Damn it, I said sexy FEMALE ninja assassins!
Ahoy-hoy! Welcome to Trivia Tuesday, which is a weekly blog post where we see how far the rabbit hole of knowledge really goes.
I can’t help but be slightly aroused by the previous sentence. Go ahead and read it over again, out loud, and in a sexy voice. I’ll wait.
All done? Then here we go.
Sexy Japanese Female Assassins
Called Kuno-ichi, Japanese femme fatales were not just a fearsome bunch, but manipulative too. Disguised as geisha, prostitutes, fortune-tellers or entertainers they could get right in close to their targets, much easier than their male counterparts. It was because of this that their training often focused more on disguises and poisons and using their feminine wiles to their advantage rather than on outright fighting, which isn’t to say that they were not capable in that area as well. They could break bones with their wooden shoes and put hidden blades in their fans. They would even use an umbrella as a weapon or shield if the situation called for it.
The Kuno-ichi rarely needed to resort to using swords or shuriken, instead they would use their natural attractiveness to lure their targets into sexual entrapment, which is like regular entrapment, but sexier. The word Assassin, by the way, was invented by William Shakespeare.*
Found Guilty of Being Australian
In 1954, a fellow named Bob Hawke was added to the Guinness book of world records for being able to drink 2 and a half pints of beer in 11 seconds. Which is quite a feat and an excellent party trick, I think, and probably made him a pretty popular guy, because he later on became the Prime Minister of Australia.
It’s fairly well known that Australia was founded as a British penal colony (in fact it has been recorded that 22% of non-aboriginal Aussies have at least one convict ancestor), but it should be noted that you didn’t get sent to Australia for serious crimes like rape or murder or impersonating an Egyptian (which was a serious offense back then), those people were put to death in Jolly Old England, and people who committed lesser offenses were sent to Australia because the English believed that the best way to lower the crime rate was to simply export all the criminals.
Some of the lesser offenses that could land an Englishman a vacation to Sydney include: recommending that politicians be paid (the nerve!), starting a union, stealing fish from a river or pond, receiving or buying stolen goods, or being suspected of supporting Irish terrorism. Who’d have thought that stealing a fish from the river and being in cahoots with terrorists would merit the same punishment, but there you go, that’s what you get for thinking.
Da Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa, that famed painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, was, like Rome, not made in a day. From the start of the painting to the final brushstroke, it took Da Vinci a span of 16 years to complete it; he began working on it in 1503 and carried it with him when he emigrated to France in 1516 and finished it three years later in 1519 shortly before his death. However, only around 4 of those years, it is said, were spent actively working on the painting. There is reason to believe that much of this time was spent working on and pondering over that most famous aspect of the Mona Lisa: her lips.
Although currently residing at the Louvre in Paris, France, the Mona Lisa has had a number of homes, most notably the bedroom of Napoleon Bonaparte. What’s more, the advent of X-ray technology has shown us that there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one. None of them, unfortunately, are nude.
* – Not really. The word “assassin”, as Speedicut has pointed out to me, comes from the Arabic word for “hash”, which everyone knows means “to work out”. Assassins are known far and wide for their physical fitness and that’s where we get their name.
…
Well that wraps up Tuesday Trivia! Did you like it? Hate it? Comments below will be happily answered or roundly mocked, your choice.
Tags: australia, davinci, drinking, kuno-ichi, mona lisa, sexy japanese assassins, Trivia Tuesday
