Random fact of the day thread.

Random fact..our ( late) cat used to mesmerise birds by lying on the ground and staring at them, they used to gradually hop closer and closer to him and then.....he closed his eyes and they lost interest in him and flew away.
He did this on a regular basis, it was his little game.

Cheers, Glammagran. (I am of course rather younger than IKB...)

agranbytheendofsummer
Lovely news. Congratulations X

The first recorded example of artificial insemination was in the 1400s (King Enrique IV of Castille also known as Enrique the Impotent). It wasn't successful although his wife, Queen Joan did later have a child, widely believed to be a result of an affair. She did run off with her lover in the end and had at least two more children by him.

LornaS I think it depends what you define as sea as tidewater ingress counts. Realistically though I agree with you.

Ooops no, Coventry is well over 100 miles from the sea

Thought Pirates wore gold earrings so someone would bury them? Sailors friends auction their kit.

Blinko Box tunnel is indeed in Wiltshire; a few miles from where we live. Always look at the tunnel when driving through en route to Bath.

MiniMoon that has to be my favourite so far!

Twelve plus one is an anagram of eleven plus two!
Both add up to thirteen.

I float in a swimming pool
My grandson who is an exceptional competitive swimmer cannot float because his bones are so dense

Back to random facts

Pirates wore earrings because they thought it improved their eyesight

There are 1,710 steps in the Eiffel Tower

Sorry the link is that this is on his golf course.

How do I reply with the name in bold?

A boy! ?

Yesyterday Aberdeenshire Council approved the Trump Organisations plans to build 550 luxury homes at its Aberdeenshire Golf Course. Councillors backed the plans by 38-24.
The Mennie Estate is considered a "national important protected wildlife site", the Scottish Government warned that the surrounding dunes may lose their protected status.
a total of 18 objections were lodged with most focusing on the the environmental impact.
50 of the houses are designated holiday units with the remaining 500 being a mixture of private, rental and holiday homes.

NotSpaghetti, LondonGranny, many thanks for your advice and comments on our business IT systems problems up thread.

It is up and running again now, but very slow at the minute. One of the IT guys has told me the fault was found in a section of the programming going corrupt which "links to the cloud."

I Joked back that it has been raining very heavily here in North Somerset for much of the morning, so there must be a link to the cloud to be found there somewhere. ?

Anyway, we have been told to keep traffic through the system to a minimum, so finance and accounts are the only sections on there at the moment.

The rest of us on the operations side have been managing with our phones pretty well, and have now decided to adjourn to the pub for the rest of the afternoon and make a fresh start in the morning (Saturday). We will class that as having been an advanced planning meeting when we are able to get back on the system. ?

I was only joking about the IT guys in my earlier post as they have been very good really and we have used that particular company for years.

Three out of the four of them who come into us are women these days anyway.

agranbytheendofsummer Congratulations on becoming a gran! Is it a boy or a girl?

Random fact - porcupines float in water.

The area with the most land devoted to golf courses is Woking, Surrey at 11%

Every web site has a different answer about the % of land that is built on. This seems to be the best recent one which throws in a lot more information as well.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297

It contains a table that shows built on land in the four UK countries as follows:

Built on: Farmland: Natural
England. 8.8%. 72.9. 14.5
Scotland. 2.1%. 26.4. 70.7
Wales. 4.2% 59.3. 35.1
N Ireland 3.5% 72.2. 23

The rest is green urban.

I am quite happy about the golf courses, I do not play, but they are green spaces, better than an industrial unit.

lovebeigecardigans1955.
Not forgetting motorways snaking their way through our once green and pleasant land.

btw Y2K aka the Millennium Bug really was a thing. People say it was a lot of guff and everything was fine and it was a big fuss about nothing but it was all hands to the pumps & thousands upon thousands of programmers worked very hard to sort it. He did loads of overtime and we were very flush for a while as a result.

Grandad1943
My husband was a programmer before he retired. One of the most fraught jobs is sticking two systems together. It rarely goes smoothly, in fact you're better off assuming it will take a lot of effort and will fall over many times before it works. I have a feeling that's what caused all the banks systems crashing a while ago. I can't check with him because he's meeting another retired programmer for lunch today.

Grandad1943 - not all IT people... just the ones you have chosen to employ I'm afraid!
Hope it's sorted by now. Good luck.