[Vhfcn-l] Sunday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I will be gone for a couple of days, so this is going out early.

 

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The three most common expressions in aviation are, 'Why is it doing that?,
'Where are we?' and 'Oh Crap.' 

Unknown

 

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to
answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'

Theodore Roosevelt 

 

Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry
reason: fear. 

Molly Ivins 

 

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to
be bought and sold are legislators.

PJ O'Rourke

 

Do you think God gets stoned? I think so. look at the platypus. 

Unknown

 

You're not that lucky and I'm not that desperate! 

Anonymous

 

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Fiddlesticks

 

One apocryphal story is that fiddlesticks came from the wooden bars on ships
that stopped crockery sliding off tables in rough weather, and that officers
used to play silly games with them, hence the name. 

 

There's an ounce of truth in this because the protective slats, bars or
rails around the edges of shipboard tables are indeed called fiddles. But to
leap from this undisputed fact to its being the origin of fiddlesticks is
too great for most minds, however athletic.

 

A fiddlestick was undoubtedly at first a violin bow. (Both fiddle and violin
come from the Roman goddess of joy, Vitula, who gave her name to a stringed
instrument; fiddle came down to us via the Germanic languages, violin
through the Romance ones.) Fiddlestick is recorded from the fifteenth
century, and Shakespeare used a proverb based on it in Henry IV: "the devil
rides on a fiddle-stick", meaning that a commotion has broken out; the
imagery is obviously related to the broomstick of a witch, and perhaps
there's some thought behind it of the noise that a fiddle might make if the
devil got to play it.

 

At some point in Shakespeare's lifetime, it seems fiddlestick began to be
used for something insignificant or trivial. This may have been because a
violin bow was regarded as inconsequential or perhaps simply because the
word sounds intrinsically silly. It took on a humorous slant as a word one
could use to replace another in a contemptuous response to a remark. George
Farquhar used it in this way in his play Sir Henry Wildair of 1701: "Golden
pleasures! golden fiddlesticks!". From here it was a short step to using the
word as a disparaging comment to mean that something just said was nonsense.

 

There is a link between the violin bow and ship's table senses of fiddle, in
that the word has been used in several fields for various wooden
contrivances with a more or less fanciful resemblance to a violin and that
this is the source of the ship usage. But otherwise, ship's fiddles and the
retort are unconnected.

 

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Across the board

 

this term has a specialized gambling sense in the US. In the UK it is
primarily known in the sense of something that applies to all, as in "the
cutbacks will be across the board".

 

It's definitely of American origin and comes from horse racing, in which it
refers to a bet in which equal amounts are staked on a horse to win, place,
or show in a race - that is, come in first, second, or third. The Oxford
English Dictionary's first citation is from 1950, but it's actually much
older - there are examples in US newspapers going back to the beginning of
the twentieth century. The earliest found was from The Post-Standard of
Syracuse, New York, in 1902, about a scam perpetrated on a local bookmaker:
"This affected the bookmaker to the extent of allowing him to make another
bet of $30 across the board, this bet to net $160".

 

The board itself was the blackboard on which bookmakers chalked up the odds
for each horse in each race, so to bet across the board was to select all
three options - win, place, and show - for one horse.

 

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Edward Hunter, a  US Journalist, invented what war Korean term ?

A: Brainwashing

 

In 1951 disposable what were invented?

A:  diapers

 

Fire escapes, windshield wipers, and bullet proof vests were all invented by
what group?

A:  women

 

Denis Gabor of Hungary, in 1971, won the Nobel prize for what invention?

A:  Holograms

 

The Wright brothers made aircraft but what was their other job?

A:  Bicycle manufacturers

 

Who invented the Linux computer operating system?

A: Linus Torwalds

 

in 1662 what calculating aid was invented by William Oughtred?

A: Slide Rule