Things I learned lately 3 December

• Omicron is a Greek letter.
  
  
  
• The entire Canadian House of Commons voted to pass the bill banning conversion therapy. All parties. Unanimous. Bravo.
• Keanu Reeves has done 68 movies in his 35 year career so far.
• Container ships sometimes have to drop anchor just offshore for a longer period than it took to cross the ocean, waiting for a berth at a west coast port.
• It costs about $1000 to ship a 20 foot container across the ocean from Asia to North America. An average sized container ship can carry 13,000 containers.
• If you watch a lot of old cartoons, you would notice a lot of the main characters are always wearing neckties or neck collars that are always covering their necks and disconnecting their head from their body. That is by design. In the 1960s the iconic duo Hanna-Barbera were cranking out 6 hours of cartoon television every single week to over 300 million viewers around the globe. But the studio's budget kept shrinking, which threatened the entire hand-drawn animation industry. In a stroke of genius, they came up with a new technique that reduced the animation effort by 7000%. By giving characters something to wear around their necks, it meant that animators could keep the same body position and only animate the head while it was moving and talking, which not only meant that the frames required for a 7 min cartoon were reduced from 14000 to 2000, but this move is credited with saving the animation industry.
• In Italy bars are starting to use pasta as straws to reduce plastic use.
• Adjectives in English have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose-Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order, in the slightest, you'll sound like a maniac. This is why green great dragons can't exist.
• The inventor of the Murphy Bed, William Lawrence Murphy (1856-1957), created his first hide-away bed as means to convert his one-room apartment into a parlour, specifically to host the company of his future wife. It was considered inappropriate at the time to for a woman to enter a man's bedroom.
• The government knows exactly how much salary you got paid in a calendar year, unless you worked under the table. They could very easily just figure out what you paid in tax and decide whether you owe or not. If you have deductions they don't know about, you send in an amendment. This is done in other parts of the world.