321 Fantastic Trivia

Marcia Smith 00:00
How many pounds of jelly beans did the White House bring in during the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency?

Bob Smith 00:06
And what media entrepreneur had to go work as a baby photographer after his first media company went bankrupt?

Marcia Smith 00:14
Oh yeah.

Bob Smith 00:14
Answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of The Off Ramp with Bob

Marcia Smith 00:19
and Marcia

Bob Smith 00:20
Smith, 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 with little-known facts about well-known people, places, and things. (In Ronald Reagan voice) Well, how many jelly beans were in the White House? Well, I imagine they shipped them in by the ton. Truckloads of jelly beans.

Marcia Smith 00:58
I give you this gift

Bob Smith 00:59
(In Reagan voice) Jelly bellies

Marcia Smith 01:00
of using your voice, your wonderful voice. Okay, so everyone knows pretty much that Ronald Reagan loved jelly beans.

Bob Smith 01:08
He did like jelly beans.

Marcia Smith 01:09
He did. He was in the office for eight years. So, according to the ultimate book of useless information, Bob, just how many pounds were brought in to the White House in those eight years of his being a president.

Bob Smith 01:25
Pounds, not tons, not well, not metric tons.

Marcia Smith 01:28
I’m just giving you the lowest common denominator.

Bob Smith 01:31
So we’re not talking in Costco terms here. Oh gosh, how many pounds came into the White House?

Marcia Smith 01:38
You can convert it to tons if you want to.

Bob Smith 01:40
No, no, that’s okay. I’ll say

Marcia Smith 01:43
Eight years, Bob.

Bob Smith 01:43
Let’s say 300 pounds.

Marcia Smith 01:45
300 pounds-that’s a lot. But they brought in 12 tons.

Bob Smith 01:50
Oh my God!

Marcia Smith 01:51
Of his favorite jelly beans over the course of eight years. Yes, there you have it. How?

Bob Smith 01:57
Holy Cow. (In Reagan voice) Oh, that’s a lot of jelly beans.

Marcia Smith 01:59
It’s a ton of jelly beans.

Bob Smith 02:00
Jeez, can you believe that?

Marcia Smith 02:03
I didn’t.

Bob Smith 02:04
Okay, Marcia. What media entrepreneur had to work as a baby photographer after his first media company went bankrupt?

Marcia Smith 02:13
Say the first part. What media

Bob Smith 02:15
entrepreneur?

Marcia Smith 02:16
Media entrepreneur

Bob Smith 02:17
had to work as a baby photographer after his first media company.

Marcia Smith 02:20
Is this someone – okay, Ted Turner.

Bob Smith 02:22
No, not Ted Turner.

Marcia Smith 02:23
Okay, then now who?

Bob Smith 02:25
Walt Disney.

Marcia Smith 02:26
Oh, Walter.

Bob Smith 02:28
When his first animation company, Laugh-O-Gram Studios in Kansas City, which made advertising films – and they they did animation with them too. When that went bankrupt, he was completely broke, and his wife Lillian later wrote. At 20, he had his own movie company producing cartoon shorts. At 21, he went into bankruptcy. Then he went from door to door taking baby pictures to earn money to get to Hollywood, and he landed there in 1923, a few months after he was 22. And even then, he and his brother struggled. They founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and the brothers often had to get by on one square meal a day shared between the two of them. They’d go to a restaurant, order one meal, two plates, and that’s how they ate while they’re trying to get started.

Marcia Smith 03:14
Well, that’s that’s how it’s done, a lot of the time.

Bob Smith 03:17
And today, that company they founded is a $95 billion dollar.

Marcia Smith 03:21
Yeah, it’s gone up a bit.

Bob Smith 03:22
Joggernut.

Marcia Smith 03:23
That’s more than a plate of beans. I think they could afford.

Bob Smith 03:26
You know all these different brand names they own. Are you familiar with the fact that they own Pixar Animation, Marvel Studios, Lucas Films?

Marcia Smith 03:36
Really?

Bob Smith 03:37
Yes. The ABC Television Network, ESPN, the National Geographic Channel, Disney Plus, and Hulu.

Marcia Smith 03:45
No, I didn’t know they owned all that. You know, at any given time, you say, “Oh, they’re buying that, and then you put it all together, and it’s amazing.

Bob Smith 03:52
They have 231,000 employees in 43 countries and distribute product to 130 nations.

Marcia Smith 03:58
Wow!

Bob Smith 03:58
And it started with a baby photographer – that was that was a gig he had between jobs, you know.

Marcia Smith 04:04
I get it. Okay, so from Walt Disney to ancient Egyptians, Bob.

Bob Smith 04:09
Okay,

Marcia Smith 04:10
Can you tell me or guess any of the ingredients that the ancient Egyptians put in their tooth powder or toothpaste that they used back in the days of yore.

Bob Smith 04:21
Well, I know the Romans used urine in theirs.

Marcia Smith 04:24
Did they?

Bob Smith 04:24
Yes.

Marcia Smith 04:25
Oh God in heaven.

Bob Smith 04:26
Yeah, they had to have some kind of ammonia or something, you know, and that’s where they got it. So the Egyptians, what would they have done? Did they use some kind of camel dung? What did they do?

Marcia Smith 04:37
Camel dung. No, but I’ll tell you. Long before the invention of the toothbrush, people often applied cleaning powders directly with their fingers or a piece of cloth. You know, like if you’re out at a hotel and you haven’t got a toothbrush, you you still use your finger

Bob Smith 04:52
or your napkin.

Marcia Smith 04:53
Yeah, ancient Egyptian tooth powders contained pumice, burnt eggshells. And the powdered ashes of ox hooves.

Bob Smith 05:02
Wow, ox hooves.

Marcia Smith 05:04
Pumice is abrasive enough to scrub away stains, and it’s still used by dental professionals today.

Bob Smith 05:10
Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So that’s part of the toolkit. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 05:12
But ox hoof, not so much.

Bob Smith 05:14
Not that we know of, Marcia.

Marcia Smith 05:16
That’s true!

Bob Smith 05:17
Okay, Marcia, this is an interesting question. What inventive writer? Now, inventive is the term, so it’s like you know, E. E. Cummings had a strange way of writing poetry. It’s not him. What inventive writer was the grandson of a famous inventor? Got the same last name as his grandfather.

Marcia Smith 05:35
What inventive writer?

Bob Smith 05:37
An inventive writer. Let me give you a hint. He did a famous novel. He abandoned the conventional plot almost entirely, presenting a series of interchangeable hallucinatory writings that could be read in any order. It was called *The Naked Lunch*

Marcia Smith 05:52
Oh, I read that.

Bob Smith 05:53
Did you?

Marcia Smith 05:54
Was it Burroughs?

Bob Smith 05:54
Yes, William S. Burroughs. Right. And he was the grandson of William S. Burroughs, who invented the adding machine.

Marcia Smith 06:02
Oh, really? Oh, I didn’t ever connect those two. Isn’t that

Bob Smith 06:04
interesting? So his grandson invented a style that broke language apart and reassembled its component parts. The grandfather invented a machine for taking numbers and using them together. So they both dealt with things in an unusual way.

Marcia Smith 06:17
Quite, quite. I don’t remember if I liked it or not. It’s so long ago.

Bob Smith 06:21
He had two subsequent novels. This is William Burroughs again, *The Soft Machine* and *Nova Express* He cut up pages of text and rearranged them at random. Yeah, this is just technique to me. It’s not really being a good writer, but he was an inventive writer.

Marcia Smith 06:35
I think our son Ben really liked him a lot. Okay, Bob, how many popes do you think were British?

Bob Smith 06:41
How many popes were British? I didn’t know that any popes were British.

Marcia Smith 06:45
Oh, really?

Bob Smith 06:46
No.

Marcia Smith 06:46
Okay, you’re wrong.

Bob Smith 06:47
Okay, tell me.

Marcia Smith 06:48
One.

Bob Smith 06:49
Who was it?

Marcia Smith 06:50
Nicholas Breakspeare, who became known.

Bob Smith 06:53
Who’s William Shakespeare’s cousin!

Marcia Smith 06:55
No, this is Breakspeare, who became known as Pope Adrian the Fourth, who served from 1154 to 1159.

Bob Smith 07:04
I had no idea. That’s

Marcia Smith 07:05
only like what five years, and then he died from some throat infection. So Americans and British, it takes about 2,000 years to just get one down. So it takes a while. It does.

Bob Smith 07:17
Wow, I didn’t know that there was a British pope. Interesting, Marcia. What is the origin of the word reckless? We think of reckless as dangerous. Like he’s reckless, like somebody having a wreck, right? But wreck with less at the end of the word doesn’t make sense. If he’s wreck less, why would he be prone to have a wreck?

Marcia Smith 07:38
Yeah, well, that’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer.

Bob Smith 07:41
Well, here’s the reason. It’s the spelling. They’re two different words. Reckless is R-E-C-K-L-E-S-S.

Marcia Smith 07:47
Oh, I didn’t think of that.

Bob Smith 07:49
It’s not W-R-E-C-K.

Marcia Smith 07:52
Okay, so what is R-E-C-K?

Bob Smith 07:53
R-E-C-K-L-E-S-S literally means without rec, and reck was an old English verb meaning to care, to heed to pay attention to the consequences. Oh, okay. The less in reckless is the same as without. Without care is what that meant, and it didn’t mean dangerous. Just without care originally, it just meant somebody who didn’t care what happens.

Marcia Smith 08:14
Yeah, I never thought of the wreck and wreck being different spellings, and now it makes sense. Yeah. Thank you, Bob.

Bob Smith 08:20
Now, how did we get the word “wreck” spelled with a W? Like, is he wrecked his car or she’s just a wreck? Where did that come from?

Marcia Smith 08:28
I don’t know.

Bob Smith 08:29
That comes from Old Norse. The Vikings used “wreck” w-r-e-k to mean something driven ashore or ruined, like a boat. A boat wreck. Yeah. And English borrowed it, then they added the C, so W R E C K is what the word became. So the word is completely unrelated to reckless, R E C K, meaning to care less, and W R E C K means destruction. So the words sound the same, but they’re spelled differently with different root.

Marcia Smith 08:56
You know, I never paid attention to that.

Bob Smith 08:59
Now this is the wonder of AI: reckless and reck. Why do those words? They don’t mean the same.

Marcia Smith 09:03
And down the rabbit hole you go.

Bob Smith 09:05
There I go down the electronic rabbit hole.

Marcia Smith 09:07
Okay, thank you, Bob. So on to your favorite subject. How many U.S. presidents were born English subjects?

Bob Smith 09:15
I think it’s the first 14 were born.

Marcia Smith 09:17
14?

Bob Smith 09:18
Well, wasn’t it 14? Oh, the first seven at least

Marcia Smith 09:21
Nine.

Bob Smith 09:21
The last one was Van Buren, wasn’t he?

Marcia Smith 09:24
No. Last one was William Henry Harrison.

Bob Smith 09:26
So Van Buren was after him?

Marcia Smith 09:27
No, he’s not on this list.

Bob Smith 09:29
Well, then he must be after him.

Marcia Smith 09:30
Yes.

Bob Smith 09:31
Okay. There we go. Okay, I’ll try it. All right. Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe.

Marcia Smith 09:37
Wait, you forgot, Tommy.

Bob Smith 09:39
I’m gonna get there. Washington, Adams, Madison Monroe, Jefferson. Let’s see William Henry Harrison. Who was before that? John Quincy Adams.

Marcia Smith 09:47
Yes, very good.

Bob Smith 09:48
And then was there one more? Did I miss that?

Marcia Smith 09:49
Andrew

Bob Smith 09:50
Andrew Jackson. I wondered about Andrew Jackson. Yeah. Okay.

Marcia Smith 09:53
Yeah. There you go. Thank you very much.

Bob Smith 09:55
I have a good question for you. How long have we been using the words white collar and blue collar to describe jobs?, how long has that been going on?

Marcia Smith 10:04
1700s.

Bob Smith 10:07
I would think it was something like that, but it’s more recent than that.

Marcia Smith 10:10
Okay, then that makes more sense actually to me. 1900s.

Bob Smith 10:14
Yes, it is. Yes, in 1911, white collar was used for the first time to define the class of salaried employees whose duties do not recall the wearing of work clothes. In other words, workers who didn’t perform manual labor didn’t require durable work uniforms, often made in denim or chambray, which were traditionally colored blue. But they didn’t use blue collar until 1929. For some reason, 18 years later, nobody knows why. So eventually, white collar also took on negative meanings. White collar crime? While blue collar workers are generally pictured as upright, honest, dependable people, there’s always a suspicion of white collar crime because it’s more invisible.

Marcia Smith 10:54
Blue collar don’t see.

Bob Smith 10:55
You can’t figure it out.

Marcia Smith 10:57
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of blue collar crime. God knows there is, but you never refer to it.

Bob Smith 11:01
That would be more out in the open, where white collar crime would be something’s kind of invisible, sinister within the company.

Marcia Smith 11:06
Yes, sinister. I mean, who’s going to walk off with a high end loader or something,

Bob Smith 11:11
or a nice wrench? You know,

Marcia Smith 11:15
Bob. The term “by and large, use that in a sentence.

Bob Smith 11:18
Okay, by and large, I believe you are a wonderful person.

Marcia Smith 11:21
Yes, it’s true, but we know where that phrase came from originally. How did that originate? By and large,

Bob Smith 11:27
I’m glad you asked that because that is one of those. It’s kind of interesting. Where did by and large come from? I know

Marcia Smith 11:32
these things we use all the time and we have no idea. Well, guess what? It’s from sailing.

Bob Smith 11:37
Oh, okay. It’s nautical. I see.

Marcia Smith 11:38
Nautical. In early sailing jargon “buy” was by the wind, and when a helmsman was ordered to fill the sails, he was told to steer and buy, steer by the wind. This required great skill and was called steering small, but a less experienced helmsman might have been told to steer large with the order by and large, which meant use the wind but don’t fill the sails because you’re not good enough.

Bob Smith 12:06
Really!

Marcia Smith 12:06
Aand that’s how the phrase by and large came to mean not quite close enough.

Bob Smith 12:11
By and large means use the wind.

Marcia Smith 12:14
Use the wind but don’t fill the sails.

Bob Smith 12:16
Oh, that’s weird.

Marcia Smith 12:17
And it means it’s close but not quite close enough.

Bob Smith 12:21
That is a strange expression when you think of that.

Marcia Smith 12:23
Yeah, by and large, use the wind, but don’t fill the sails because you’re not good enough.

Bob Smith 12:29
All right, I think it’s time for a break.

Marcia Smith 12:31
Indeed.

Bob Smith 12:31
You’re listening to the Off Ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment.

Bob Smith 12:37
We’re back. You’re listening to the Off Ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We do this each week and put it on podcast platforms where it is heard

Marcia Smith 12:44
all over the world.

Bob Smith 12:45
All right, now you are always sniffing around for trivia. I’ve got a sniffing question, Marcia. Where is sniffing someone considered a compliment?

Marcia Smith 12:54
Oh dear. Do you come up to somebody in this day and age? Uh huh. Really?

Bob Smith 12:58
Yeah. Kind of creepy, isn’t it? It is creepy, unless it’s your dog. Yeah, but even then, it could be creepy.

Marcia Smith 13:04
Is this in some obscure country?

Bob Smith 13:06
No, not obscure.

Marcia Smith 13:08
Okay, tell me.

Bob Smith 13:09
This comes from Britannica.com. Public displays of affection are generally frowned upon in Laos. Instead of kissing, many will press their nose against a loved one and inhale. And the practice is called hom ne, which means “Can I sniff you?

Marcia Smith 13:23
(Laughs)

Bob Smith 13:25
This is not something you ask someone on the first date.

Marcia Smith 13:27
Oh my word!

Bob Smith 13:29
In Buddhist Laos, romantic affection was historically private, no public affection. Homé involved a gentle workaround, a way to show love without violating those norms. So you say, I kind of like you. Can I sniff you? You know. Now there’s no written origin, but anthropologists give several explanations. Number one, parents traditionally sniff their babies’ heads.

Marcia Smith 13:51
Oh yeah, I did that.

Bob Smith 13:52
And then in Laotian folklore, a person’s natural scent was tied to their spirit. So sniffing someone was a way to acknowledge their presence and their essence. And then, as Western-style kissing became known through movies and travelers, younger Laotians wanted a way to express affection that still respected elders and monks. And Homna, may I sniff you, became the culturally safe alternative. Instead of kissing, people will press their nose against a loved one and just not typically used between strangers or casual acquaintances.

Marcia Smith 14:24
You want to stay all scrubbed up and dental fresh.

Bob Smith 14:27
You better take a bath if you’re going to go out with somebody.

Marcia Smith 14:30
I guess so. You’ll like this one, Bob. Where did the expression “the whole nine yards” come from?

Bob Smith 14:36
Oh, I remember this. This had to do with ammunition, I believe, and you had like a yard of shells,

Marcia Smith 14:43
yeah,

Bob Smith 14:44
in a machine gun,

Marcia Smith 14:45
yeah.

Bob Smith 14:45
And if you used the whole nine yards, you used the whole belt of bullets,

Marcia Smith 14:49
Yeah. During the South Pacific action of World War II, American fighter planes’ machine guns were armed with 50-caliber ammunition belts that measured exactly 20. Seven feet or nine yards in length, and if during combat a pilot gave everything he had, firing all his ammo at a single target, it was said he gave it the whole nine yards.

Bob Smith 15:12
Gave it all.

Marcia Smith 15:12
Yeah,

Bob Smith 15:13
He did everything.

Marcia Smith 15:14
Everything he had.

Bob Smith 15:15
All right, Marcia, what was Gondwana? Gondwana

Marcia Smith 15:20
Is-it’s not a place?

Bob Smith 15:22
It isn’t a place anymore.

Marcia Smith 15:23
It’s a former place.

Bob Smith 15:25
It’s believed to be a former place, and this is the name that was given

Marcia Smith 15:29
to it. Okay, tell me.

Bob Smith 15:30
Okay, Gondwana-that’s G-O-N-D-W-A-N-A-was the great giant supercontinent of all the land masses below the equator. So South America and Africa, which fit right into each other, you’ve seen that before, where they kind of link in.

Marcia Smith 15:44
Yeah, yeah.

Bob Smith 15:44
India, Australia, and Antarctica were all together at one point underneath the equator. Okay, it was one big landmass, and the name comes from Sanskrit, from India. There’s this place in central India known as the Forest of the Gonds, the Gond people. In the 1800s, British geologists labeled the local rock layers the Gondwana system. Well, lo and behold, later on in 1885, they started finding fossils with the same kind of plants in different parts of land below the equator in India, South Africa, South America, Australia, even Antarctica, and the Austrian geologist Edward Suess, he realized these were all once connected, so he named that vast ancient southern continent Gondwana Land. That’s what Gondwana was, but it was millions and millions of years ago. Later, paleontologists also found fossilized teeth linked to South American species in Australia, so animals and plants that were all in that area.

Marcia Smith 16:43
Okay,

Bob Smith 16:44
I thought Gondwana sounded like a kingdom in one of the Marvel movies or something. I would say that

Marcia Smith 16:48
definitely sounds like a Marvel movie. Okay, Bob. In the Middle Ages, animals were frequently one kept as pets, two put on trial, three eaten alive.

Bob Smith 17:01
I’m sure they were put on trial. How did you

Marcia Smith 17:03
know that?

Bob Smith 17:04
Because they attributed souls to animals. These animals knew what they were doing. They could be evil, and so they committed a crime. And it was also a great way to get people out of trouble. The goat made me do it. You know. Yeah. Put the goat on trial. I

Marcia Smith 17:16
had no idea. Dogs, pigs, rats, locusts, grasshoppers, and even snails, snails, Bob, were tried for all manner of crimes in countries such as Italy, France, and Switzerland. All of whom I would have thought knew better, but okay.

Bob Smith 17:32
So snails-that’s a very slow animal. Were they in like bookkeeping scandals? Fortunes were stolen over time. These

Marcia Smith 17:38
countries’ legal systems frequently threw the book at these speechless defendants,

Bob Smith 17:43
poor animals,

Marcia Smith 17:44
many of whom were even sentenced to death. Some of these trials were secular against individual animals, while others were ecclesiastical proceedings against large groups of vermin who offended the church by eating crops. Oh,

Bob Smith 18:00
jeez! So they ate crops. So now there’s like a theological enemy for us. Can

Marcia Smith 18:06
you hang a snail? I don’t know.

Bob Smith 18:07
All right, Marcia, you look at a map. You see Greenland and Australia. They’re both islands. Greenland is listed as the largest island in the world, but Australia is obviously far larger. It’s not listed as an island. What gives?

Marcia Smith 18:21
It isn’t.

Bob Smith 18:21
No,

Marcia Smith 18:22
the continent.

Bob Smith 18:23
That’s right. So what makes it a continent? What

Marcia Smith 18:26
makes it a continent, not an island?

Bob Smith 18:29
That’s a good question, isn’t it, Bob? Yes, it is. Australia is 3.5 times larger than Greenland. Yeah. But Greenland is considered the largest island. Why is that? Part of it is size, because Australia is much bigger, but size isn’t the only reason Australia is considered a continent. It’s a continent because of three things: the tectonic independence, the continental crust, and the biogeographic isolation. Okay, the tectonic independence. Australia sits on its own plate, separate from all the other plates in that part of the world, whereas Greenland sits on the North American plate, not a separate tectonic plate. Continental crust. Greenland is on the North American crust, and then the third one is the biogeographic isolation. You know what that’s about? No. The fact that there are plants and animals in that continent that aren’t found anywhere else in the world

Marcia Smith 19:22
in Australia. Yeah, yeah.

Bob Smith 19:23
More than 80% of Australia’s plants and 70 to 90% of its animals are endemic to that part of the world. That’s amazing.

Bob Smith 19:33
It’s not just what you think of. Marsupials is what we think of. Well, of course, nowhere else has you know these animals with pouches like kangaroos, koalas, wombats, Tanzanian devils-those are the ones we think of. Australia is home to more reptile species than any other place in the world. Even their butterflies, their bees, their beetles, their spiders, their crabs-all of it. Most of them, 70 to 90% are found nowhere else in the world. Only in Australia. Pretty amazing. And like I said, the kangaroos, koalas, wombats. Those are the. We think of, but it goes far beyond the marsupials. I didn’t know that.

Marcia Smith 20:03
I didn’t either, Bob.

Bob Smith 20:04
And it’s all because Australia split from Gondwana. That’s the reason it broke away, and then everything was isolated there for 1000s and 1000s of years. That’s the sequel to the Gondwana story.

Marcia Smith 20:17
Thank you. All right, time for also known as all right. Okay. Where I give you a category, and you have to figure out the word that goes with it. Today, it’s words that come after blue.

Bob Smith 20:29
After blue.

Marcia Smith 20:31
So if I said Leno, what kind of blue am I looking for?

Bob Smith 20:35
Leno, J Leno. That’s it. Blue J.

Marcia Smith 20:37
Yeah.

Bob Smith 20:37
Okay. Got it.

Marcia Smith 20:38
Okay. And how about if I say hell alternative? What kind of blue?

Bob Smith 20:44
The hell alternative, heaven. What’s that got to do with blue?

Marcia Smith 20:48
Blue heaven, my blue heaven.

Bob Smith 20:50
Oh, oh, it’s a little stretch. I don’t just connect two dots on this one. I got to connect three or four. Sorry,

Marcia Smith 20:55
you got to put a little work. Oh, here we go. Okay. Okay. So how about stock market name for top companies. What kind of

Bob Smith 21:04
blue chips?

Marcia Smith 21:05
That’s it.

Bob Smith 21:05
Yeah.

Marcia Smith 21:06
Very good. How about when you talk nonstop? You’ve talked out

Bob Smith 21:10
blue streak.

Marcia Smith 21:11
That’s it. First place award is a what?

Bob Smith 21:15
Blue chips, blue ribbons. That’s

Marcia Smith 21:17
it. Louisiana Gulf area. The

Bob Smith 21:20
Louisiana Gulf area. Yes, Gulf, G U L F.

Marcia Smith 21:24
Yes,

Bob Smith 21:25
blue, blue

Marcia Smith 21:26
what?

Bob Smith 21:26
Blue waters, blue.

Marcia Smith 21:28
Yeah, I don’t know. Louisiana, the blue bayou. Oh, okay, the blue bayou. Yes, I was

Bob Smith 21:34
thinking blue herons or something. Okay, the blue bayou. Okay,

Marcia Smith 21:36
and lastly, Bob, Smart and Stapleton. What kind of blue am I asking for?

Bob Smith 21:43
Smart and Stapleton.

Marcia Smith 21:45
Yeah.

Bob Smith 21:45
Who’s Stapleton? Think

Marcia Smith 21:47
of these are actresses. Well,

Bob Smith 21:48
I think of the one on on the the one that was on All in the Family. Yeah. Was June Stapleton? No. Jane Staple. What was her name? Jean Stapleton. That’s it. So blue jeans. Yes. Okay.

Marcia Smith 22:00
Okay. Wow. You didn’t do badly.

Bob Smith 22:02
These were very.

Marcia Smith 22:03
This was harder because it came after the word. Three

Bob Smith 22:05
or four dots in a row. Connect three or four dots together. All right, Marcia. I have a question for you. What original U.S. colony of all the 13 U.S. colonies, which one was payment for a king’s debt to a British citizen? This colony was actually payment for a debt. Oh,

Marcia Smith 22:22
that was for Louisiana Purchase. No,

Bob Smith 22:24
no, no, no, no.

Marcia Smith 22:26
But

Bob Smith 22:26
this colony was given as a payment on a king’s debt. Okay,

Marcia Smith 22:30
which which one?

Bob Smith 22:31
Pennsylvania.

Marcia Smith 22:32
Oh yeah.

Bob Smith 22:33
It was given to William Penn.

Marcia Smith 22:34
Oh,

Bob Smith 22:35
Penn’s father was owed a debt from the royals, and King Charles II had a IOU to pay back the family, and in 1631 he granted a charter for this colony in America. And William Penn established the colony Pennsylvania as a safe haven for Quakers. So Pennsylvania is named after the family’s name. It became a model of diversity, coexistence, attracting settlers of all faiths and backgrounds, and it was all because a king owed a debt to a citizen.

Marcia Smith 23:07
What do you think Alvania means?

Bob Smith 23:11
Don’t know. Okay. You mean Sylvania?

Marcia Smith 23:13
Yeah.

Bob Smith 23:14
S Y L V A N I A. Well, that’s a good one. Let’s look it up. Do you have your phone?

Marcia Smith 23:18
Yeah.

Bob Smith 23:18
What does the suffix Sylvania mean in Pennsylvania and Transylvania,

Marcia Smith 23:24
woods or forests? Oh,

Bob Smith 23:25
that’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 23:27
so I wouldn’t have guessed that. So

Bob Smith 23:28
Pennsylvania means Penn’s woods. Yeah. So it’s probably because it was a wooded area. Yeah. And Transylvania means beyond the forest. Yeah. I’ll be darned.

Marcia Smith 23:37
Haven’t we learned a lot on so

Bob Smith 23:39
much on this show,

Marcia Smith 23:40
okay. I’ll finish up before my quotes with Marcia’s “Where in the world?

Bob Smith 23:45
Okay, Marcia’s mystery. Where in the world? Three

Marcia Smith 23:49
clues. See if you can get them sooner rather than later.

Bob Smith 23:52
Okay.

Marcia Smith 23:52
This city. It’s a city. World’s tallest steel arch bridge and one of the world’s deepest harbors. The

Bob Smith 24:00
world’s tallest steel bridge,

Marcia Smith 24:02
arch bridge,

Bob Smith 24:03
arch bridge, and one of the world’s deepest harbors, an arch bridge. Okay, we’re not talking we’re not talking San Francisco, are we?

Marcia Smith 24:12
Nope. Its central station and town hall are both built on top of former cemeteries from the 1800s. Oh, really? Yeah, the 1800s. That should give you a little bit of clue. Well, I’m

Bob Smith 24:24
thinking of Australia. I’m thinking that’s it. Okay, is it Melbourne or is

Marcia Smith 24:28
it no? It’s Sydney.

Bob Smith 24:29
Sydney. Okay.

Marcia Smith 24:30
It was going for the country here. Founded as a British penal colony, you would have got it right away. Hmm. But the the city is Sydney.

Bob Smith 24:39
Okay. All right, I have another colony question. Okay, you’ve heard of the Salem witch trials in the colony of Massachusetts. What other colony had witch trials?

Marcia Smith 24:49
I don’t know.

Bob Smith 24:51
Witch trials in the

Marcia Smith 24:53
South. Salem and Virginia.

Marcia Smith 24:58
Virginia.

Bob Smith 24:58
Virginia had two. Dozen witch trials between 1626 and 1730, including an infamous case of Grace Sherwood. She was convicted of witchcraft and spent several years in jail before she was released, so she wasn’t killed. But Virginia had a dozen witch trials. Two dozen witch trials between 1626 and 1730. So it’s not just Salem, Massachusetts. What

Marcia Smith 25:21
a weird time to live. Yeah,

Bob Smith 25:23
and as we’ve mentioned, research shows that there were 1000s of women killed as witches in Europe in that same period. Far more in Europe than in the United States. God

Marcia Smith 25:32
forbid you have a little wooju in you and

Bob Smith 25:34
just be a little strange.

Marcia Smith 25:35
Yeah. Okay. Well, she’s a witch, especially husband’s one to get rid of you. Ah, she’s acting kind of witchy. Yeah,

Bob Smith 25:40
it’s against the law to divorce, so she’s a witch. Yeah. Oh, it was so easy

Marcia Smith 25:45
to get rid of people. Okay, Bob, I’m going to finish up with quotes from the late great Dolly Parton. All

Bob Smith 25:51
right.

Marcia Smith 25:52
Okay, you ready?

Bob Smith 25:53
Mm-hmm.

Marcia Smith 25:53
If you don’t like the road you’re walking on, start paving another

Bob Smith 25:57
one.

Marcia Smith 25:58
I like that.

Bob Smith 25:59
Yeah.

Marcia Smith 26:00
If I see someone without a smile, I give them mine.

Bob Smith 26:03
Oh, isn’t that great?

Marcia Smith 26:04
I love that. Change the magic is inside you. There ain’t no crystal ball.

Bob Smith 26:10
It’s all very practical stuff, isn’t it?

Marcia Smith 26:15
And I’ll just do one last one, which has been quoted many times, but it costs a lot of money to look this cheap. I always thought that was the best.

Bob Smith 26:24
You know, it’s amazing how many millions of dollars she gave to charity. 300 million books given to all kinds of kids for the years. But I think the one that impressed me most is the fact that she opened up a amusement park near her hometown to give employment to people, and 23,000 jobs were created. How many people have ever done that for their hometown? Yeah, isn’t that great?

Marcia Smith 26:47
It’s wonderful. Instead of a fudge store, you know, fudge store. All the attraction towns have fudge stores. Oh, I never thought

Bob Smith 26:56
of that. Oh my goodness! Well, that was a great contribution. If you’d like to make a contribution to our show, you can go to our website, theofframp show. Click on Contact Us, and then you can fill out the field. Give us a question to ask Marcia and try to stump her,

Marcia Smith 27:10
or just tell us you’re listening and where you’re listening from.

Bob Smith 27:13
You’re right. That’s good enough.

Marcia Smith 27:15
Love to hear from. We do

Bob Smith 27:16
love to hear from folks. So I’m Bob Smith.

Marcia Smith 27:18
I’m Marsha Smith.

Bob Smith 27:19
Join us again next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on

Marcia Smith 27:25
the Off Ramp. The

Bob Smith 27:33
Off Ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at theofframp.show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai