A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

Antarctic ice core sample. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. February 2012.

Sunday Top Five and this week I am mythbusting. Thus, I present My Top Five Common Misconceptions That Both Get My Goat And Frustrate Me Inordinately (This Week)!

Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. Proven. Done. And. Dusted. Double-blind trials people. There is no difference in behavior between children given sugar-full or sugar-free diets. This is true even in those studies specifically looking at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or those considered sensitive to sugar. So please, other parents, stop saying this over and over and over and over again. Your kids behaviour has more to do with getting hyped up by other kids at the party than it does with the fairy bread...

Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Actually, he was a little bit taller than the average Frenchman. of his time. He actually stood 168.6 centimetres tall (5 feet 6 inches). The average height in the eighteenth century was something like 5 feet 5.5 inches. Napoleon actually stood an inch taller than current French President Nicolas Sarkozy...

Bulls are not fussed by the colour red. Cattle are dichromats, that is, red does not stand out as a bright colour. It's the dicking about by the matadors that irritates the bull and gets it to charge.

Eating before swimming does not increase the risk of experiencing muscle cramps. There is no evidence linking stomach cramps and the consumption of food prior to swimming. Now, there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and drowning, but did you really need to be told that...?

Vikings did not have horns on their helmets. There is no known archaeological evidence that Vikings ever wore them. Now, there are some clues that priests adorned their hats with this kind of gear, but even then it was rare.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Some good mythbusting! I love posts like this!

Thanks for coming by my place as well...

19 March 2012 at 06:02

Roddy said…

For a brief moment I thought it was someones DNA, or the tapes inside a printer.

20 March 2012 at 19:33

Kris McCracken said…

No problemo!

Roddy, kind of like DNA, only ice.

25 March 2012 at 16:44

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

This will hurt me...

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