What have you learned this week that you did not know last week?

I always listen to NPR on my way to work, so I (know if I’m on track to be on time if I hear this at 4 minutes before I have to clock in) love Thayne Maynard, the 90 second naturalist.

My favorite bit of knowledge was about nurturing male spiders. They guard the clutch of eggs and females come to them to lay more eggs. The nice guy gets more action in that world.

Yesterday, I stumbled across this news article about a father accidentally cutting off his daughter’s feet with a lawnmower. The article made some claims about mower-related injuries and deaths that were rather surprising.
– 600 children undergo lawn mower-related amputations per year.
– 75 people are killed (1 in 5 are children) by lawn mowers per year.

I’m not sure if these stats are accurate. If they are, this is one of those things that I had absolutely no idea happens. If someone had made me guess (prior to reading the article), I would have assumed that maybe 3 children total (as in all-time) may have had to deal with lawn mower-related amputations.

Not to make light of this, but it makes me wonder what other stats I would be surprised by.

HOV lanes are awesome.

That the current market value of my house has dropped and its tax evaluation has increased. I was happier when I knew neither fact.

I learned the term mondegreen which is a word coined to mean misheard lyrics such as “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.”

Cyprus needs an additional 6 billion euros in order to avoid bankruptcy.

T-Mobile sells iPhones now! Gonna go see about getting one today!

Food stamps, pop and jammies are a dangerous combination.

Since Maggie Thatchers passing at the beginning of the week I have rediscovered my interest in politics and learnt quite few new things and re-learnt things I had forgotten!

That the creepy calls coming from up the hill in the cemetery behind my new house are those of a fox calling out, probably seeking a he or she fox since it is breeding season. lol
I listened to a bunch of animal calls online and was able to identify the cemetery demon as Fox. It is the creepiest sound I have ever heard and funny, considering that I just moved to the edge of town after being in the woods for years and had never heard this sound before.

There was also a Mountain Lion sighting in the cemetery a few weeks ago.
Really, I may not be on 5 acres anymore but the wildlife is still just as wild here on the edge of town in these hills.

I’ve learned some of your first names here & plan on using some of them from now on :-)

@tom_g That’s concerning since only at the weekend I said to my boyfriend “go and cut the grass, you can’t do too much harm to yourself by cutting the grass!”

Until this week, both Jonathon Winters and Margaret Thatcher were still alive. I thought they both passed long ago.
Also, the double slit experiment in quantum physics. What a mind fuck!

@ucme That’s fine by me, Al! ;)

@WillWorkForChocolate Well allrighty then, Abby it is :-)

@rojo- no fair! I listen to Am Family radio for more than a minute, I just get disgusted. I can’t ever stand it enough to laugh!
I learned (courtesy of the Huff Post) that, according to Steve Stockman’s bumper sticker that “If Babies Had Guns They Wouldn’t Be Aborted.”

That it was a cytokine storm (hypercytokinemia) that made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly to young healthy adults compared to the flu’s normal victims, the very young and the elderly.

That one can be throwing up and have diarrhea at the same exact time… : (

@yankeetooter Where I live, that’s called “goin’ at both ends.” Happened to me once, with severe food poisoning. It sucks.

I still don’t know if I had a virus, or food poisoning…but except for the one time I got pneumonia, it was the sickest I have ever been…

Well, I hope you’re all better, now!

I am, thanks…just in time to be super stressed out at my job.

:-( @yankeetooter. Sounds like the tooting was quite unpleasant! I’ve had the same problem when I had food poisoning. Just horrible. Glad you feel better.

The SO and I spent last week in Istanbul, Turkey. There is so much history there that I never knew existed. It’s generated a desire for learning more.

You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might get what you need.

A Rolling Stone gathers more paychecks.

@Bellatrix… I’m better now…and I’m sure stress made it worse, but thank you.