EDITORIAL Christmas conversation helpers

This is an edition version of an editorial that first appeared in the Dec. 12, 2012 print edition of The Citizen:

Heading into another Christmas party and unsure how to keep the conversation going once “got the tree up yet?” “presents all bought?” and “what’s your New Year’s resolution going to be?” are exhausted? Have no fear. Here’s some conversation starters (or killers, depending on your point of view) to help you get through a long meal with the family.

Without further ado, a random collection of rare and obscure facts about the world:

- Lego comes from the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which means “play well” in English. - Jenga is the word in Swahili for “build.” - Tonka comes from “tanka,” the Dakota Sioux word for “great” or “big.” The Tonka trucks were invented in Minnesota in 1947.

- The model for Barbie inventor Ruth Handler was a doll sold to German men in the early 1950s.

- The artificially broad shoulders, ridicu- lous bust and tiny waist of Barbie dolls are there to hold the clothes up high, otherwise they’d just sag at the hips (the clothes, not the bust) if Barbie had the proportions of an average woman.

- The word Crayola comes from combining “craie” and “ola,” the French words for chalk and oily.

- In the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers where Viggo Mortenson (Aragorn) kicks the orc helmet in anger because he thinks Merry and Pippin are dead, he broke his toe. The scream and the falling to his knees were not in the script.

- It’s impossible to fold the same piece of paper in half more than 7 times.

- Hawaii residents eat more Spam per capita than anyone else in the world. Spam musubi is a popular Hawaiian snack. It’s a hunk of grilled spam on top of a little rice and wrapped with nori (dried seawood) in the Japanese style.

- A mondegreen is the word used to describe the misinterpretation of a song lyric, as in “excuse me while I kiss this guy” and “Oh, Canada, we stand on cars and freeze.”

- William Moulton Marston is best known for his two inventions: the blood pressure test used as part of the polygraph lie-detector and the comic book heroine Wonder Woman.

- Brad Pitt turned 54 on Monday. If the acting career doesn’t work out, he could go back to the University of Missouri and finish his journalism degree. He’s only a couple credits short.

- With all the fuss this year in the United States about tearing down monuments to Confederate leaders, here’s a little-known fact. There are more parks, schools, streets and other civic facilities named after Nathan Bedford Forrest than after any other American, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Forrest was a Confederate general during the Civil War and, after that conflict, he went on to found the Ku Klux Klan.

- Here’s one for Citizen staff Dana Young to bring up with her son Jared, drafted by the Chicago Cubs this year: a 95-mile-an- hour fastball covers the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate faster than the blink of an eye. For the last 15 feet of that pitch, the ball is traveling so fast that the eye and the brain can’t keep up, making the ball invisible to the batter (who has already started swinging the bat, anyway, in hopes of making contact). Also, there is no such thing as a “rising” fastball but it appears that way to a hitter who expects gravity to affect the ball more than it does on its way from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt.

- Some kinds of bamboo can grow up to an inch per day. As a result, it was used to torture prisoners to death in China by planting a stock and then laying some poor sod on top. Not even a grown man’s weight can stop it from pushing through, slowly, inexorably, causing a painful death, not unlike those awkward conversations at Christmas gatherings.

— Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout