The useless bits of info to see if we can make a million posts thread

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Dirty Harry's badge number is 2211.

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The first fossilized specimen of Austalopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the palentologists' favorite song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, by the Beatles

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The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes onstage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.

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Mata Hari, who was executed by firing squad in France in October, 1917, is probably the most famous spy of all time. Yet in fact she was not Oriental, or even a spy. Mata Hari was the stage name adopted by a plump, middle-aged Dutch divorcee named Margaretha McLeod who had left her alcoholic Scottish husband and opted to become a dancer in Europe.
The evidence of her alleged espionage on behalf of the German Kaiser is based merely on her being mistaken for a known German agent, Clara Benedix, by the British in November 1916. She was arrested and released by police when they realized the mistake. She was later arrested in France and charged with having been in contact with German intelligence officers in Madrid. At her trial in Paris her lurid lifestyle was used to damning effect. It was only in 1963, when secret files relating to her case were released, that the legend was reassessed.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his famous poem "Kubla Khan" directly from a dream. He was in the midst of writing down the visions he had seen in his dream when someone knocked on the door and he rose to let him in. On returning to his work, Coleridge found that he could not remember the rest of the dream. That is why "kubla Khan" remains unfinished.

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Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engles, "I do not trust any Russian. As soon as a Russian worms his way in, all hell breaks loose

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The Earl of Condom was a knighted personal physician to England's King Charles II in the mid-1600's. The Earl was requested to produce a method to protect the King from syphillis.(Charles the II's pleasure-loving nature was notorious.). The result should be obvious.

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The "R" in Author Dean R. Koontz's name stands for Ray.

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Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous trans Atlantic flight.

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Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.

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Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.

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The woman who has appeared most on the covers of Time magazine is the Virgin Mary -- ten times.

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Samuel Clemens's pseudonym "Mark Twain" was the nickname of a riverboat pilot about whom Clemens wrote a needless nasty satirical piece. Apparently, Clemens felt guilt later and adopted the name as a nom de plume as some sort of expiation. The phrase does not mean measuring the depth of the river; it means a specific depth, to wit, two fathoms (twelve feet.)

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2800 . . . .

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And onward we go into the never never . . .