What popular board game was created to head off boredom in a World War II air raid shelter?

I celebrate seven years of this nonsense and find I’m still not doing it all right.

Two weeks ago, I said that only two countries in the Western Hemisphere used French as their official language – Canada and Haiti.

Turns out, I should have said “the Americas,” as a friend on another website pointed out that within the Western Hemisphere itself, several nations use French: Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Togo, Burkina Faso (all on the African continent and all entirely within the Western Hemisphere) and … France itself, a portion of which is in that part of the world.

Sometimes, I get a little too big for my britches, it seems, and I am always grateful to my readers who find me in a fault and correct me.

Heavy sigh … this getting old is getting to me. Let’s move on to this week’s new stuff, shall we?

Did you know …

… Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster doesn’t really eat cookies? Well, he does, but not on camera. Real chocolate chip cookies have grease in them and that would damage the puppet, so the show uses rice cakes painted to look like cookies. (It’s hard to imagine old C.M. saying, ”Rice cake!  Rice cake!”)

… a perfect pint of Guinness™ beer takes about two minutes to pour? Most people I know don’t care about such niceties, but if you’re into precision, there are six steps in the process of properly pouring a pint of Guinness stout. One of the steps involves waiting exactly 19.5 seconds for the beer to settle between the first and second pour. (Yeah, all that’s nice, but when you’re waiting to quench your thirst, two minutes is two minutes!)

… it really is not possible to suck snake venom out of a snakebite? Once a poisonous snake bites, the venom spreads too quickly through the bloodstream. Not only that, making those little “x” incisions over the actual bite and trying to suck out the venom can lead to a pretty nasty infection. Using a tourniquet to “stop” the venom from spreading is a rather bad idea too, since most people aren’t trained in putting one on and can make it too tight, cutting off blood flow and eventually leading to amputation (in the worst cases). The best bet, if someone is bitten by a venomous snake, is to get them to a doctor as quickly as you can. (It doesn’t hurt to hope that the bite was “dry,” and no venom was injected.)

… a museum dedicated to French fries exists? It’s called the Frietmuseum and is located in Bruges, Belgium. The museum has a collection of art, equipment and other artifacts tracing the history and development of the French fry – which, by the way, originated in Belgium, not France. (Here I always thought they were invented at McDonald’s.)

… a popular board game was invented to alleviate boredom in an air-raid shelter? During World War II, Anthony Pratt (1903-1994) was spending yet another boring stretch in a British air raid shelter when he came up with the idea of a game based on murder. Pratt used his love of murder mystery games to come up with one called Murder! – or, as we know it today, Clue. Aided by his wife Elva (1913-1990), Pratt developed the murder mystery game, which in the beginning had some wild weapons – an axe and a bomb, for instance. (I still think it was Col. Mustard in the Drawing Room with the Rope.)

… the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, was not always called that? The community that eventually became St. Paul was originally called “Pig’s Eye” after a saloon there. The town was renamed St. Paul in 1841 after a chapel built by a Catholic missionary, which was dedicated to St. Paul (5 AD-67 AD). It was designated the capital of the territory in 1849, and became the capital of the state when Minnesota was admitted to the Union in 1858. (In a pig’s eye!)

… oversleeping helped the world’s first billionaire escape death? John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) was set to meet with Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) one day in 1866 to negotiate shipments of kerosene to save his failing oil refinery. But on the day of the meeting, Rockefeller overslept, meaning he missed the 6:25 a.m. train that was to carry him to the meeting in New York. Good thing for him that he did, though: the train derailed and fifty people were killed in the car in which Rockefeller would have been seated. (Use that as an excuse for work the next time you oversleep.  Let me know how it works for you.)

… astronauts sent to the Moon considered making a practical joke? The crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman (born 1928), James Lovell (born 1928), and William Anders (born 1933) – were the first humans to leave Earth orbit and travel to the Moon, in December of 1968. Though they did not land, the lunar-orbital mission was a successful test of the hardware that would eventually lead to the first men on the Moon the next year. But a few months before the mission took off, the crew viewed the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Long after the mission ended, the astronauts revealed that they had seriously considered playing a practical joke on Mission Control: they reportedly thought about radioing back a report that they spotted a huge black monolith on the Moon. (Open the hatch, Hal.)

… calm winds aren’t always calm? According to the National Weather Service, air can move at a speed of under one mile per hour and still be referred to as “calm.” (Kind of like how having ten cents means you’re not broke.)

… there are about 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year? (Sing it … “I feel the Earth move under my feet …)

Now … you know!

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