Stump Me Questions Answered in March 2002

Can't get any shorter than that.  I imagine there are others that start out with one word sentences, but I think this one will do.

After cutting the tube open, I discovered the incredible secret that GlaxoSmithKline was trying to hide from me: the three colors have a thin plastic lining between them .  These barriers stop just before the nozzle, which is probably why you never noticed them before.

2)  Canada.

2)  Mustafa Kemal Atattirk was a regular officer of the Ottoman Army before the war of Dardanels.  His success at the south east at Syria had earned him the name "Desert Lion," but his victory at Dardanels was one of the major steps of Atattirk's career.

3)  The short answer is that we still don't know.  But we do know that even thinking about yawning can make you yawn.  Even babies only 5 minutes old yawn.  You're more likely to yawn just after you've woken up, just before you go to sleep, or if you see someone else yawning.  But why do people yawn?

According to Dr. Karl S. Kruszelnicki, people are most likely to yawn in the first hour after they've woken up, in that last hour before they go to sleep, or when they're tired, bored, or doing long boring repetitive tasks.  If you smile, you'll probably get a few people to smile back.  But yawn and the whole room yawns with you.

We know that hoosier came into general usage in the 1830s.  John Finley of Richmond wrote a poem, "The Hoosier's Nest," which was used as the "Carrier's Address" of the Indianapolis Journal, Jan. 1, 1833.  Finley originally wrote Hoosier as "Hoosher."  A few days later, on Jan. 8, 1833, at the Jackson Day dinner in Indianapolis, John W. Davis offered "The Hoosher State of Indiana" as a toast. And in August, former Indiana Gov. James B. Ray announced that he intended to publish a newspaper, The Hoosier, at Greencastle, Indiana.

Many have inquired into the origin of Hoosier.  But by all odds the most serious student of the matter was Jacob Piatt Dunn, Jr., Indiana historian and longtime secretary of the IHS.  Dunn noted that "hoosier" was frequently used in many parts of the South in the 19th century for woodsmen or rough hill people.  He traced the word back to "hoozer," in the Cumberland dialect of England.  This derives from the Anglo-Saxon word "hoo" meaning high or hill. In the Cumberland dialect, the world "hoozer" meant anything unusually large, presumably like a hill (immigrants from Cumberland, England, settled in the southern mountains).

To go even further, they're not even sure she died in her bedroom.  The body was stretched out flat, which is not a typical position for a person who had overdosed on barbiturates.  I won't even go into the other details...there's too damn many of them.

Outlook Good 
Outlook Not So Good 
My Reply Is No 
Don't Count On It 
You May Rely On It 
Ask Again Later 
Most Likely 
Cannot Predict Now 
Yes 
Yes Definately 
Better Not Tell You Now 
It Is Certain 
Very Doubtful 
It Is Decidedly So 
Concentrate and Ask Again 
Signs Point to Yes 
My Sources Say No 
Without a Doubt 
Reply Hazy, Try Again 
As I See It, Yes

By the way, apparently there are a lot of sites out there that specialize in dismantling a Magic Eight Ball.

Just because zebras are not domesticated like horses does not mean they are "untrainable."  It's possible that this is the case because zebras have a totally different social structure in the wild than horses.  The social structure of zebra herds also varies between species. In working with zebra and zebra hybrids, an advantage can be gained through the re-socialization process of raising them around mannerly, well trained equines.  In time, animals will adapt to their environment and become more like the animals they herd with.  In a controlled environment, a zebra in a horse herd eventually becomes more like a horse.

A.:  This is my most frequently asked question.  Actually, angry and hungry are the only two words in common use ending in -gry, but there are two more answers: 1) anhungry, an obscure word meaning an extreme state of hunger, and 2) gry, which is a now obsolete unit of measurement that is equal to 0.008 inch. Gry is the answer to that annoying trivia e-mail that gets passed around all the time.

The first box of Crayola crayons was produced in 1903 as an 8 count box. It sold for a nickel and contained the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown and black.

"Dr. Neilson, a keen student of Scottish history and literature, discovered a passage in the works of John Knox which, shorn of the eccentricities of sixteenth-century spelling, reads as follows: 'One among many comes to the East Port (i.e., gate) of Leith, where lay two great pieces of ordnance, and where their enemies were known to be, and cried to his fellows that were at the gate making defence: "Ware Before!" and so fires one great piece, and thereafter the other.' The cry of 'Beware before' -- Look out in front -- was, of course, the signal for the defenders of the gate to drop to the ground in order that the guns might be fired over them.

The situation is not dissimilar to that of the golfer intending to drive over the head of someone on the fairway in front, and the way in which the military signal 'Ware before!' might in the course of time be cut down to "Fore!" needs no explaining. 'Look out in front!' It is the most democratic of shouts, which no one dares to let pass unheeded. During an Open Championship at Sandwich many summers ago, I saw a future King of England scurrying apologetically off the fairway in response to a distant bellow of "Fore!" from one of our less distinguished professionals."

"Rank" and "file" are military terms: a rank is a line of men side by side, and a file is a line of men one behind the other. Arranged as a platoon or a company in a formal setting, the enlisted men line up in ranks and files; the officers are separate. As Robert Burns wrote in 1784: "The words come skelpan [galloping], rank and file."