235 Bonkers Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
What word meaning a fondness for the past was once a medical condition called immigrant psychosis?

Marcia Smith 0:07
Okay, Bob, how many primates have eyebrows

Bob Smith 0:11
answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith?

Welcome to the off ramp a chance to slow down. Steer clear of crazy take a side road to sanity with some fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. This is a show that gives you the opportunity to learn something every week. We do this for the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and it’s internet radio station. We’ll Marcia what word was once a medical term for a psychological disorder called immigrant psychosis. It’s a word that means a fondness for the past

Marcia Smith 1:02
sentimental, something like that.

Bob Smith 1:07
This starts with an N

Marcia Smith 1:08
N. Oh, I don’t know. Well,

Bob Smith 1:12
the interesting thing is, you know if you’ve got something with the G IA on the end, but it’s a medical condition, right? Yeah, well Knightstown jaw Oh NuSTAR. Wait spelled, the word is constructed like a medical term. Think of medical terms with the suffix ALG? Ia Fibromyalgia neuralgia. This suffix means pain. So how does that relate to the word nostalgia? Well comes from the Greek words nostos meaning return and Agito meaning pain, the suffering caused by the desire to return to one’s place of origin.

Marcia Smith 1:44
Oh, no kidding. Immigrant. What did you call it immigrant immigrant psychosis.

Bob Smith 1:48
It was coined by a Swiss physician Johan Hoffer. After observing the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries who were fighting for European monarchs, they had obsessive thoughts of home bouts of weeping, anxiety, palpitations, anorexia, and insomnia. That’s where the word nostalgic started home six Swiss mercenaries

Marcia Smith 2:11
mmm six Swiss mercenaries whatever the

Bob Smith 2:14
origin the word nostalgia was widely accepted as a medical term. Finally, in the 20th century, nostalgia acquired a more positive meaning. That comes from the British Psychological Society. I found that interesting.

Marcia Smith 2:27
All right, Bob, how many primates do you think have eyebrows? Gee, I

Bob Smith 2:33
don’t know. Monkeys maybe? Primates are we primates? Yes. Yeah. Okay, so we have eyebrows I think chimpanzees have eyebrows. Other animals that seem to have eyebrows like raccoons have eyebrows. They do raccoons. Do they? Do they’re all right, what’s the answer?

Marcia Smith 2:50
None just us. I thought monkeys had them too. But they don’t. Only humans have this unique feature. As foreheads on Homo sapiens receded to make room for bigger brains eyebrows developed to keep moisture out of your eyes and block the sunlight. An early man spotted the unibrow but somehow that the middle part disappeared over time in most people except people like kalo, the artists and people like so

Bob Smith 3:19
we kind of evolved away from the unibrow Yes. And and we have eyebrows because our brains are bigger. Yeah, I don’t think so. Come on. Come on. I know some friends. I have friends don’t think their brains are that big.

Marcia Smith 3:34
Women pluck their eyebrows away now. big bushy eyebrows are popular now. Okay, Bob, what came first the invention of the wheel? or alcohol? Alcohol.

Bob Smith 3:45
Alcohol was invented after the wheel was frustratingly not invented. They needed to drink and think about it. And then they go you know, you know make it round.

Marcia Smith 3:56
They get round. That’s exactly right. Today, we often consider the wheel to be the ultimate civilization game changer. But it turns out that creating the multipurpose apparatus wasn’t really on our immediate to do list. ancient ancestors worked on other ideas. First, they did boats, musical instruments, glue and beer and long before the wheel came about she’s the oldest evidence of booze comes from China, where archaeologists have unearthed 9000 year old pottery coated with like you said, beer residue, beer 9000 years ago. In contrast, early wheels didn’t appear until around 3500 BCE, before the Common Era, about three millennia later. It’s

Bob Smith 4:46
just amazing, isn’t it that people supposedly live for millions of years and it was only 5500 years ago, we finally got the wheel and they make sense. Yeah, and

Marcia Smith 4:55
it was in Iraq. But even when humans began using wheels, they had a different application. Rudimentary versions were commonly used as Potter’s wheels. Yes, a necessity for mass producing vessels that could store the batches of brew.

Bob Smith 5:12
Oh, God, so it always comes back to beer. But they don’t get that

Marcia Smith 5:16
was the earliest applications. Hey, we could we could do this. Oh my God, that’s hilarious. Then

Bob Smith 5:21
we make a wagon. We can carry the beer to other places and sell it. There we go. All right, Marsha. I have an interesting fact from the 1950s. Why did some US communities in the 1950s tattoo their children, American communities in the 1950s? How tattooed their children’s

Marcia Smith 5:40
50s. They tattooed? Was it to find them in case they got kidnapped? No. That would make sense, I

Bob Smith 5:48
guess is a part of the Red Scare thing that went on with the communists. Yeah, sorry about the atomic weapons, then yeah, during the 1950s According to britannica.com communities in Indiana, and Utah, instituted programs to tattoo children with their blood types. So they could more quickly donate blood in the event of an atomic war.

Marcia Smith 6:10
Cheese. They were nuts back in the 50s. Weren’t we

Bob Smith 6:15
sent you did to enroll? I’ll do to your buddy. Go ahead. Totally modern 21st century facility is so modern. It has no laundry facilities. Wow. Now this is a place it’s out of this world. You might say okay, the space station international space station. Yeah. Okay. You can’t get more modern than the space station. Do you can’t do your can’t do your laundry? Or is no laundry aboard the International Space Station. So here’s a little known fact. Some astronauts, they bring very few clothes, they wear the same underwear for up to a week. Oh, hey, maybe we really didn’t want to know that after all. But that is a no before you go fact there is no laundry, no way to do any laundry. I just assume there’ll be like clothes tumbling,

Marcia Smith 7:01
to just take out hat full of underwear along with you. If

Bob Smith 7:05
you can only take so much. You know, it’s limited space and they go up there for a long, long time. Can you imagine no one it must be like a little game?

Marcia Smith 7:14
I think so. Well, that flows into one of my questions. In the good old days, Bob in the early 18th century, I assume most people turned up their noses at the notion of washing with water.

Bob Smith 7:27
Why? Yeah, well, what did they wash with?

Marcia Smith 7:29
What did some prefer? Dust? I don’t know. It takes you back to the space station dry washing, they would vigorously scrub their bodies with a dry brush. Instead of using water. They had no belief that water would make them clean. Ben Franklin, he preferred air baths.

Bob Smith 7:50
What is an air bed?

Marcia Smith 7:51
He would walk around frequently outside naked air out his body. Instead of getting water on it. Ben was strange, wasn’t it? Yeah, well look at everybody else was using dry brushes. He’s ahead of his time. Others simply believed that changing their clothes would get rid of bodily grime. Linen in particular was thought to have dirt absorbing powers. I had no idea. Yeah. So that was the in the 18th century,

Bob Smith 8:18
all clothes have dirt absorbing powers. Yes. Sure your clothes get dirty

Marcia Smith 8:23
if you were in for a long time. And they could see it when they took them off. But they didn’t think that they had any dirt left on them then Bob okay being very literal. I found that interesting. So what they’re doing up in the space station is very 18th century.

Bob Smith 8:40
For 21st century place. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Got that. All right, Marsha. I have a name of an American woman. And I want you to tell me what she did. What was her role in American history? Okay, her name was Mary Katherine Goddard, who was Mary Katherine Goddard in American history. Give me a clue. All right. It has to do with the Founding Fathers and some of the founding documents.

Marcia Smith 9:02
She kept the documents for the founding fathers in

Bob Smith 9:06
a way she did. Okay. She was a printer. Oh, she was a printer. Yeah. And she’s the only woman whose name appears on a copy of the Declaration of Independence. She was one of the nation’s first women printers. She operated a print shop, she published a Baltimore based newspaper. And she was also the first woman postmaster in America, running the Baltimore post office. And in 1777, Congress asked her to print new copies of the Declaration of Independence and mail them to the 13 colonies. She was given the job of producing the first copy to name all the signers. They never had been all named before. And with that assignment, she took a bold step to the bottom of the document. She added her name the text reads Baltimore in Maryland, printed by Mary Katherine Goddard. Oh good for her. So that is how her name appeared on a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Marcia Smith 9:57
He had some street cred. She had credentials. saw a little graph of tasks there. That took

Bob Smith 10:02
a lot of guts because signing any document declaring independence from Britain was Yeah, treason, difficult for a man but even more for a woman. But she added her name for everybody to see good for her. And she didn’t stop there. During the Revolutionary War, her newspaper continued spreading stories of battles. And as a publisher, predator and postmaster, she played an important part in the fight for independence. And that’s who Mary Katherine Goddard was the only woman whose name appears on the copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Marcia Smith 10:29
I think I would have liked to have been a printer back in the 1700s. I did hang around print shops a lot. Work that a few. Anyway, I love the smell. And

Bob Smith 10:39
I love the smell of words. I love the smell of the printed word in the morning. It’s a little different than napalm.

Marcia Smith 10:45
Yes, yes, it is. Okay, Bob, we talked about this the other day, what US president was the first to use the Washington Moscow hotline, also known as the red phone.

Bob Smith 10:58
I thought that was JFK, John F. Kennedy. I thought he was the first person to use that.

Marcia Smith 11:01
That’s correct in August 30 1963. And you know why it was created?

Bob Smith 11:06
It was because the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I think, well,

Marcia Smith 11:10
it came after that. More largely than that it was the nuclear age. Okay, stakes became too high for a misunderstanding to launch Armageddon over a misunderstanding or an accidental maneuver. And it proved invaluable during the Arab Israeli conflicts in 1967. And 1973. You want to guess what the first message over the hotline was?

Bob Smith 11:36
Hello, Boris. What do you say to me? Can you hear what

Marcia Smith 11:42
you’re doing? Let’s have a vodka.

Bob Smith 11:45
What’s what’s the answer?

Marcia Smith 11:46
Oh, you’re like this. And you know what this is immediately. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back 1-234-567-8900. No

Bob Smith 11:56
kidding.

Marcia Smith 11:57
That was what America sent out. Moscow came back with some poetry. And what is that phrase? I just said the quick brown fox jumped

Bob Smith 12:05
over the lazy dog. I think it uses all the letters of the alphabet. They’re testing every letter of the alphabet. Masco would come back and say quick brown fox was breakfast for Bear.

Marcia Smith 12:15
Bear. But what’s interesting today, they still test the hotline. Every hour on the hour. 24 hours a day. I didn’t know that. Yeah. Kremlin and the Pentagon take it to alternate hours of testing it because they want to make sure

Bob Smith 12:31
it’s always working. Wow. That’s pretty cool. It is. That’s interesting. Communication fact. Yeah, I got one now. Okay, this will blow your mind. Did you know that radio waves are so much faster than sound waves. Now listen to this. The voice of a person speaking in a room will be heard sooner. 13,000 miles away by broadcast than it will be heard by people sitting in the back of the room. Really? Yeah. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. 186,000 miles per second. But sound waves travel at 700 miles per hour even. So, if you’re 13,000 miles away from something, and somebody’s speaking and there’s no lag time. Let me back up here. Yeah, we go in the back or in the back of the room. I’m talking to you. Yeah. And somebody hearing this will be hearing it faster than you heard it sitting in the back of the room there. Huh. That was kind of interesting factoid that’s from Isaac Asimov’s book of facts.

Marcia Smith 13:31
All right. I’ll give you multiple choice here. All right. Take Galapagos Islands and surrounding waters are a nature and marine reserve belonging to which country

Bob Smith 13:42
Chile, isn’t it? Isn’t it Chile? Off the coast of Chile?

Marcia Smith 13:45
I was gonna say is it Chile? Ecuador? USA or UK? Chile, isn’t

Bob Smith 13:49
it? No. That’s Ecuador. Yes. Oh, dear. Yes.

Marcia Smith 13:53
Well, you’re better at your global mapping than I am. But Ecuador. It is. Yes. That Galapagus islands. Okay. It’s time for a break.

Bob Smith 14:02
I think it is. Okay. All right. I’m Bob Smith. Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to the off ramp. We’re back. We’re back. Yes, we’re back in force here on the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith. We do this every week for the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and it’s internet radio station, CPL radio and after it airs. We put it on podcast platforms and it goes all

Marcia Smith 14:27
over the world. All right. All right, Bob time for aka also known as Okay, the category today is Shakespeare plays for instance, if I gave you the names Montague and Capulet, what would be the Shakespeare play also known as Romeo

Bob Smith 14:47
and Juliet? Okay, those are the two warring families those were the Hatfields and the McCoys of Shakespeare.

Marcia Smith 14:52
That is correct. Yes. Okay. Let’s see how much you remember from your high school day. Okay. The salesman of Italy, the merchant Venice July nocturnal fantasy, a July

Bob Smith 15:04
nocturnal fantasy. A summer Midsummer Night’s Dream Bravo. Okay.

Marcia Smith 15:11
A lot happening for no reason.

Bob Smith 15:16
Much Ado About Nothing

Marcia Smith 15:17
that is correct, sir.

Bob Smith 15:20
I was thinking of my life what’s happening for no reason. Okay.

Marcia Smith 15:23
final evening of a dozen. Oh, this

Bob Smith 15:26
is the one of our Christmas what is that called? What is that? The 12th night very good. Yes.

Marcia Smith 15:34
The big storm. The Tempest correct and the last one. Yes. pig meat permit. What? pig meat? permit a pig meat permit?

Bob Smith 15:47
Think about it a sow’s ear. pig meat permit pork. I don’t know what makes perfect

Marcia Smith 15:54
said what is it? Hamlet? Oh,

Bob Smith 15:58
no. Oh god, you do that? every once awhile you pull those pawns on me.

Marcia Smith 16:02
It’s in

Bob Smith 16:04
the game. Me Hamlet. Pete What was it? What was that again? pig

Marcia Smith 16:09
meat permit. Ham. Let you know you permit somebody to do something. You let them do something. Come on. How many how many Shakespeare plays have?

Bob Smith 16:19
I feel so much pain right now. All right, back to exports imports other countries. Okay, fine.

Marcia Smith 16:26
All right. I’m that no Hamlet, but let’s go on.

Bob Smith 16:29
All right. I was reading and I found this item. One of the cities in Spain has a stadium that is the largest in Europe for soccer. And how many people you think it holds?

Marcia Smith 16:39
In Europe? Yeah. 60,090 99 99,000.

Bob Smith 16:46
I thought, Wow, that’s a big stadium. Right? And then I thought, how big are the largest stadiums in the United States. So I went to Wikipedia and I found out eight of the top 10 can seat how many people eat at the top 10 stadiums in the US their college stadiums, their professional state 120,000 100,000 or more? Wow, eight of the top 10 can see 200,000 or more? Well, there’s Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. That’s where the Wolverines play. There’s Beaver Stadium and University of Pennsylvania. That’s Penn State. The Nittany Lions play there. The Ohio Stadium at Ohio State. These are all over 100,000 Faith, hard to believe. Yeah. And Ohio State is a very old stadium. There are a number of these almost 100 years old but the the biggest one in the country, is it Ann Arbor 107,600 When people can sit in that stadium and it was built in 19 2070. The

Marcia Smith 17:41
population of Ann Arbor, like Green Bay, right? Everybody shows up and they come from miles around 1927

Bob Smith 17:48
is when that stadium was built. So it’s almost 100 years old and the Buckeye Stadium, the stadium in Columbus, that was also built in 1922. Also seating 102,000 people going

Marcia Smith 18:01
back all those years. That wasn’t TV, so everybody showed up for the college games, right? Yeah,

Bob Smith 18:06
so eight of the top 10 In the US concede 100,000 or more. Now after that it drops to the number nine stadium is in Athens, Georgia. 92,000. So there’s nothing like 99,000 but we have a lot of stadiums bigger than 99,000. I had no idea, huh? It’s amazing. All right. So here’s one more question for you.

Marcia Smith 18:25
Just squeeze it in. I did it one time and now you got to do it all the time. How many

Bob Smith 18:29
US stadiums seat 50,000 or more spectators? No idea. There are 98 stadiums in the United States that can seat 50,000 or more people. I had no idea there’d be that many from Maine to Hawaii.

Marcia Smith 18:43
Okay. All right. This will be interesting. Oh, yeah. My little

Bob Smith 18:48
as interesting as stadiums. I don’t know. Can it be what

Marcia Smith 18:54
a smug face okay, this you’ll you’ll like topic, which president said it? I don’t think you’ll get all these Mr. Presidential historian. Mr.

Bob Smith 19:04
Smarty Pants usually you call me? Yes.

Marcia Smith 19:06
Make smarty pants. Okay, Bob. Cop. The White House is a bully pulpit. Well,

Bob Smith 19:14
that’s Teddy Roosevelt. Now, somebody’s describing Teddy Roosevelt. No. All right, who

Marcia Smith 19:20
did it James Buchanan. Really? I yeah, I would have said Teddy. Yeah, okay. Okay, quote, what we believe in is what works.

Bob Smith 19:31
What we believe in is what works yeah. Interesting, but strange. It is what works is what we believe in what we believe in is what works. We didn’t say

Marcia Smith 19:40
these guys were you know, scientists. All right. I

Bob Smith 19:43
don’t know who did that was James Garfield. Okay, another obscure Okay.

Marcia Smith 19:47
None of these are

Bob Smith 19:49
but he was a brilliant man. He could write Latin and Greek in alternate hands. He was brilliant. And he died early in his presidency, you know, killed by this doctors actually killed by his doctor sticking their fingers into his wound and poison him after he got shot. Oh

Marcia Smith 20:05
my god. Okay, there are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone has been too long away from home. That’s true. It is still to this day. Yeah. Who said that? Well, I’m asking you. Okay, that sounds like he sounds like Harry Truman. No. James Polk. James Paul. Yeah, that’s what he said. God, how this one you should get. I want a kinder, gentler nation. That’s George Bush. John Tyler. Oh, no, he stoled it. George

Bob Smith 20:40
Bush stole it from John Tyler.

Marcia Smith 20:42
I can’t believe I can’t believe it. Not true. So far. You You haven’t got one gonna eat any broccoli? Not gonna eat any No way. Yeah, and most of these other guys, you can’t do impressions assistive pressing? Well, I finally gave you some obscure presidents you don’t know the answers to. And finally this guy said, I like the noise of democracy. I

Bob Smith 21:04
like the noise of democracy. Is that Richard Nixon?

Marcia Smith 21:09
I don’t know. Like these recordings. Zachary Taylor.

Bob Smith 21:14
I like the noise of democracy. Zachary Taylor. We don’t know how he sounded.

Marcia Smith 21:18
That’s why we could do the greatest hits of presidents and nobody would know. That’s right. Nobody we could do puppets. Think about it.

Bob Smith 21:26
All right, mush. You want me to come up with some fantastic trivia here. Okay, Bob. Remember in a recent show, we talked about how the Olympics used to give awards for art for painting and for all kinds of other things. Well, this is interesting. Found this from one of my favorite websites. Mental Floss, there we go. That’s appropriate to have a long, long pause before you say yeah,

Marcia Smith 21:52
that’s funny.

Bob Smith 21:53
The website methyl Fluss had a story on a gentleman named Charles Dowling lay. He earned a silver medal for what what do you think he earned a silver medal for in the Olympics? This is when they gave the Olympic prizes for the arts. All right. We’ll never guessed this whole crux. This is the unathletic pursuit of town planning. Are you kidding? Yeah.

Marcia Smith 22:16
Oh my god.

Bob Smith 22:19
Well plans for a marine park in Brooklyn, New York, which featured ideas for yacht parking and various sites for sport activities in a 100,000 seat stadium. And the 1936 games in Germany. That was unusual for anything in the arts there that one to be not from Germany, we told you about that. Remember, what was gurbles got in charge of that. And that was all the awards for arts went to the Germans. Yeah. So how did this guy get

Marcia Smith 22:46
his award, the planning, it blows my mind? Well, apparently,

Bob Smith 22:49
he lived in Germany for a period of time, and he studied architecture there. But this guy was very accomplished. He was a landscape architect. He published that magazine with that title. And he was very active in Queens, Forest Park and Grant’s tomb. And he also had a hand in the World’s Fair, but landscaping for that grounds there, but he won a award for town planning. It’s over metal, silver metal for town planning. But the plan didn’t ever go through. That’s the sad part isn’t Oh, really? Yeah, it was going to cost about 30 to $50 million. And at the time, that was way too much in the Great Depression. So they unveiled the first section in 1939. It’s a 430 acre parkland. It’s now home to a golf course. And baseball diamond and other amenities. But the stadium that 100,000 seat stadium just didn’t make it. But he won the silver medal. So we finally found out who did some of these things.

Marcia Smith 23:44
The family kept that the silver medal I bet they did. Yeah, picks silver medal and they hang in the living room. What did grandpa do? Well, what

Bob Smith 23:53
a silver medal.

Marcia Smith 23:54
I never saw

Bob Smith 23:55
him out in the yard throwing the football. How did you do that? Town Planning. Okay. You could you could win awards for pistol dueling back then. Really? Yeah. All kinds of other things. All right.

Marcia Smith 24:05
Before I go to my quote, my question is, she was called the first conservationist to occupy the White House since Teddy Roosevelt. Okay,

Bob Smith 24:15
it could be one of two people. I’m thinking I’m thinking first of Eleanor Roosevelt because she was involved in a lot of parks and things like that. But the other person I thought was Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson. You’re right.

Marcia Smith 24:27
You’re right. It was Lady Bird. she championed the planting of more than a million wildflowers to beautify the nation’s highways. You know, at the time I thought, well, that’s a little nuts. But I’ve so appreciated now over the years when you’d go along a highway somewhere and you see flowers and grass instead of weeds and garbage. She was

Bob Smith 24:47
also in the Get rid of the billboards movement to Yeah, which was somewhat successful in some parts of the country. There’s a lot of places.

Marcia Smith 24:55
Texas had a lot of them. I think that might be why she

Bob Smith 24:58
thought of that than if they had Way too many in Texas. Yeah, because that’s where she’s from. Yeah. Also, remember, we sat there at Big Sur, remember that we were there near that big bridge. And there was a monument there that she had dedicated that monument there. There was a plaque in the stone where we sat and we had her picture taken. And it was from her her period. And for

Marcia Smith 25:17
her, there are many first ladies that carry on with the task. The task you remember anyway. Yeah, yeah. With a mission of the modern First Ladies have all been more involved. Yeah, I think some of them Yeah, for sure. You know, it’s got

Bob Smith 25:31
to be a difficult position to be in when you’re the subordinate spouse. Yeah. Whether you’re male or female, you could be the first man.

Marcia Smith 25:39
Or the First Lady flowers is a safe bet.

Bob Smith 25:41
That’s right. Right. You stand there and you smile and take your picture. Atomic

Marcia Smith 25:45
Energy, not a good not a good topic. Stick with the flowers. Yeah, right. Thought for the Day. Yeah, I’ll close with a couple of quotes about nature. The more grateful I am the more beauty I see. Hmm, that’s from Mary Davis, a author and then from Leonardo da Vinci. And he said nature is the source of all true knowledge.

Bob Smith 26:08
Well, that’s true. Isn’t that something? Yeah. All right. Well, we hope we gave you a little knowledge with our facts and interesting trivia today. We do invite you if you’d like to participate to send us a factor a question. You can do that by going to our website, the off ramp dot show and scrolling all the way down to contact us.

Marcia Smith 26:27
Yes, send me send me some questions to dazzle Bob.

Bob Smith 26:32
All right. All right. I’m Bob Smith. Hi, Marcia Smith. Join us again next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on

Unknown Speaker 26:39
the off ramp.

Bob Smith 26:58
The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin, visit us on the web at the off ramp dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai