J is for... well, things beginning with J

I'll admit it. I had trouble finding something to blog about on this letter. So of course I went in search of inspiration to the interweb and found out some stuff that I have decided to share with you. It's slightly lazy, but useless information is what I thrive on. So there.




The collective noun for jellyfish is a smack. How on earth they decided that I have no idea. The mind boggles.

Saint Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of jugglers. I'm guessing that being "the Hospitaller" means that he wasn't very good at it.

John Cougar Mellencamp isn't his real name. The cougar part was invented by a british promoter to try and make him sound exotic when trying to book him in UK clubs. John Mellencamp hates it.

The J in Michael J Fox stands for nothing at all. He was born Michael Andrew Fox and inserted the J to differentiate between him and another actor called Michael Fox.

The Jalapeno is a hot pepper, though not the hottest. It measures 4 on the Scoville scale. Mr Scoville was a man who had nothing better to do with his time than to invent a scale to measure the heat of peppers. The method evaluates how many parts of sugar water it takes to neutralize the heat. I bet he was a laugh riot to be around. Incidentally, the hottest chilli pepper is Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper that rates a 10. Surely you can go firstly; "That's nice to eat. Spicy!" to: "Blimey! That's a bit of a temperature!" to "Excuse me, where is the nearest blast furnace. I need to put my head in it to cool down."

The programming language Java is not so called due to enormous ingestions of coffee by the code writers while working on it as the internet legend has let everyone believe. It was originally called Oak, but someone had already copyrighted the term. So, the boring truth is Sun Microsystems head honchos had a big meeting and the name came out of that. They wanted it to sound "dynamic" and "full of life". I prefer the coffee story.

Java has a mascot called Duke. It isn't even a happy animated cup of coffee. It's a black and white animated triangle with a red nose. I don't know why either.

So it seems that the J truth is out there. It's a shame that the J truth is boring though.

Rocco's Random Number is 10 today and that takes you to Chase Manhattans Blogs. Which is a pretty cool place. Go there and marvel at the universe.

Rock on,

W.