Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for September 17, 2021

Preamble? We don’t need no stinking preamble! This one ambles all on its own:

A man encounters a beautiful young woman on a New York pier, weeping. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I vant to go back to Romania,” she tells him. “But I haff no money for passage.”

“This is your lucky day, Miss,” he replies. “It just so happened I work on a ship. Wait ‘til tonight and I’ll smuggle you aboard and hide you in a lifeboat.”

“But how vill I ever repay for your kindness?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of SOMEthing,” he smirks. So at the appointed hour, she comes to the pier, and he stealthily brings her aboard, hiding her inside a lifeboat. The days pass, and when night falls, he brings her food and drink…and takes full advantage of her nubile charms, night after night.

After about a month, the ship’s captain is strolling the deck when he hears a noise, investigates, and finds the beautiful young stowaway. Demanding an explanation, he listens as she tells him about the sailor who is helping her get home to Romania. “He brings me food and drink every night,” she tells the captain.

“Is that all?” he asks.

“Vell…he is screwing me,” she admits.

The captain shakes his head. “He sure is, Lady. This is the Staten Island Ferry!”

The vanilla bit: what’s the other 15%?

Toenails receive constant friction from socks and shoes, fingernails don’t. No mystery here.

Actually, ‘imitation vanilla’ is made from lignin.

When getting nervous I chewed my fingernails, when extremely stressed I even chewed my toenails – I wasn’t very popular in school

Whoever owned the Ridiculous Jacket Shop in Mexico City must have been able to retire in 2010.

Synthetic nails were quite the thrill amongst the playground supervisor set.

Take care, may confessed pram thief Mikey “Spotted Zebra” Johnsonord be with you, and gesundheit.

Probably because you hyoomans can’t scratch yourselfs with your toenails like you can with your fingernails.

You bite your fingernails. You don’t bite your toenails.

Mystery solved.

85% of imitation vanilla is fossil fuel, the other 15% comes from a beaver’s anal glands, Believe it or not…

(And thus why I never use imitation vanilla….)

fingernails grow faster because blood can reach better than your feet

Good to know about the vanilla

Then how come the price of imitation vanilla doesn’t wildly go up/down every few days with the cost of a barrel of oil?

Mr Jackson is the world’s richest dead celebrity. Charles Schulz has slipped to third. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes’_list_of_the_world’s_highest-paid_dead_celebrities

The warden of Cebu Prison in the Philippines is a fan of Micheal Jackson. Inmates do Micheal Jackson dances in the courtyard. Videos of these are on YouTube. Some of them are professionally choreographed.

Natural vanilla comes from a plant that is an orchid. It is the only orchid grown on an industrial scale.

I recall hearing ages ago that typist’s fingernails grew faster than non-typist’s, and that the proposed mechanism was increased blood flow associated with moving the fingers while typing. Wouldn’t that explain toenails’ slower growth?

Toenails take longer to grow because of the resistance of socks, hose and shoes…

We bring vanilla back from Mexican vacations, unfortunate that it isn’t available in our country.

fingernails grow faster because they are closer to your hands

Because the fingernails can …

I scratch an itch four times more often with my fingers than with my toes…

Yuck on the vanilla!! This is why I pay almost $10 for a tiny bottle of pure organic vanilla!

Maybe toenails grow slower because nothing grows fast in the dark?

I always thought fake ’nilla tasted like Gasoline. Why would anyone ruin good baking with cheap ingredients.

So – two months after Michael Jackson died but they thought it was really him? News travels a little slower on the way to Mexico?

It’s those chocolate toenails !

Fingernails growing faster might make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Fingernails and toenails evolved long before people ever were. Many mammals that proceeded us but were in our lineage had four limbs with multiple digits on them. The front ones were used the most for digging for food as they were closest to the mouth. Faster growing fingernails would be a significant survival advantage.

No Michael Jackson impersonator has ever achieved the same degree of whiteness, or non-blackness, or non-of colour