312 Communications Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
When was POTUS first used for President of the United States?

Marcia Smith 0:05
And only three major US network shows in history ended their run at the top of the Nielsen charts. What were they?

Bob Smith 0:14
Oh, that’s interesting. End up at the top, right? That was the old idea, wasn’t it?

Marcia Smith 0:18
Uh huh.

Bob Smith 0:18
Answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of The Off Ramp with Bob

Marcia Smith 0:23
and Marcia

Bob Smith 0:24
Smith. Well, welcome to the Off Ramp, a chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy, take a side road to sanity, and get some perspective in life with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. Well, Marcia, the term POTUS, President of the United States, we hear it all the time on television and on the web, where did that come from? How many years has it been used?

Marcia Smith 1:04
I Well, I assume it started with the Secret Service. They had to give everybody names, quick short names that they could identify: Motus, POTUS, Grotius, whatever. I’ll say in the 50s,

Bob Smith 1:18
1950s It does sound reasonably new, code words and things like that, and that’s like post World War Two, we think of, but no, it goes back more than 150 years ago.

Marcia Smith 1:28
Really.

Bob Smith 1:28
Now, Who would invent that? Who would need to compress President of the United States down to P O T U S?

Marcia Smith 1:35
Was it the telegraph operators?

Bob Smith 1:38
Yes, that’s right.

Marcia Smith 1:39
Okay.

Bob Smith 1:39
Your grandfather was one, wasn’t he, or a great grandfather,

Marcia Smith 1:42
One of his many jobs that he was fired from. Yes.

Bob Smith 1:44
But we won’t go into that here – your family’s..

Marcia Smith 1:48
Did I tell you, he sent the wrong train on the wrong track and caused a huge collision?

Bob Smith 1:53
Oh my goodness.

Marcia Smith 1:54
And he went professional, became a chiropractor.

Bob Smith 1:56
Oh well, he took care of bones after that. Why don’t we get back to the subject here, Marsh.

Marcia Smith 2:01
Okay. Tell me, Bob.

Bob Smith 2:02
So, more than 150 years ago, POTUS was invented to send the name of the President of the United States cheaper by telegraph. Telegraph companies in the 19th century not only charged by the word, they charge by the length of the word. So, if you could shorten things up, you could say the same thing for less money, and telegraph operators got creative. Well, in 1879 Walter Phillips, a former telegraph operator who later became a New York journalist, published a book called The Phillips Telegraphic Code for the rapid transmission by telegraph. What was the purpose of that? To let reporters and court reporters send things cheaper by telegraph,

Marcia Smith 2:42
That was very kind of him.

Bob Smith 2:43
So he pulled together all of these abbreviations, and he invented a few of his own, and the terms SCOTUS and POTUS both came from that. SCOTUS came first.

Marcia Smith 2:52
Oh it did? The Supreme Court?

Bob Smith 2:53
Supreme Court of the United States. Yeah, the earliest recorded use of Otis, the Otis suffix meaning of the United States, was in the 1879 book for SCOTUS for Supreme Court of the United States. Poetis followed 16 years later, in 1895, again to help reduce the cost of telegraph messages. And a lot of these abbreviations are still with us today. CO for company, CO period, that was a telegraph abbreviation. Thanks, TNX and THX, and this is close to your heart. 30 for the end of a project, or the end of a –

Marcia Smith 3:26
The end of a news story.

Bob Smith 3:27
A bulletin, or a news – story that came from that book as well.

Marcia Smith 3:30
I’ll be darned.

Bob Smith 3:31
When you got done with the news story, the thing you typed at the bottom was 30. You were even doing that back in the 80s, right? That still was being done.

Marcia Smith 3:39
Oh yeah, 90s too.

Bob Smith 3:41
How many codes do you think there were for shorthand in that book?

Marcia Smith 3:44
Oh gosh, a lot. I’ll say 1,000.

Bob Smith 3:47
4,688 were in that 1879 book. Isn’t that amazing?

Marcia Smith 3:53
It’s amazing, and probably still being used in texts all the time.

Bob Smith 3:56
Yeah, the telegraph operators, they abbreviated things.

Marcia Smith 3:59
Okay, Bob, let’s get on to television.

Bob Smith 4:02
Okay

Marcia Smith 4:02
In the history of television, only three major US network television shows ended their run at the top of the Nielsen rating charts. What were they? You’ve seen all three of them.

Bob Smith 4:14
Okay, I would say I bet I know where they are. I’m gonna name three that I would think of.

Marcia Smith 4:18
Okay

Bob Smith 4:18
M.A.S.H. would be one,

Marcia Smith 4:20
Uh huh.

Bob Smith 4:20
The Dick Van Dyke Show, and then I think the third one would be Dallas.

Marcia Smith 4:24
Oh, you got all three wrong. Okay,

Bob Smith 4:29
Aww, you had me thinking I was so good,

Marcia Smith 4:31
I know, but you weren’t.

Bob Smith 4:32
Oh, you got all three wrong!

Marcia Smith 4:35
I’ll give you – to make it easy,I’ll do it again. Only I’ll give you this – the first one was in 1957.

Bob Smith 4:41
Oh, really?

Marcia Smith 4:42
Yeah,

Bob Smith 4:42
57?

Marcia Smith 4:43
Yeah.

Bob Smith 4:44
Well, what would that be?

Marcia Smith 4:45
Oh, you know this.

Bob Smith 4:46
I don’t know.

Marcia Smith 4:47
It’s I Love Lucy.

Bob Smith 4:48
Oh no kidding. So it was number one when it ended.

Marcia Smith 4:52
Here’s a show that I didn’t watch, but you did. 1968

Bob Smith 4:57
Okay?

Marcia Smith 4:57
You want to guess?

Bob Smith 4:58
I’m listening.

Marcia Smith 4:59
The Andy Griffith show.

Bob Smith 5:01
Oh no kidding. So that was number one too.

Marcia Smith 5:03
Yeah.

Bob Smith 5:03
Oh, OK.

Marcia Smith 5:04
And finally 1998.

Bob Smith 5:06
All right,

Marcia Smith 5:07
I just read a book by this fellow.

Bob Smith 5:09
Oh, Jerry Seinfeld.

Marcia Smith 5:10
That’s right. The Seinfeld show ended in 1998.

Bob Smith 5:13
Those are the three, the only three of all of the network TV shows. that ended on top

Marcia Smith 5:18
On top.

Bob Smith 5:18
In the ratings

Marcia Smith 5:19
Right

Bob Smith 5:19
And all three were voluntarily ended, by the way.

Marcia Smith 5:23
Yeah

Bob Smith 5:24
Each one of those,

Marcia Smith 5:24
Yeah

Bob Smith 5:25
The creators decided, okay, I think we’ve done enough.

Marcia Smith 5:27
Yeah, it’s run its course. I’m sure shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, I have a feeling they all ended number one. But this is, you know, US network television,

Bob Smith 5:38
Yeah yeah.

Marcia Smith 5:38
Interesting.

Bob Smith 5:39
Okay, I have a question for you, Marcia. This is kind of a fun one going back in history, how did the Romans pioneer electrotherapy?

Marcia Smith 5:47
Well, that’s a great question. What would they have used to shock? How did they do it – with lightning?

Bob Smith 5:55
No.

Marcia Smith 5:55
Okay. Tell me.

Bob Smith 5:56
According to britannica.com 46 CE, the year 46

Marcia Smith 6:02
Yeah,

Bob Smith 6:02
the Roman physician, listen to this name, Scribonius Largus.

Marcia Smith 6:06
I used to date him.

Bob Smith 6:09
I don’t think I want to hear about him. Wrote that standing on an electric ray fish was an effective way to relieve the pain caused by gout. The ray’s electricity produced numbness in the leg. That’s widely regarded as the first electrotherapy. He was the court doctor to the Emperor Claudius. That’s why we have a record of what he prescribed. They

Marcia Smith 6:30
put a fish on his leg.

Bob Smith 6:32
No, Largus specifically described the treatment happening at the seashore, so the patient was either standing in shallow water or had a fresh, still wet fish on the beach. Electricity conducts better in salt water, which allows the shock to travel to the person’s body – but they were doing it back then,

Marcia Smith 6:47
And it supposedly worked,

Bob Smith 6:48
Supposedly worked, and we have records of it, because he was the court doctor to the Emperor. So,

Marcia Smith 6:53
Yeah, there’s probably so much pain from that action that it overtook all the other pain.

Bob Smith 6:59
Could be!

Marcia Smith 7:00
Okay, Bob, we are doing for the last time. Where in the world?

Bob Smith 7:05
Why? Why the last time?

Marcia Smith 7:06
I’m out of cards.

Bob Smith 7:07
Oh, that’s too bad. Okay, where in the world?

Marcia Smith 7:09
So I give you clues, and you have to figure out where in the world I’m talking about, right?

Bob Smith 7:14
Right.

Marcia Smith 7:14
Okay. Clue one: this city hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1968.

Bob Smith 7:21
1968 I think that was Mexico City.

Marcia Smith 7:24
Oh, wow, bing bing ding.

Bob Smith 7:26
Okay, I remember that, because that’s where the, the three Americans, the black Americans, had their fists and they stood up on the platform.

Marcia Smith 7:32
Oh yeah, forgot that. All right, second city clue one. This city is officially known as Krung Fet Maha Nakhon, but the city’s full name is over 169 characters long.

Bob Smith 7:46
What officially known as what?

Marcia Smith 7:48
Krung Fett Maha Nakhon, but the city’s full name is over 169 characters long.

Bob Smith 7:55
Oh my goodness,

Marcia Smith 7:57
You want to guess?

Bob Smith 7:58
No.

Marcia Smith 7:58
Okay. Clue two, the Chao Phraya River runs right through the heart of this city.

Bob Smith 8:04
Must be in China somewhere.

Marcia Smith 8:06
No,

Bob Smith 8:06
no.

Marcia Smith 8:07
Clue three.

Bob Smith 8:08
Okay,

Marcia Smith 8:08
it’s the most populated city in Thailand.

Bob Smith 8:11
Oh, is it really?

Marcia Smith 8:13
Yeah,

Bob Smith 8:14
Let’s see. What is that? Oh, gosh, Chelsea was there. Can’t remember.

Marcia Smith 8:18
Bangkok,

Bob Smith 8:19
Bangkok, Thailand.

Marcia Smith 8:19
Yes,

Bob Smith 8:20
So its original name was Krogmach – ?

Marcia Smith 8:23
Yes, and it’s actually 169 characters long, which I am not going to torture you with.

Bob Smith 8:28
Well, Bangkok is better then

Marcia Smith 8:29
I think it certainly fits on a map.

Bob Smith 8:32
Yes, yes, I’d say so.

Marcia Smith 8:33
Final answer here: one of this city’s most famous landmarks was a gift from the people of France.

Bob Smith 8:41
Well, that’s New York City,

Marcia Smith 8:42
That’s it.

Bob Smith 8:43
The Statue of Liberty.

Marcia Smith 8:44
Correct. There you go. I thought I’d let you end with a, with a winner on questions.

Bob Smith 8:49
Well, thank you so much Marcia.

Marcia Smith 8:50
And that’s the end of where in the world.

Bob Smith 8:53
All right, speaking of where in the world, I was reading about Christopher Columbus again, because I find that a fascinating voyage – leaving Europe to sail west, righ? Sail across the ocean? When did they first sail around the southern coast of Africa? Now these are Europeans, so they’re trying to get to China. One way was, well, let’s see if we could just sail around the coast of Africa to get to it. The other was, let’s head due west and we’ll hit China. Obviously, there’s nothing out there. So, when did the European explorers first sail around the southern coast of Africa? 1492 was when Christopher Columbus sailed.

Marcia Smith 9:29
So, when did this happen?

Bob Smith 9:30
So, when did the European explorers first sail around the southern coast of Africa?

Marcia Smith 9:34
Was it before or after?

Bob Smith 9:35
It was before

Marcia Smith 9:36
I will say the end of the 1300s

Bob Smith 9:40
So, you’re saying about 100 years before that.

Marcia Smith 9:42
Yeah

Bob Smith 9:43
No, just four years.

Marcia Smith 9:44
Oh, really?

Bob Smith 9:45
Only four years before Christopher Columbus took on that major journey to reach the Americas.

Marcia Smith 9:50
I’ll be darned.

Bob Smith 9:51
That was when the Europeans discovered the ability to sail around Africa.

Marcia Smith 9:55
Oh my God.

Bob Smith 9:56
So all that exploration just came out in an explosion.

Marcia Smith 9:59
Yeah.

Bob Smith 9:59
It’s amazing, I thought, perhaps, like you did, that they’d been sailing around Africa for centuries.

Marcia Smith 10:04
No kidding,

Bob Smith 10:05
But they’d only gone around Africa four years before, which makes Columbus’s voyage either courageous – or foolhardy – depending on how you look at it.

Marcia Smith 10:14
I like that. That’s funny.

Bob Smith 10:16
I mean, man, he’s not a – he did some horrible things to the natives, and so forth, but what an imagination and courage it took just to go. How bold that was to go.

Bob Smith 10:28
Yes.

Bob Smith 10:28
In the other direction.

Marcia Smith 10:30
Yeah,

Bob Smith 10:30
When only four years ago they finally figured out how to navigate around Africa. We think our time is busy and unusual and exciting. I can imagine those great explorers, they were living in a totally different world than everybody else in Europe.

Marcia Smith 10:43
That’s amazing. All right, Bob, here’s something for you to ponder. What is so special about the painting, The Red Vineyard, by Vincent Van Gogh?

Bob Smith 10:53
The Red Vineyard. Yeah, I’m not familiar with that painting.

Marcia Smith 10:56
Most people aren’t.

Bob Smith 10:57
What makes it so special? Why would the vineyard be red, I guess. It could be because they’re cherries or berries that are red, but I don’t know what makes it so special. Tell me.

Marcia Smith 11:07
That is the only picture he ever sold while alive.

Bob Smith 11:11
Oh no kidding. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 11:12
remember he only sold one painting in his lifetime.

Bob Smith 11:15
Jeez

Marcia Smith 11:16
It sold for 400 francs, which is about somewhere between two and 7,000 That’s pretty big range, but as you know, he died penniless, and most of his paintings today sell between two and 3 million bucks.

Bob Smith 11:28
That’s amazing, isn’t it? And that’s all because of his sister-in-law, isn’t it?

Marcia Smith 11:31
That is correct.

Bob Smith 11:32
Vincent Van Gogh’s sister in law.

Marcia Smith 11:33
The Red Vineyard, has been hanging for 60 years in Moscow’s Poshkin Museum, and the reason it’s never been seen by most people, it’s too fragile to travel. They can’t send it out in other museums, so it has to stay in house. That’s why you haven’t seen it.

Bob Smith 11:51
Okay. All right, I think it’s time for a break. You’re listening to The Off Ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment.

Marcia Smith 11:57
Okay.

Bob Smith 12:00
Okay, we’re back. You’re listening to The Off Ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We do this each week for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and then put it on podcast platforms where it is heard

Marcia Smith 12:11
All over the world!

Bob Smith 12:13
Including your question now.

Marcia Smith 12:14
Okay, what is considered the most expensive painting ever sold in the world,

Bob Smith 12:21
Ah, so another art question. The most expensive painting ever sold,

Marcia Smith 12:25
yeah,

Bob Smith 12:26
That was a few years back, wasn’t it? Was like 60 million, but it was an impressionist painting, as I recall. Ah, wasn’t it?

Marcia Smith 12:33
No.

Bob Smith 12:33
Okay. Well, tell me.

Marcia Smith 12:34
It was Leo Da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi.

Bob Smith 12:38
Leonardo da Vinci’s?

Marcia Smith 12:40
Yeah.

Bob Smith 12:40
Oh, Leo Da Vinci. I never heard him called that.

Bob Smith 12:42
I’m sorry, I’m being familiar. Leo, and I go way back.

Bob Smith 12:45
Oh, okay.

Marcia Smith 12:46
And this painting, Salvador Monday, depicts Christ as the savior of the world, and it sold for $450.3 million at Christie’s auction in 2017

Bob Smith 12:59
$453 million

Marcia Smith 13:02
it’s one of fewer than 20 known surviving Da Vinci paintings. It was bought by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Bob Smith 13:10
Well, only he could afford that. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 13:11
that’s right. You got to be a Crown Prince to do that.

Bob Smith 13:14
Okay, Marcia. Back to communications. I have some buzzwords I want to ask you, how old these things are not where somebody tells you a sentence and they go, I went to the store and saw her dress, it looks so pretty. Not okay. So

Marcia Smith 13:30
you do that very well. How

Bob Smith 13:31
long has that kind of stuff been going on?

Marcia Smith 13:33
Oh, well, it seems rather recently, but since you’re asking, it must go back much further. So I’ll say the 1800s

Bob Smith 13:41
Well, you’re right, yeah. Most people think it goes back to, like, Wayne’s World, those movies or something, you know. But it actually goes back to none other than the novels of George Eliot,

Marcia Smith 13:52
really. Yes, George Eliot.

Bob Smith 13:53
George Eliot was that pen name of a woman, and in her book Mill on the Floss, in 1860 it contains this line. She would make a sweet, strange, troublesome, adorable wife to some man or other, but he would never have chosen her himself. Did she feel as he did? He hoped she did not.

Marcia Smith 14:12
Good old George. All right, isn’t that funny?

Bob Smith 14:18
Okay. Here’s another one. OMG. Oh my god, right.

Marcia Smith 14:21
Yeah.

Bob Smith 14:21
How far back do you think that goes?

Marcia Smith 14:24
Spare me. Tell me.

Bob Smith 14:25
Goes back to Winston Churchill.

Marcia Smith 14:27
Oh, really?

Bob Smith 14:27
Yes. But it was discovered in a letter written in 1917 to Winston Churchill by John Fisher, who’d served as the British Royal Navy’s first sea lord during World War One. He expressed something, and then he wrote, OMG, like, oh my god, can you believe that? So that goes back a lot farther than we thought, too.

Marcia Smith 14:45
All right, Bob, it’s time for aka, also known as..

Bob Smith 14:49
Okay,

Marcia Smith 14:50
this is a game where I give you a topic, a category, and you have to figure out what the heck I’m talking about. Yes, I do. So the category is the song 12. Days of Christmas.

Bob Smith 15:01
Oh, my.

Marcia Smith 15:02
Okay, you ready?

Bob Smith 15:02
Okay,

Marcia Smith 15:03
so what line am I talking about when I tell you percussionists percussing?

Bob Smith 15:08
Well, that’s the so many drummers drumming.

Marcia Smith 15:10
That’s correct. Yes, goslings making eggs,

Bob Smith 15:13
that’s the geese, the geese hatching eggs. I can’t remember the line,

Marcia Smith 15:18
geese a laying

Bob Smith 15:19
a geese a laying. Yes,

Marcia Smith 15:20
housekeepers lactating. I like that

Bob Smith 15:23
one. The maid was that milk maidens making milk or something like that. What is that? So many maidens churning milk? No, maids a milking. Maids a milking.

Marcia Smith 15:32
Housekeepers lactating. No, that’s

Bob Smith 15:34
funny.

Marcia Smith 15:34
That is, how about rowdy rowdies blowing? This I wouldn’t have got

Bob Smith 15:39
rowdy roddies blowing.

Marcia Smith 15:41
Yeah,

Bob Smith 15:42
okay. Okay, tell me.

Marcia Smith 15:43
Well, Piper’s piping.

Bob Smith 15:45
Oh, okay. What did you call it? Rowdies,

Marcia Smith 15:47
rowdy roddies blowing.

Bob Smith 15:50
Oh,

Marcia Smith 15:50
does that make sense to you?

Bob Smith 15:51
Well, Piper’s piping,

Marcia Smith 15:53
yeah.

Bob Smith 15:53
A pipe is a rod.

Marcia Smith 15:54
Oh, is that right?

Bob Smith 15:55
Yeah, you know, so it’s something you blow into. It’s okay. Okay,

Marcia Smith 15:58
all right. 20-four carat bands,

Bob Smith 16:01
24 karat bands, gold something,

Marcia Smith 16:05
come on,

Bob Smith 16:05
gold rings, that’s right, yeah,

Marcia Smith 16:07
five golden rings. Okay, how about royal singers jumping? My

Bob Smith 16:13
god, get me out of season. It’s kind of hard to get back into this one. Let me see here. Lords a leaping, isn’t it? So many lords are leaping. There were

Marcia Smith 16:22
10 of them, very good, very good. And this one is good, if you think it through. Shirley Jones, where Bartletts grow.

Bob Smith 16:31
What, Shirley Jones, where Bartletts grow?

Marcia Smith 16:35
Shirley Jones was in a popular television show. Yeah, what family? Brady

Bob Smith 16:40
Bunch,

Marcia Smith 16:40
no. The other one, the

Bob Smith 16:41
Partridge Family, right? Oh, so it’s the Partridge, Partridge in a pear tree. Oh dear God. Okay, is that it?

Speaker 1 16:50
Yep.

Bob Smith 16:51
All right. Well, that was quite interesting. Okay, Marsha, I have another word origin, and I’m going to ask you this: that what this word originally meant, the word smash, an onomapateic word. It’s a word whose sound describes something,

Marcia Smith 17:06
onomatopoeia.

Bob Smith 17:07
Yes, a word that sounds like

Marcia Smith 17:09
its name,

Bob Smith 17:10
its name, exactly zap. Right, the word smash was probably written to describe something crashing together, and they think it goes all the way back to the 1600s Oh, really? Yeah, but when was the term smash meaning a smash hit?

Marcia Smith 17:26
Uh, huh,

Bob Smith 17:26
a positive thing. When did that come about?

Marcia Smith 17:29
Oh, back in the vaudeville days,

Bob Smith 17:31
Broadway, right? Any, any era?

Marcia Smith 17:34
Well, the vaudeville era..

Bob Smith 17:36
well, the vaudeville era went from like the 1890s to 1948 or 50, so yeah,

Marcia Smith 17:41
early 1900s

Bob Smith 17:43
Okay, I’ll give you that. 1920s two Broadway productions, The Fool and The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, were labeled by Variety magazine as smash hits in 1923 That’s when that first came about. And interestingly, smash, the opposite of it, in the Oxford English Dictionary, they found a handful of examples back as far as 1839 where the word smash described a crushing commercial failure. Oh,

Marcia Smith 18:07
okay. Oh,

Bob Smith 18:08
that was a smash.

Marcia Smith 18:09
Oh,

Bob Smith 18:10
not a smash yet, it was a smash, the opposite. Yes, so that word’s been around a long time, and it’s meant multiple things.

Marcia Smith 18:17
Okay,

Bob Smith 18:18
positive and negative.

Marcia Smith 18:19
So, here’s one from my presidential historian.

Bob Smith 18:22
Oh dear,

Marcia Smith 18:23
what future president witnessed the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln?

Bob Smith 18:29
Well, let’s see, Teddy Roosevelt, as a young boy, that’s it. He was standing, I think he was watching it from a building apartment building in New York City somewhere, is that right?

Marcia Smith 18:39
Yeah. Well, tell me, just six years old, Theodore Roosevelt at the time gazed down at Lincoln’s casket from the second story of his family’s home on Broadway in New York City as the late President passed the Roosevelt mansion on april 25 1865

Bob Smith 18:56
I read that somewhere, and just the picture of this little boy looking out the window, that’s what stuck with me. I can see little Teddy there with those little mustaches. Yeah, looking out at Abraham Lincoln. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 19:09
an early Sprouter. He was a perfectly timed photograph. Bob captured the image of two young boys, tell Teddy and his brother Elliot looking out from the window. Oh,

Bob Smith 19:18
really? There was a picture. Yeah. Oh, no kidding. It

Marcia Smith 19:21
captured the image, like Lincoln. Roosevelt was one of the most renowned presidents in US history, though their similarities didn’t end there. While on the campaign trail in 1912 Roosevelt was struck by a bullet of a would-be assassin, but was miraculously saved when the projectile hit a folded speech.

Bob Smith 19:40
Yeah, hit a folded speech that happened right here in Milwaukee.

Marcia Smith 19:44
I know that hit Teddy in his breast pocket, attempted

Bob Smith 19:47
assassination, similar,

Marcia Smith 19:49
but Teddy survived and Abe didn’t.

Bob Smith 19:51
That’s right.

Marcia Smith 19:52
Okay,

Bob Smith 19:53
okay. Marcia, geography question: think of Southeast Asia, think of we grew up during the Vietnam era, so we saw that on the maps all the time. Time, there aren’t too many landlocked countries in the world, but there are some, and there is one in Southeast Asia. What country is it? Is it Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Malaysia?

Marcia Smith 20:12
Cambodia.

Bob Smith 20:13
No, it’s Laos, believe it or not.

Marcia Smith 20:15
Okay,

Bob Smith 20:15
yeah, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, it’s called now, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, in that Indochina peninsula, it’s bordered by Myanmar and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the southeast, and Thailand to the west and southwest. And because of its geographic location centuries ago, it became a hub for overland trade and very wealthy economically and culturally. As a result of that, even though it was landlocked.

Marcia Smith 20:43
Interesting. Okay, Bob. According to Discover magazine, how many words can the average pencil write?

Bob Smith 20:51
You mean before it runs out of lead? Yes. Oh, that’s interesting. It’s not that it knows the words, yeah, it’s that it only has so much lead. That’s right, it’s casing, and

Marcia Smith 21:01
that graphite will run out.

Bob Smith 21:02
Wow, how did they figure this out? I

Marcia Smith 21:05
don’t know. That’s Discover magazine, that’s they sit around. Let’s figure this out today, shall we, George? How?

Bob Smith 21:10
Okay, so somehow they calculated this, so it’s got to be in the 1000s of words, maybe 100,000 words. I’ll say 150,000 words. Wow,

Marcia Smith 21:18
no,

Bob Smith 21:19
okay, 157,629 you can point five words,

Marcia Smith 21:24
43,000

Bob Smith 21:26
That’s still a lot of words. Yeah, with a pencil,

Marcia Smith 21:28
or if you prefer to equate this to how far can you draw a straight line with the average pencil?

Bob Smith 21:35
Okay, 40 miles,

Marcia Smith 21:37
3535

Bob Smith 21:38
miles. Yeah, well, I got pretty close on that. I’d love to

Marcia Smith 21:41
have seen them doing that test. When we finish counting words, let’s just take it out the door and see how far the line goes.

Bob Smith 21:50
I think I may have done this before. What colony was the first to plant potato chips? Which of the original 13 states

Marcia Smith 21:55
they planted potato chips?

Bob Smith 21:57
Potato crops.

Marcia Smith 21:58
Oh, sorry, let’s try

Bob Smith 22:00
that again. Yeah, I

Marcia Smith 22:01
was interested in that one. They

Bob Smith 22:03
ate potato chips, but they planted potato crops. What colony of the original 13 was the first to plant potato crops?

Marcia Smith 22:12
All right, what was the question? What colony?

Bob Smith 22:16
Yeah, I don’t know. Here’s a hint: they were planted by Scotch-Irish immigrants. That makes sense, right?

Marcia Smith 22:20
Yeah, it’s the Scotch colony.

Bob Smith 22:22
Okay, which one? Marsh, they were the first colony to establish their own constitutional government.

Marcia Smith 22:28
Oh, I don’t know, Bob,

Bob Smith 22:29
New Hampshire. Okay, but their tastiest contribution was potatoes. In 1719 Scotch-Irish immigrants near Londonderry planted the first permanent potato crops, and the tubers quickly became a staple and spread across the colonies to become the most consumed vegetable in the country. Who knew that the potato had such historic roots?

Marcia Smith 22:49
Okay, Bob, what colony discovered the McDonald’s French fry?

Bob Smith 22:55
What colony discovered the McDonald’s French fry? Never mind, moving on. Okay,

Marcia Smith 22:59
what happens when a lizard loses its tail,

Bob Smith 23:02
it loses part of its identity. I would say when a lizard loses its tail, I think it grows back, doesn’t it? Lizards, some animals can grow back parts of their bodies. I think lizards can. Okay, what

Marcia Smith 23:16
about at the moment of departure? I

Bob Smith 23:18
don’t know what happens. It loses its balance.

Marcia Smith 23:21
No. Okay.

Bob Smith 23:22
What is it?

Marcia Smith 23:22
The tail can keep moving all by itself.

Bob Smith 23:25
Oh, even if it gets cut off. Yes. Oh, certain

Marcia Smith 23:27
species of lizards can intentionally shed their tails when threatened, a process known as caudal autonomy.

Bob Smith 23:35
Caudal autonomy. Yes,

Marcia Smith 23:36
it happens quickly, coming off at specialized fracture points along the vertebrae in the tail that allow it to detach cleanly when needed with minimal harm to the lizard itself. After it detaches, the tail simply doesn’t go still for several minutes. It continues to twitch, wiggle, jump, and flick across the ground.

Bob Smith 23:56
That sounds terrible.

Marcia Smith 23:58
The movement, though, a bit unsettling,

Bob Smith 24:00
yes, is

Marcia Smith 24:00
an evolved distraction tactic designed to take a predator’s attention away while the lizard escapes.

Bob Smith 24:09
That’s an evolutionary trait. Oh my goodness, how can they use my tail

Marcia Smith 24:15
jump around by itself? I’m getting out of here. I can’t see

Bob Smith 24:18
how you could say that. That was something that nature determined as an evolutionary trait. After it’s cut off from the body of the animal, it

Marcia Smith 24:26
personally intentionally sheds

Bob Smith 24:29
it. It does.

Marcia Smith 24:30
Yes,

Bob Smith 24:30
you shed your own tail.

Marcia Smith 24:31
Yeah, I’m gonna lose

Bob Smith 24:32
my leg right now. I can’t imagine how that happens. Yes,

Marcia Smith 24:35
and it continues to distract the animal while you get the heck out of there

Bob Smith 24:39
again. How do we know this? Have we interviewed a lizard?

Marcia Smith 24:42
I don’t know. Obviously, they observation Bob.

Bob Smith 24:45
Okay, well, they lose their tails all the time. Obviously, it’s intentional, really. Maybe it’s just flawed design. Okay,

Marcia Smith 24:52
we should move on to.. okay.

Bob Smith 24:53
But first, I have to ask you a question, Marsh. You mentioned the Olympics, the Mexican Olympics. Where were the first Olympics? In the United States, what city was the first to host the Olympics, and when?

Marcia Smith 25:04
Oh, geez, was it out west?

Bob Smith 25:07
Well, it was west, but not far west, Denver.

Bob Smith 25:10
No,

Marcia Smith 25:11
no, what?

Bob Smith 25:12
St. Louis.

Marcia Smith 25:13
Oh, I wouldn’t have thought that.

Bob Smith 25:14
1904 and even then, the games were a mess. This is like a lot of Olympics. Less than two months before the games, no invitations had gone out to other countries, and political tensions dissuaded many European countries from participating. So, Olympic participation skewed heavily American, with only 42 of the 651 athletes coming from non-US nations. I didn’t know that. I

Marcia Smith 25:37
didn’t hear.

Bob Smith 25:37
Even so, they figured some very real triumphs. American gymnast George Icer earned six medals in one day, three gold and two silver in one day, despite competing with a wooden leg. Yes,

Marcia Smith 25:51
it’s not funny by itself. He was an

Bob Smith 25:53
amputee, and it wasn’t voluntary, Marcia. He didn’t lose that leg voluntarily. He wore that prosthetic wooden leg after a train ran over his left real leg, it would be a century before another amputee competed in the games, but that’s what happened in the 1904 games, and also one more milestone, they introduced boxing, freestyle wrestling, and the decathlon, which have been events ever since, but they also introduced one that got pulled out, the famous tug of war.

Marcia Smith 26:19
Time for our closing quotes

Bob Smith 26:21
okay.

Marcia Smith 26:21
Here’s quotes for artists by artists. Edgar Degas said, art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Bob Smith 26:29
Okay, that makes sense. And

Marcia Smith 26:32
Salvador Dali, have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach

Bob Smith 26:36
it. Look at my clocks, they draped over branches of trees, melting

Marcia Smith 26:42
clocks. Yes, they melted. He wasn’t trying to get melted clocks, he was trying to paint a wall clock, and he, no, no, those melted

Bob Smith 26:49
clocks were intentional. Marcia,

Marcia Smith 26:50
oh, okay,

Bob Smith 26:51
just like the lizard tail.

Marcia Smith 26:52
Yeah, okay. All right,

Bob Smith 26:54
all right. Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed our show, and if you would like to participate, we always welcome people to contribute facts they would like to stump one of us with you can send it to us by going to our website, The Offramp dot show. Go to contact us, and you’ll find a field that you can fill out with information. We would love to hear from you,

Marcia Smith 27:11
and that’s the place where you’ll also find over 300 of our shows that you can listen to at any time. All of our shows ever recorded,

Bob Smith 27:19
that’s right, shows and transcripts and show notes, plus a blog. We have several things there, some goofy pictures of us, a lot of fun. All right, that’s it for today. We hope you join us again next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. I’m Bob Smith. I’m Marcia Smith. You’ve been listening to The Off Ramp. The Off Ramp is produced in association with the Cedar Brook Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at The Offramp dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai