? Fake News. And don’t think that that’s necessarily a new term. Oh, really, I do. Yeah, I’m applying this to it. Something had happened hundreds of years ago. Oh,

Marcia Smith 16:51
hundreds of years ago. I was going to say that after you have the baby, you have to come out and step and let everybody see your baby. You know, you sort of like that, come out of the hospital or or go on the balcony or something. And he said, Here’s mice.

Bob Smith 17:04
Well, here this, oh, this just will appall you. Okay, until recently, high ranking government officials had to be present in the room during labor and delivery. During the labor and delivery of British royal children. The purpose was to ensure the births were legitimate and no baby swapping occurred. Swapping the first royal birth born after this rule was abolished was Prince Charles, who is now King Charles the third when he was born in 1948 nobody was there. Queen Elizabeth the Second didn’t have to suffer a British government politician in the same room when she gave birth, but they did that for over 200 years.

Marcia Smith 17:43
Bad enough, you got interns in there with the doctor. You want to know

Bob Smith 17:47
how this started? Yeah, the case of fake news. In 1686 King Charles the second died. He had no legitimate children, so, oh my, what’s going to happen now? You know that meant the throne passed on to his brother, James, and in June of 1688, King James’ wife, Mary of Modena, bore a healthy son, James, Francis Edward. He was now the heir to the throne, but news of the baby’s birth was met with denial. Opponents of the king, who feared a Catholic dynasty, started spreading fake news that Mary’s child was still born, and another baby had been brought into the bed chamber, yeah.

Marcia Smith 18:24
Well, they bought it like they buy everything today. That’s right,

Bob Smith 18:26
a conspiracy, because they were Catholic, see, and it was a Protestant nation, so that was the problem there. So the little baby was known as an imposter baby, nicknamed the pretender, and the theory gained so much traction, that’s what motivated William of Orange to invade England and overthrow the King in the Glorious Revolution. So that’s when everything changed, from the Stuarts of Scotland to the other families that have been there ever since. So from that birth on, from 1688 to 1948 more than 260 years, all royal births with heirs to the throne were witnessed by British politicians to verify the babies were rightfully heirs. Thank

Marcia Smith 19:07
you, dear. Okay, Bob, what great musical writing team detested each other.

Bob Smith 19:15
They detested each other. You know these two? Was it Rogers and Hammerstein? No, was it Rogers and Hart. No, let’s see. Who was it? They detested each other. Okay, who was

Marcia Smith 19:26
it Gilbert and Sullivan? No

Unknown Speaker 19:28
kid, yeah, they

Marcia Smith 19:29
couldn’t stand each other. No. Ws, Gilbert wrote the words, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, he wrote the music. And they had 14 incredibly popular operettas together, which I can sing to you later, and they did it strictly by mail from 1871 to 1896 isn’t that amazing?

Bob Smith 19:47
Some of the best songs were written by people who just exchanged things that way, like Elton John and Bernie topplin, yeah,

Marcia Smith 19:54
Gilbert and Sullivan broke up three times and tried unsuccessfully. To work with other partners. Now, I never got the back story on why they hated each other, but they knew they could make money together, so they toughed it out.

Bob Smith 20:08
So weird, yeah, okay, more bird questions. Marcia, just because a bird can’t fly doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous flightless birds, yeah, which is known to have killed human beings with its feet. You ever heard of the cassowary? No Penguin, dodo or kiwi? Which one of those? What were they? Cassowary spelled C, A, S, S, O, W, A, R, Y, the penguin, the dodo or the kiwi,

Marcia Smith 20:34
I’ll say that first one.

Bob Smith 20:35
Well, you’re right. That’s it. It’s been known to kill human beings with slashing blows of its feet really, because the innermost of its toes bears a long dagger like nail in

Marcia Smith 20:46
the innermost so it slashes. Where does this bird live?

Bob Smith 20:51
It lives in Australia and New Guinea and nearby islands. They

Marcia Smith 20:54
got some weird stuff down there.

Bob Smith 20:58
Yes, they do. Yes.

Marcia Smith 20:59
All right, Bob, what automobile holds the record for the most sales of a single model car?

Bob Smith 21:06
Would it be the Model T?

Marcia Smith 21:09
Nope, this one, okay.

Bob Smith 21:10
Was that the Mustang? No, oh. Wonder what that would be. I found this surprise. What is it recent? No, this

Marcia Smith 21:18
one stopped being made in 2003

Bob Smith 21:21
2003 they stopped making this car,

Marcia Smith 21:24
and it was, it still hasn’t been surpassed. It’s

Bob Smith 21:27
not the Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, really, yes.

Marcia Smith 21:30
20 million units were sold. Holy cow, yep, and it hasn’t been surpassed. It was in production and being sold from 1938 to 2003

Bob Smith 21:40
isn’t that amazing? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 21:41
I never you’d see him around, but you didn’t see that many. I would. I was always seeing Fords and things like that. I thought they

Bob Smith 21:49
were very distinctive. Yeah, that was the people’s car. Wasn’t that? Hitler had that designed? Is that? Right? That’s what Volkswagen means, people’s car. No kidding,

Marcia Smith 21:57
yeah. Well, aren’t you a smarty pants? Thank

Bob Smith 21:59
you. Thank you. Okay, so I have another question on Royal births. Who was the first royal father to actually watch his child being born? Really?

Marcia Smith 22:09
Well, I bet you got to go. I’ll bet that was who was the first, what did you say modern, the

Bob Smith 22:15
first royal father. This is British royal father. Was it Philip? Yes, it was Philip. Okay, and it was not his first child, it was not his second child, the third one, his third child,

Marcia Smith 22:24
yeah, it was his fourth child. Oh, okay, he finally gave in, well,

Bob Smith 22:28
and Queen Elizabeth was encouraging him to come to the birth. So she had a role in this and that, that kind of made it interesting for, you know, fathers to be there. Yeah, it was my father was not in the room when I was born. Your father wasn’t either.

Marcia Smith 22:41
Well, who was the fourth child? Was that Margaret or Prince Edward? Prince, oh, Eddie, yeah, ah, Edward, 1964 Okay, yeah, it was high time Bob that he get into the birthing room. Now,

Bob Smith 22:54
before the royal babies were born in hospitals, where were they all born? Buckingham Palace. That’s exactly right. They were all born there, except Princess Anne, she was born in Clarence House, because Buckingham Palace was being renovated after World War Two.

Marcia Smith 23:09
Oh, okay, yeah, all right. Why do we say let’s go hang out? Where does that come? Well, that’s

Bob Smith 23:14
a good question. Yeah, let’s go hang out, like clothes on the clothesline or something.

Marcia Smith 23:20
You’ll like this. Answer. Was

Bob Smith 23:21
it something like that? No, did it have anything to do with hanging anything? Yes. Oh, it did. Okay, let’s hang out. So we, what do we hang? We people hang clothes, people hang plants and what else? Well, people get hanged when they die. Yeah, you don’t want to hang out. No, don’t want to hang out there.

Marcia Smith 23:38
All right, Bob, what’s the answer? The expression comes from a time before commercial signs, when English shopkeepers set up poles in front of their shops from which they would hang flags to describe the goods they sold. Oh, these flags were called hangouts because they put these flags, hung them outside, and here’s what we got inside, okay, and they became a place where people would stop to linger and gossip. Oh, really

Bob Smith 24:02
kidding. So let’s hang out, man, let’s go out there by the flag. Yeah, the banner under the hanging I did not know

Marcia Smith 24:07
that’s kind of weird, but I like it.

Bob Smith 24:10
So this is before they really had signs on their stores. Yeah, they didn’t have so this must go back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Do

Marcia Smith 24:18
you think they had pictures on the flags, probably, or how did they do that?

Bob Smith 24:21
Emblems and things, I suppose. Yeah. Well, we saw some of that when we were in Europe. All the merchants, oh, that was in Salzburg, yes. And they had ancient pictures of their wares, you know, things like that, where Mozart was born, yeah. Okay, Marcia. What birds have, a beard, a wattle and a snood. These are all parts of this animal, a duck, a duck, a pigeon, a turkey, or an eagle, a duck. No, it’s a turkey or the snood is what the fold of the flesh that grows from the turkey’s throat that’s called a wattle, yes, sounds like it would vibrate Yes, the long, fleshy ornament that grows from its forehead and hangs. Over its bill that’s called a snood. I have one of those too. Do you okay? And the long tuft of hair that projects from its breast is called a beard. Of all things. You

Marcia Smith 25:09
have one of those? No,

Bob Smith 25:12
okay. And one more bird question for today, yes, which bird lays the largest egg relative to its size? Okay? A kiwi, an Oriole, an ostrich or an albatross.

Marcia Smith 25:25
Oh, ostrich or Albatross, I will say, I know this. I know this

Bob Smith 25:30
ostrich. Well, the ostrich lays the largest egg of any bird. Then I’m right. No, the egg is only about 2% of the mother’s weight, I said, relative to the size.

Marcia Smith 25:40
There’s a little trick in there. Okay,

Bob Smith 25:43
so a kiwi egg is larger. It’s 20% of a mother’s weight. That’s big. Comparison a full term human baby only 5% of his mother’s weight. Imagine a baby that was 20%

Marcia Smith 25:56
of your weight. Well, that would be why.

Bob Smith 25:59
So that’s the kiwi. It’s the bird that lays the largest egg relative to its

Marcia Smith 26:04
size. Okay, that I didn’t comprehend. Yes, I know some subtleties, the subtlety, the

Bob Smith 26:10
subtleties, the subtleties of my questions. Marcia,

Marcia Smith 26:14
so coin, CS, Lewis, Bob, he said, you can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. That’s a good one. Isn’t that? That’s a good well, and with WC Fields, I always cook with wine. Sometimes I even add food.

Bob Smith 26:36
WC Fields isn’t that interesting. Remember how he was so popular when we were growing up. There were a lot of his films, but he was, he’d been long dead, but his films were very popular. When I was in college, they were showing his film. I never went to want, did you? They didn’t stand the test of time. Let’s put it. That wasn’t my humor. It was kind of quiet, kind of quiet. I think it was on stage. It was funnier, you know, one of those things. But anyway, WC Fields, that’s good. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. And if you would like to contribute to the show, you can go to our website, the offramp, dot show, scroll all the way down and send us a question so I can stump Marcia again with something fascinating. Send

Marcia Smith 27:14
it to me if it’s a good one. Thank you very much. What? And goodbye. Okay,

Bob Smith 27:17
I’m Bob Smith,

Marcia Smith 27:19
I’m Marcia Smith. Join us again

Bob Smith 27:21
next time when we return with more questions and answers here on the off ramp.

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

Transcribed by https://otter.ai