Fun Fact File Day!!!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, welcome to another fun fact file day when the fasab archives are opened up to reveal a startling array of random facts that you probably didn’t know and didn’t need to.

But here they are anyhow.

I hope you enjoy.

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did you know2

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During your lifetime,

you will eat about 60,000 pounds of food,

that’s the weight of about 6 elephants.

Cartoon Elephant Clip Art

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Einstein couldn’t speak fluently when he was nine.

His parents thought he might be retarded.

But he turned out to be relatively smart!

Young_Einstein

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Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island had a first name

that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show.

His first name was Willy.

The skipper’s real name on Gilligan’s Island is Jonas Grumby.

It was mentioned once in the first episode

on their radio’s newscast about the wreck.

gilligans-island-320

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If you toss a penny 10,000 times,

it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950.

The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.

Lincoln_Penny_Obverse

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In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa

completely out of toast.

toastier-lisa

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Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.

(But only when you really surprise them!)

penguin jump

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The average bank teller loses about $250 every year.

The average bank CEO loses at least $1 billion – and gets a bonus for doing it!)

bank teller

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The Earth weighs around

6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

atlas

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The name for Oz in the “Wizard of Oz”

was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum,

looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z,

hence “Oz.”

2 drawer filing cabinet

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The reason firehouses have circular stairways

is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses.

The horses were stabled on the ground floor

and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

firehouse stairs

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The Sanskrit word for “war” means “desire for more cows.”

cartoon-dairy-cows

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The word “Checkmate” in chess

comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,”

which means “the king is dead”.

checkmate

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The word “modem” is a contraction

of the words “modulate, demodulate.”

(MOdulate DEModulate)

modem

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Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor,

was afraid of the dark.

Thomas Edison

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Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey.

eggplant

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Wilma Flintstone’s maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal,

and Betty Rubble’s maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.

betty_wilma2

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Mars is the home of Olympus Mons,

the largest known volcano in our solar system

Olympus Mons v Everest
Size comparison – Olympus Mons v Everest

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There are six million parts in the Boeing 747-400.

Landing-of-a-Boeing-747-400

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Japanese research has concluded that

moderate drinking can boost IQ levels

(Sometimes you just know when scientific results are accurate.)

Drinks-4

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In 1960 there were 16,067 gambling slots in Nevada.

By the end of the century, 1999, this number rose to 205,726 slots

which would be one slot for every 10 people residing there.

slot machines

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Feeble Fallout From Facebook’s Financial Floatation Flop

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Remember this post from way back towards the end of May 2012?

 Furious Flabbergasted Facebook Fools Face Frightening Falls From Fanciful Flagging Financial Flotation Farce. 

As well as being the biggest F’ing title ever seen on a WordPress blog, it drew attention to the debacle that was the much heralded launch of Facebook shares on the stock market.

facebook ipo

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Well, the fallout from what is now being called the IPOcalypse continues.

The head honcho at Nasdaq has had his CEO’s bonus slashed because of it, and rightly so.

But don’t start feeling sorry him just yet. Even with a slash he will still be taking home a $1.3m bonus, slightly north of half a million dollars lighter than it would have been, but still enough to get by on.

Oh yes, and that’s bonus on top of his $1 million salary!

Others at Nasdaq have also been penalized, including Anna Ewing, VP in charge of “technical glitches” that messed up the first day of trading. Her bonus was cut by over a quarter of a million dollars. But keep those hankies where they are, she is still left with a $574,125 bonus for the year.

Losses for angry brokers and traders from the botched IPO, on the other hand, have been estimated at around $500m. Nasdaq has approved just $62m in compensation, I suppose they needed the rest of their money to pay out the bonuses?

Like the banksters, it all begs the question of just how incompetent do you have to be in the financial industry to not just lose your bonus, but lose your job as well?

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Can Heads That Have No Brains Handle A No-Brainer?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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origin of banksters

Time for another rant about the slime of creation, also known as the banksters.

This blog is about highlighting and fighting against stupidity and bureaucracy and there is no better example of this than the banking industry.

Their stupidity is only matched by their arrogance and their greed.

More than five years on from plunging the world into a financial catastrophe, and all of us into debt that will take generations to sort out, they are still at it!

And the governments are still faffing about, afraid to take on those who bribe them with “contributions” to their election campaigns.

banksters table

For example, the European parliament only reached a “tentative deal” last Wednesday evening to limit bankers’ bonuses at twice the value of their fixed pay. They call it “imposing the toughest limits on pay since the financial crisis”. Gimme strength!!! Of course, the deal, still has to be endorsed formally by governments and lawmakers (i.e., the bureaucrats), and is the result of 18 months of farting around (they call it negotiating).

It’s a start, but a poor and a slow one.

It shows how long it takes for a no-brainer to happen in heads that have no brains!

In timely manner, latest results last week came from Europe, namely the grandly named basket-case Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Lloyds Group, and Spain’s lesser sounding Bankia.

Already more than 80% owned by the British Government (i.e., taxpayers) who stupidly bailed out these idiots to the tune of almost $70 billion, RBoS have announced further losses of around $9 billion!

To make matters worse, $1.6 billion of that was to compensate clients wrongly sold insurance and interest-rate hedging products – which is a nice way of saying they have been caught fleecing their customers and now have to pay back money they cheated their clients out of in the first place.

They called it a “chastening year”.  

Meatime Lloyds chalked up further losses to the tune of more than $2 billion!

And the banksters aren’t any smarter in Spain either. Bankia also this week reported a net loss of €19.06 billion ($25.04 billion) for 2012, by far the largest in Spanish corporate history.

And you know what? Let’s add insult to injury.

These dumb-asses are looking for bonuses for their efforts.

Can you believe it?

banksters bonuses

If someone starts a business and it fails, no one gives them a bonus – they lose their business (usually because the banksters force them to close down).

Just how on earth have we allowed the banking industry to create a culture of stupidity to take hold and remain in place after such clear evidence that it is not working. It is completely absurd.

Hit your sales targets, make money for the company and yes sir you can have a bonus and well deserved. Cost the company $ billions and drive it to bankruptcy because of your incompetence and the only bonus you should get is early parole for good behavior.

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That’s Europe taken care of, can’t go without a word about the American banksters too.

Latest news is that they “have discovered” that they wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 members of the military during the housing crisis and seized homes from about two dozen other borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments,

The banks, namely Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, only found the foreclosures after regulators ordered them to examine mortgages as part of a multibillion-dollar federal settlement. Each bank “discovered” around 200 members of the military whose homes were wrongly foreclosed in 2009 and 2010.

So while military personnel are putting themselves in harm’s way to protect and defend the country, the slime in the banks are busy trying to illegally foreclose on their homes.

Incredible!

Not only do these foreclosures violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a federal law requiring banks to obtain court orders before foreclosing on active-duty members, but they violate every common law of decency.

The sooner governments come to their senses and put these banksters out of business the better and cleaner the country will be.

banksters wrecked the economy

***end rant***

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