Dumb Things I Know

You can get intestinal worms from raw fish at a sushi restaurant. You'd be mighty unlucky, but theoretically it is possible.

The Second Amendment needs ratifying.

The Corinthians wrote back! Paul's letters pick up as he answers questions the leaders at Corinth have written to him - some of which may be quoted in the New Testament. But they're not indented or italicized like in e-mail, and the mix makes some of Paul's statements sound contradictory.

Our moon is in synchronous (or "captured") rotation with Earth, so we always see its same side.



The Pisa Tower was off-kilter by the time construction was finished.

Stardates in Star Trek make little sense. In the original series they were assigned arbitrarily. The Captain's Log in episode Spock's Brain starts at stardate five thousand plus, but later Kirk makes a supplemental entry at four thousand and something. In later series, dates progressed 1000 star dates per season of television, starting at 40,000 on the first season of The Next Generation.

The egg came before the chicken, since chickens are descended from other non-chickenoid lifeforms that would have hatched from eggs.

"O.K." stands for "oll korrect". It comes from America in the 1830s when comic mis-spellings and abbreviations were something of a fad. (If you think that sounds dumb, just look at the persistence of "nite" and "lite" in modern culture.) It passed into the vernacular the following decade, when it was used in a political campaign.

The opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu - you're in a totally familiar situation yet you feel like you've never been there before.

Richard Dawkins (credited with first coining the word "meme", among other achievements) is now married to former Doctor Who actress, ex-wife of Tom Baker and all-round hottie Lalla Ward.

"Katie Holmes" is an anagram of "Tom Likes A He". He heh.