Sunday, August 18, 2013

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ahhh, training videos -- the bane of existence of everybody who has ever worked, well, anywhere. Personally, I can't stand training videos and I invariably find them a giant waste of time.

But this one, from Wendy's in the 80s, is fascinating. It's just your normal boring training video, dull-as-ditchwater, until you get to about the 3:40 mark.


:: James Garfield is the only President to prove a mathematical theorem. Now, there are two things Garfield can be known for! (The other is that he died of a gunshot wound just six months into being President.)

:: If you're on Facebook, go like a page called "Grandiloquent Word of the Day". Because then you'll get a daily dose of words-gone-by, words just waiting to be dusted off and used again, the vocabulary analogs of poor Woody in the toybox. And the words come with nifty illustrations!




More next week!

6 comments:

Andy said...

DONE!!!! Thanks for that, Now I can use some 'words' that no one knows in my bitchin' blog!

Earl said...

I like visiting historical places like presidential homes. We are lucky that we have two near us: The Garfield and Rutherford B Hayes home/museum. Apparently it was not the gunshot that killed Garfield but the doctor that did not wash his hands, who insisted that the bullet MUST be removed for the president to survive.

He may have lived had they left it in there.

Kelly Sedinger said...

Earl: I've read that about the Garfield shooting. You wonder how much history would have been different if medical knowledge had been just a few more decades more advanced, at certain points like that. I've heard that if he suffered that same gunshot wound today, he almost certainly lives.

Roger Owen Green said...

Garfield lived for weeks after he was shot. Yes, today he would almost certainly have lived.

Imbrue sounds a lot like imbue.
Soodle is a great word for saunter. But I'm not sure how I can work that other word into polite conversation.

Earl said...

A Hungarian physician, Semmelweis, tried to convince the US medical community that hand washing would decrease infection and death. He was rejected and humiliated to the point he had to be committed to an insane asylum (where he was beaten to death by guards).

Makes me wonder what "outside the box" ideas we are rejecting today that would dramatically alter our lives.

Conventional lives are ruled by people who subject themselves to opinion leaders.

Roger Owen Green said...

You inspired me! (And I sent the link to the Grandiloquent folk.)