Total Trivia

[call_me_Melody]

Real "official" vampires
Do NOT Sparkle

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

A fascinating newspaper science article that is a 'must' read for all girls and which also shows an insight into the psychology of men...

What to wear on a night out.

http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l323/GaiaLorraine/article-fleshexposure.jpg

 

[smotherman]

41% of Chinese people eat at least once a week at a fast food restaurant. 35% of Americans do.

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

Light doesn't always travel at 'the speed of light'. It only goes at that speed (299,792,458 metres per second) when travelling through a vacuum; when it passes through matter, it slows down. The slowest light has ever been recorded moving at is 38mph, while passing through an ultracold gas of sodium atoms.

 

[smotherman]

Romanian firefighters could not get their trucks close enough to a burning building, so they put out the fire by throwing snowballs at it.

 

[smotherman]

Mailmen in Russia now carry revolvers.

 

[smotherman]

The biggest dog on record was an Old English Mastiff that weighed 343 pounds. He was 8 feet, 3 inches from nose to tail.

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

American Corey Taylor faked his own death in 2007 – even going to the extent of forging a death certificate... just so he could get out of his mobile phone contract early without paying a £105 fee. Sadly for the enterprising Mr Taylor, the phone company caught on and forced him to pay up.

 

[fire_breeze]

I'm on a mythological creature kick.

The succubus (plural succubbi) stems from the Mediaeval era (and not before, as previously assumed), and is a demon who takes the form of a woman to seduce men in dreams to have sexual intercourse.

Demons are fallen angels, and like angels, are sexless. In order to procreate (who doesn't want an army of non-humans), they turn into succubbi, and seduced men, taking their semen. They then turn into incubi (sing. incubus - demons that take the masculine form in order to sleep with women), who then deposit the now corrupt and demonic sperm, which would impregnate women with demon-children.

Whew.

 

[fire_breeze]

Lilith who, in some apocryphal traditions, was considered to be Adam's first wife. She was originally a female Mesopotamian storm demon associated with wind and was thought to be a bearer of disease, illness, and death.

 

[fire_breeze]

Peter Binsfeld prepared a classification of demons in 1589. His demon classification was based on the seven deadly sins, establishing that each one of the mentioned demons tempted people by means of one of those sins.

Lucifer: pride
Mammon: greed
Asmodeus: lust
Leviathan: envy
Beelzebub: gluttony
Satan/Amon: wrath
Belphegor: sloth

 

[fire_breeze]

The manticore has the body of a red lion, a human head with three rows of sharp teeth (like a shark), and a trumpet-like voice and was Persian in origin. It means "man eater"

 

[fire_breeze]

The cockatrice was first described in the late twelfth century based on a hint in Pliny's Natural History, as a duplicate of the basilisk or regulus, though, unlike the basilisk, the cockatrice has wings & tail because its a rooster & lizard tail.

Its reputed magical abilities include turning people to stone or killing them by either looking at them or by breathing on them.

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

Peter Binsfeld prepared a classification of demons in 1589. His demon classification was based on the seven deadly sins, establishing that each one of the mentioned demons tempted people by means of one of those sins.

Lucifer: pride
Mammon: greed
Asmodeus: lust
Leviathan: envy
Beelzebub: gluttony
Satan/Amon: wrath
Belphegor: sloth

The seven deadly sins

 

[call_me_Melody]

86% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

86% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

LOL!

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

Kraken:
Probably no legendary creature was as horrifying as the Kraken, a giant sea monster. According to stories this huge, many armed, creature looked like an island when motionless and could reach as high as the top of a sailing ship's main mast with its arms deployed.

When the Kraken attacked a ship, it wrapped its arms around the hull and capsize it. The crew would drown or be eaten by the monster.
The Kraken of legend is probably what we know today as the giant squid or cephalopod. Though they are considerably less then a mile and a half across, they are large enough to wrestle with a sperm whale.

Early stories about Kraken, from Norway in the twelfth century, refer to a creature the size of an island. Even in 1752, when the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, wrote his Natural History of Norway he described the Kraken as a "floating island" one and a half miles across. He also noted: "It seems these are the creatures's arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom."

Later Kraken stories bring the creature down to a smaller, but still monstrous size and assimilated it as a giant octopus.

On at least three occasions in the thirties they attacked a ship. While the squids got the worst of these encounters when they slid into the ship's propellers, the fact that they attacked at all shows that it is possible for these creatures to mistake a vessel for a whale.

 

[call_me_Melody]

Barbie's measurements (if she were life-size): 39-23-33

 

[HoneyBearFarms]

Is this Malibu Barbie or another of the many Barbies that exist????

 

[Gaia_Lorraine]

The Harpies were fierce, filthy, winged monsters who had characteristics of a bird and a woman, similar to that of the early Sirens. Their hideous faces of women with sharp claws mounted on the bodies of vultures inspired both horror and disgust.
The three daughters of Thaumas and Electre are called Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno and were originally goddesses with beautiful hair and wings until they were reduced to such fearsome monsters.
They serve Zeus. They are sometimes represented as demons of death carrying away the souls of deceased persons (see the Haryp tomb in the British Museum). The people feared them for it was said that they stole small children and carried away the weak and the wounded.

One of the most famous stories involves Phineus, the King of Thessaly, who had the gift of seeing into the future. Phineus told Zeus' secrets to others and Zeus took away his sight and sent the Harpies, the "hounds of Zeus," to come after him. The Harpies kept steeling his food and devouring it for themselves and leaving only enough for Phineus to survive. When Jason and the Argonauts visited Phineus, Zetes and Calais, sons of the North Wind, pursued the Harpies through the sky. Iris or Hermes convinced Zeus to remove the Harpies from Phineus.

 

[smotherman]

Bayer Aspirin was the first drug ever to be marketed in tablet form. First marketed in 1899 as a powder, by 1900 aspirin was being compressed into a water-soluble tablet.

 

[fire_breeze]

Just like demons, angels are found in many traditions. In most (ever careful not to say all ) traditions, angels are messengers to the divine realm.

The word angel in English is a fusion of the Old English word engel (with a hard g) and the Old French angele. Both derive from the Latin angelus, and thence the Koine Greek ἄγγελος - angelos ('messenger') used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew מלאך mal'akh (yehowah) "messenger (of Yahweh)"

 

[smotherman]

Soldiers disease' is a term for morphine addiction. The Civil War produced over 400,000 morphine addicts.

 

[fire_breeze]

According to medieval Christian theologians, the Angels are organized into several orders, or Angelic Choirs

From the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament passages, including their etymology and semantics, the above mentioned theological works (which contain variations), and esoteric Christian teachings, the descending order of rank can be inferred as following:

First Sphere (Hebrew Bible sources)
Seraphim
Cherubim
Thrones (Gr. thronos) (New Testament sources)

Second Sphere (New Testament sources)
Dominions (Gr. Kyriotetes)
Virtues (Gr. Dynamais)
Powers (Gr. Exusiai)

Third Sphere
Principalities (Gr. Archai)
Archangels - Archangeloi
Angels - Angeloi

 

[smotherman]

The chemical n-acetyl-cysteine found in raw eggs is proven to help hangovers.