» Weird Traditions

Oldest educational institution in England
so we are inevitably going to have thousands of stupid traditions. A few crackers are:

Every 100 years, the fellows of All Souls have to chase a wooden duck around the quad and sing a silly song about it.

Every year, when daylight savings time is applied, everyone at Merton has to dress up in sub fusc and walk backwards round the main quad drinking port, in order to preserve the space/time continuum, or something

Christ Church has its own time zone, 5 minutes ahead of the rest of the country

Come May Day, just about everyone in the universtiy goes down to Magdalen bridge, gets stupidly drunk, and breaks both legs jumping off into 3 feet of filthy water.

All this from arguably the greatest university in the country. I dread to think what madness the filthy tabs get up to.
(Thu 28th Jul 2005, 14:43, More)

» Useless Information

...
actually, the word "vagina" comes from the latin for scabbard. And Chaucer's spelling of cunt as "quaint" was just him: nobody could spell back then; the later meaing/spelling of quaint is just coincidence. And the posh one is bollocks too: it's actually a derivation for the gipsy word for pocket; posh people having deep pockets and short arms, dontchaknow.

And one of my own... bugger, i can't actually think of anything which i know to be true which people will be interested to hear. I guess i'm just a bit of a killjoy. Aah, sod it, here's one which is thoroughly uninteresting: whether or not you can roll your tongue is determined by a recessive but common gene. That is to say that some people simply cannot roll their tongue, and never shall be able to. There is a theory that this is owing to, at some point in the past of our species, some kind of cross-breeding with another species of ape for which the ability to form a tube with its tongue was an advantage; probably something to do with sucking ants off of trees.
(Wed 23rd Mar 2005, 1:12, More)

» Useless Information

more annoyance
And i feel compelled to debunk this banana rubbish: the plant they grow on is a shrub, not a tree (as it doesn't have a woody stem), but the fruit is still a fruit, dammit! Strawberries aren't (proper) fruits, however (seeds are on the outside, and they're formed from the wrong bit of the flower), but raspberries (is that the only word with a p followed immeditaely by a b?) are, and so are bananas and tomatoes and cucumbers and pumpkins and all kinds of other things. It doesn't have to grow on a tree to be a fruit.

*edit* And Thomas Crapper didn't invent the flushing toilet, he merely updated (and popularised) it; and moreover, his name was a coincidence, since the word "crap" had been around long before.
(Wed 23rd Mar 2005, 1:37, More)

» World's Most Hated Food

not sure there's anything i dislike that nobody else does, but
i can't stand:
prawns
rice pudding
hershey's "chocolate" (although thankfully i'm a brit, and so have only tried it once when a friend brought it back from holiday. says something about it that i still remember how ill i felt.)
liver, kidneys, frankfurters (you get the picture here, no?)
vinagar
mayonaise, unless sufficiently masked by the sweet taste of bacon in my blt. why would anyone willing dip things in stuff that smells like rotten eggs?
marrow. yes, the vegetable, not the stuff in bones... well, that too. courgettes as well. just don't like the flavour.
fish, but only if it looks like a fish. same for poultry and stuff looking like birds. this one's probably freakishly psychotic, but what the hell, that's how i am.
(Mon 12th Jul 2004, 15:20, More)