the Truth Is As Facts Do edition

NF, One L
Issue #21

1. Evian spelled backward is Naïve. A baby eel is called an elver. The battle of Bunker Hill was not fought at Bunker Hill. The One-Hundred Years war lasted 115 years. Fossilized turds are called “coprolites”. The name “Wendy” did not exist before Peter Pan. In almost every watch ad, the time shown is 10:10. Those “Live Free Or Die” license plates you see while tooling around the wilds of New Hampshire, which tend to call up visions of revolution and patriotism and the hanging of Nathan Hale, are manufactured by inmates earning .12 cents an hour at Concord State Prison.

The Lesson Here: Irony is the editor of Vanity Fair pronouncing the death of Irony.

2. There is a spoon museum in New Jersey. Rabbits can’t puke. The Catholic Church is the largest landowner in Manhattan. Columbia University is second. The Mormon Church is the largest single landowner in America. The queen of England owns, by royal fiat, all swans and sturgeons in the UK, and it is a serious offence to poach one. DaVinci invented scissors. Carnivores will not feed on other animals struck by lightning. Octopuses have rectangular pupils, and therefore should not be eaten. Giraffes have no vocal cords. Woodward Avenue in Detroit was the first paved street in America. The only freshwater sharks in the world are in the Ganges River.

Conclusion To Be Made: Although calling the Ganges "fresh water" is in itself an entire comedy routine, it likely would be preferable to swim naked in and/or drink from the Ganges than peruse spoons in Newark.

3. Tennessee is bordered by eight states. Maine is bordered by one. Maine is the only state name with one syllable. In Sanskrit, “war” means “to desire more cows.” “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with just the left hand. “Shah Mat” in Persian means “The king is dead”, and over centuries of mispronunciation became “checkmate”. Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City. Russia continues to deny it, although pick-wielder Ramón Mercader did 20 years in prison and is known to have been an agent of the NKVD, which stands for Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, which is the precursor to the KGB, which stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Muddy Waters’ name is McKinley Morganfield. Ralph Lauren’s name is Ralph Lifshitz.

Inference Alluded To: "Lifshitz" does not, in fact, rhyme with “Yacht”.

4. We abbreviate “pounds” as “lbs” because the term comes from the constellation Libra, which is also a Latinate noun/adjective meaning both “pound” and “scales”. The Italian lira also derives from Libra. Pre-metric British currency was broken down into Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, which are the modern forebears of Julius Caesar shelling out pockets full of Libra, Solidus, and Denarius. Parthenogenesis is the ability of female animals to reproduce without the intervention of the male of the species, which sounds good on paper, but the sharp money is on The World of Parthenogenesis having the exact same degree of inequality as the current Copulative/Missionary. Ergot is a mold that grows on unleavened bread, popular around the Mediterranean in biblical times. Ergot also has psychoactive properties, not entirely dissimilar to mescaline, which among many serious academics is thought to explain certain events, for instance walking on water, being casually conversational with burning bushes, and rising from the dead.

Takeaway: The Sumerians were brewing beer 8,000 years before Christ. As a species, we generally prefer to be addled away from the recognition of how profoundly temporary we are.

5. Fly Agoric is a plant Norsemen chewed before going into battle. It also has psychoactive and stimulant properties, which tended to turn the Vikings into “berserkers”, or blood-mad, neurally-altered, very bearded men with a taste for wanton slaughter. Which helps explain why they were able to rape and pillage the majority of Europe for centuries with no real competition. Kamikaze means “Divine Wind”. Kamikaze pilots were often gorked out of their skulls on amphetamine, newly produced by the German Big Pharma company Bayer. “Blitzkrieg” means “Lightning War” and accurately describes the movement of German divisions through Poland and France like a knife through a cliché about butter, since they fought and marched for days on end with little or no rest or stopping to eat. German soldiers were provided with strips of top shelf Beyer as part of their mess kits. American soldiers, after finishing basic training, were given two cartons of Lucky Strikes each. Theodor Karl Ludwig Gilbert Morell was Hitler's personal doctor, rarely left Adolph's side, and shot him up with a solution of vitamins and pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine nearly every day starting in 1941.

Let’s Unpack This: In 1941 Hitler began making a string of inexplicable and erratic decisions, like for instance invading Russia at the onset of winter, or allowing trapped Allied soldiers to escape from Dunkirk.

6. The world “modem” simultaneously means modulate and demodulate. Lizzie Bordon was acquitted. Isaac Asimov has a book in every Dewey Decimal category. “Set” has the most definitions of any word in English. Only humans and horses have hymens. Nothing rhymes with orange, silver, or purple. Gaelic is actually Scottish, and Irish is Gaeilege. Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was written. In that version of Psalms 46, the 46th word from the beginning is “shake” and the 46th word from the end is “spear”. The first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch, which is really just the Torah with a slice of de-Yiddishing, while the Greek Old Testament is called the Septuagint, which was a single, much shorter book until Medieval monks (paid by the word) added arbitrary chapters, headings, and page numbers. All continent names end with the same letter they begin with. “Facetious” and “abstemious” are two words with all the vowels listed in correct order. The Book Of Esther is the only one that never mentions God, probably because even then she could sense the encroachment of Clarence Thomas.

At The End Of The Day: Moses is owed some major royalties.

7. Car horns beep in F, although are usually flat if looked at through an oscilloscope. Kenny G plays every note sharp. “Philatelic Fulfillment” means getting off on postage stamps. Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee. There is only one word in English with a single vowel that repeats six times: “Indivisibility”. You can go slower than the speed of light, and faster than the speed of light, but not at the speed of light. The world “testify” comes from the Roman army, when soldiers were forced to confirm the truth of something by swearing on their testicles. Hitler and Napoleon both had only one ball. Avocado is a derivative of “ahuacatl”, which means balls. Mussolini believed he could ward off the evil eye by cupping his balls. Stalin means “steel” in Russian, and was not actually his name, which was Ioseb Dzhugashvili. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was five feet four inches tall. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was an ethnic Georgian, which is not a state that borders Alabama.

Bottom Line: Steel Balls

8. Four words in the English language have consecutive UU’s: Vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, and residuum. Muumuu is the only one that does it twice. “Queueing” is the only one with five consecutive vowels. Emus cannot walk backwards. Hummingbirds can fly backwards. The white tip of your fingernail is a “lunulus.” People from Manchester are Mancunians. Naguahyde was invented in Naugatuck, CT. The southernmost city is America is Na’alehu, Hawaii. Alaska is the only state to have been invaded by the Japanese during WWII. There are twice as many people in Rhode Island as Alaska. “Oiseau” has five consecutive vowels, but it's French, and means “bird”. The plastic tip of a shoelace is an Aglet. “Screeched” is the longest one-syllable word. Nothing rhymes with “month”. Babies don’t have kneecaps. “Samba” means “Rub navels together.”

Core Concept: Emus also hate Michael Jackson.

9. The largest amount of money you can have in coins without being able to make change for a dollar is $1.19. Honey is the only natural food made without destroying life. The glue on Israeli stamps is kosher. Harold Edgerton took every single photograph of our atomic bomb test detonations with his Rapatronic Camera. He also invented the camera that took the first pictures of the sunken Titanic. The only three angels named in the bible are Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer. In Latin, Lucifer means “light bringer”. Compact discs track inside-out, the opposite of vinyl. Birds on spaceships will immediately die because they require gravity to swallow. You can duel legally in Paraguay if you are a blood donor. “Denim” means “de nimes” or “from Nimes, France”. Penguins fuck twice yearly. Pigs have corkscrew penises and thirty-minute climaxes.

Cliff’s Notes: Bacon tastes like greasy death and motherly disapproval.

10. I ate raw fish eyes on a dare once. They tasted like rusty paper clips.