History of The Middle Finger :

Well, now......here' s something I never knew before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to share this post with my friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified. Isn't history more fun when you know something about it?

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English,proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew" (or "pluck yew").

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird."

IT IS STILL AN APPROPRIATE SALUTE TO THE FRENCH TODAY!
And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing.

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September 1752 :Actually was not a month!!

Have you ever seen the calendar of 1952? If you have noticed you will find that you will fine that
eleven days are wiped off the face of the calender of september 1752.If you go through http://www.timeanddate.com you can see the calendar of that year from where i have pasted this onto my blog . If you are a Linux user then you easily figure it out through following command.
At $ prompt ,type cal 9 1752.
You will get surprise when you see that 11 days have been swept away from the calender.


It is a month with whole of eleven days missing.This was the time when England shifted from Roman Julian calender to the Gregorian calender and the King of England ordered those eleven days to be wiped off the face of the month of September of 1752.What could't a king do in those days and the workers had to work for 11 days less ,but got paid for the entire month.That's how the "Paid Leave" are born.hail the king!!

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Amazing Shoe Trees !!

Yesterday,I was going through my mails and i met really amazing shoe trees. I found it really interesting to keep aware of this fact to all the bloggers.Have u ever imagined that a creepy tree covered with shoes ???? ..Here it is !!

A Shoe tree, not to be confused with the shoe-preservation device of the same name, is a tree or, occasionally, a powerline pole or other wooden object that has been festooned with old shoes. Shoe trees are generally located alongside a major local thoroughfare, and may have a theme such as high heeled shoes. There are currently at least seventy-six such shoe trees in the United States, and an undetermined number elsewhere . Shoe Trees may be the greatest embodiment of the American Spirit you can find on the highway (free of admission charge, anyway)

The Shoe Tree in Beaver, Arkansas was on the road to Beaver Dam, a few miles from Dinosaur World . It was mysteriously chosen, one of many thousands of trees and woods lining an otherwise featureless highway. Hundreds of old sneakers and running shoes dangled, some over 30 feet off the ground.

A shrunken old desert tree near Vidal, California , on Hwy 62 northest of the junction with Route 177, bore both shoes and a variety of shirts -- until some maniac burned it down in 2004.

On Highway 50 near Middlegate , Nevada , a lone cottonwood stands, clotted with hundreds of shoes. One tipster tells us the first pair was thrown during a wedding night argument by a young couple; later, their children's shoes were added to the bough. Whatever its origins, the tree now seems to suck up all the discarded footwear in the county.

The original Mud Flat Shoe Tree south of Altura, California was cut down in 1993, but second generation Shoe Trees sprouted along Highway 395.

One of them, the Ravendale shoe tree , features scores of sneaker pairs dangling from branches, a strange ritual by bored locals. Not a fully developed shoe tree, but far from anywhere .

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A "jogging flower" creeping away from trouble:

The humble sea lily (Endoxocrinus parrae) is an ocean animal closely related to the starfish, sea cucumber and sea urchin. With a ring of feathery fingers and a stalk 50 centimeters long, it resembles an ocean garden flower. And it has a sophisticated method for avoiding danger as caught in the video after the jump which shows a sea lily crawling slowly across the ocean floor on its fingers, dragging its broken stem behind it.The video was discovered by Tomasz Baumiller of the University of Michigan and Charles Messing of Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Center in Florida, both in the US, from archive footage captured over the last decade. It was presented at a meeting of the Geological Society of America on 16 October.


Other footage and photographs captured suggest that the sea lily makes its ocean floor dash to escape the attentions of sea urchins, which have been seen lurking on the sea bed behind the traveling sea lilies – "It's the lizard's tail strategy", Baumiller says. "The sea lily just leaves the stalk end behind. The sea urchin is preoccupied going after that, and the sea lily crawls away."

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