Why the ocean liner Queen Mary was known as the 'Grey Ghost' in WW2 and other #FridayFunFacts
A very warm welcome to this week's edition of #FridayFunFacts.
Let's get straight to it.
Ever experienced that sharp pain in your head when eating something that's too cold? Well. There's a word for that and it's called Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. Good luck pronouncing it!
Running a marathon (26 miles) is an impressive feat. Even more impressive is achieving a similar distance through water. More than 1,800 individual swimmers have completed the 21 mile stretch across the English Channel. In 1988, Tom Gregory became the youngest person to swim the distance aged just 11 years old! The oldest person to swim the channel was the South African, Otto Thaning, who was 73 when he completed this rather impressive feat.
During WW2 ocean liners played an important role in transporting troops quickly and safely across international waters. The Queen Mary was painted battleship grey for protection and safely carried more than three quarters of a million military personnel around the world. Known during this period as the 'Grey Ghost', each cabin (originally designed for just two people) was converted to house twenty soldiers.
Q. What's worse than one cockroach? A. An army of them. However, the correct collective noun for a group of cockroaches is an invasion. How appropriate!
Getting to the moon in the early 1960s was one of the defining moments of the 20th Century. It required the greatest minds working with the latest technology to achieve something that was considered impossible not that many years earlier. Today, the smartphone in your pocket now has more computing power than all of NASA did in 1969. Wowzers!
