More yak butter is produced in Nepal than any other country. The reason I know that obscure and totally useless fact is because of fillers. Before computers newspaper stories were typed and then given to typesetters who placed each letter of every story on every page into the printing press. Because sometimes the different lengths of the stories the columns wouldn't come out neat and even on the page. There would be a blank space at the bottom of some columns unless something was done about it. What they did was to use fillers. Fillers were one, two or three line factoids of information that almost nobody would know. The filler would be inserted into the paper in between stories and the paper would look nice and neat. Because there was no googling to come up with many many factoids a lot of times you would see the same one used many times over the months and years. My favorite was the one about the yak butter. Who even thought about the fact that yaks produce milk that can be churned into butter? The yak is a long-haired bovid found throughout the Himalaya region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. Most yaks are domesticated, Bos grunniens.
Rona Scoratow of Pittsburgh is leaving $5000 to her 42 year old philodendron house plant to make sure it will be cared for when she's gone. Sounds to me like she's already gone.
In 1640 the English astronomer William Gascoigne invented crosshairs after a spider laid a web across his telescope
Cool photo of an F-18 Super Hornet 2 at the split second it broke the sound barrier at the speed of 768 mph. It formed a vapor cone that only lasted tenths of a second
A group of alligators is called a congregation. Maybe they are all praying for you to fall into the water.
At the time of this post, more Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian (3) than have died from ebola (1) in the US.
