Dual Role in Bollywood

tTe 1952 film Anhonee, had Nargis enacting a dual role, and also marked the first occasion in Bollywood where an actor was cast in such a role.

Smoking of Fish

The smoking of fish was originally performed as a method of food preservation that would keep fish edible for more than a year. The availability of refrigeration and freezing, now a days, has changed the primary purpose of smoking to enhancing the flavour of the fish.

Rochdale Town Hall

It is thought that Rochdale Town Hall in Greater Manchester,  was so admired by Adolf Hitler that he wanted to ship it, brick-by-brick, to Nazi Germany had the UK been defeated in World War II.

Otto Weiß

Otto Weiß was the first Luftwaffe attack aircraft pilot to receive the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.

Jesse L Brown

Jesse L. Brown (1926–1950) was the first African-American naval aviator in the United States Navy, and the first naval officer killed in the Korean War.

Counting Cows

A farmer named Sid was overseeing his stock in a remote moorland pasture in North Yorkshire when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the farmer, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

Sid looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing stock and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the farmer and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Sid.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the back of his car.

Then Sid says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Member of Parliament", says Sid.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the farmer. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of pounds worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a flock of sheep. ...

Now give me back my dog!

YKK

"YKK" on zippers stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, the name of the Japanese company manufacturing them. The letters were stamped onto products and eventually became the trademark and official name of the company.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen literally means "people's car." Adolf Hitler initially came up with the idea for "cars for the masses," which would be a state-sponsored Volkswagen program. Hitler wanted to create a more affordable car that was able to transport two adults and three children at speeds of 62 mph. He choose the car manufacturer Porsche to carry out the project, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Reebok

Reebok is an alternate spelling of rhebok, an African antelope. The company founders found the word in a South African a dictionary won by Joe Foster, son of the Reebok founder J.W. Foster.

Canon

Canon was founded in 1933 under the name Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory. Two years later it adopted "Canon" after the company's first camera, the Kwanon. Kwanon is the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisatva of mercy.

Hotmail

Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith had the idea of checking their e-mail on a web interface, and tried to find a name that ended in "mail." They finally settled on "hotmail" because it contained the letters html, referencing the HTML programming language used to help create the product.

Rolls-Royce

During the First World War Rolls-Royce made rifles.

Nike Swoosh Logo

The Nike corporate logo design has successfully grown into being one of the most influential and recognizable insignia throughout the world. Amazingly, in 1972, Nike CEO Phil Knight wrote a $35 check to Carolyn Davidson, a Portland State University student, to design the “Swoosh” logo.

At the time, he wasn’t very impressed with her creation, saying back then that he’d “get used” to the design. By 1983, Knight warmed up to the now iconic design and invited her to a company lunch. There, he presented her with a diamond ring engraved with the swoosh, and an undisclosed amount of Nike stock.

Flag of Paraguay

The flag of Paraguay was adopted in 1842. It is the only national flag with different emblems on its obverse and reverse sides.

Each side of the flag consists of three equal, horizontal bands: red, white, and blue, with an emblem centered in the white band.

The emblem on the obverse side is the national coat of arms of Paraguay: a yellow five-pointed star surrounded by a green wreath capped by the words REPUBLICA DEL PARAGUAY -"Republic of Paraguay", all within two concentric circles;

The emblem on the reverse side is the seal of the treasury, a yellow lion below a red Phrygian cap and the words Paz y Justicia - "Peace and Justice" capped by REPUBLICA DEL PARAGUAY, again within two circles.

Oldest Olympian ever

The oldest Olympian ever was Oscar Swahn, a Swedish shooter in the 1920 Antwerp, Belgium, Olympics. He was 72.

First Chinese Olympic Medal

Xu Haifeng, who won gold in the 50 meter pistol event in the Los Angeles Olympics, was the first medal won by China in Olympics.

BMW Models

You certainly know that most BMW cars have codes - E21, E30, E36, E39, E32, E12... So, what's with this E in the models?

BMW does not use automobile platforms like any other manufactures, instead, each generation has a development code - Entwicklungsnummeren,

E = Entwicklung = Development

NokiaName Origination

The name of the town of Nokia originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river, Nokianvirta, was named after the old Finnish word originally meaning Pine Marten.

Project Habbakuk

A secret Second World War program, called Project Habbakuk, was proposed by the British to manufacture icebergs for use as unsinkable aircraft carriers. The idea was to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete, a mixture of wood pulp and ice, for use against German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic, which were beyond the flight range of land-based planes at that time. The idea came from Geoffrey Pyke who worked for Combined Operations.

In the 15 April 2009 episode of Mythbusters, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage built a small boat out of a modified formulation of Pykrete. using newspaper instead of wood pulp. They successfully piloted the boat in Alaskan waters at a speed of 25 miles per hour. Based on this success, they determined that it is possible to build a boat out of Pykrete. They also determined that Pykrete lived up to its purported properties of being bulletproof, stronger than ice, and taking longer to melt than ice. However, they expressed doubt that an aircraft carrier made of Pykrete could have survived long.

In September 2010, the BBC programme Bang Goes The Theory also attempted to recreate a Pykrete boat. A hull using 5,000 kg of hemp fibre Pykrete was frozen in a cold-store, then launched in Portsmouth harbour for a planned trip across the Solent to Cowes. The hull began to melt almost immediately; after an hour it had taken on enough water to cause it to capsize before they could even leave the harbour.