DID YOU KNOW

The Mole and the Gopher

The mole is not a rodent. It is an insectivore, a small insect eating mammal, which feeds mainly on insects and earthworms. However, the Townsend’s mole may eat roots and tubers. The mole has short velvety fur, a slender snout, small needle like teeth, no cheek pouches, poorly developed eyes, and ears that are not visible. It’s limbs are short and spadelike. The mounds formed by moles are pushed up, volcano fashion, from a central hole. The soil may be in chunks. The single mounds often appear in a line over runways connecting them.
The pocket gopher is a rodent..It feeds on roots, bulbs, grasses, seeds, and sometimes even tree bark, plastic irrigation pipe, and underground cables. Gopher tunnels can divert and carry off irrigation water and lead to soil erosion. Gophers have large incisor teeth projecting outside the mouth, and pocket like, external, fur-lined pouches on either side of the mouth. They have relatively small eyes and ears and a good sense of smell for locating food. Gophers usually burrow four to 12 inches below the soil.
surface and do not leave a ridge. The mounds are often in clusters and the soil is usually fine because the gophers dig and carry it to the surface instead of forcing it straight up.

Johannesburg South Africa
After the Group Areas Act was scrapped in the early 1990s, Johannesburg was affected by urban blight. Thousands of poor, mostly black, people who had been forbidden to live in the city proper, moved into the city from surrounding black townships such as Soweto. Crime levels in formerly white areas rose. Many buildings were abandoned by landlords, especially in the high-density areas such as Hillbrow. Many corporations and institutions, including the JSE Securities Exchange, moved their headquarters away from the city centre, to suburbs such as Sandton. By the late 1990s, Johannesburg was rated as one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Frisbee (Disc) Golf

The early history of disc golf is closely tied to the somewhat mysterious history of the recreational flying disc (especially as popularized by Wham-O Inc.'s trademarked Frisbees) and may have been invented in the early 1900s, but it is not known for sure. Modern disc golf started in the late 1960s, when it seems to have been invented in many places and by many people independently. Two of the best-known figures in the sport are George Sappenfield and "Steady Ed" Headrick who coined the term "Disc Golf" and who introduced the first formal disc golf target with chains and a basket, the Mach 1. In 1975, Headrick formed the first disc golf association, the PDGA, which now officiates the standard rules of play for the sport. The sport has grown at a rate of 12-15 percent annually for more than the past decade, with nearly 3,000 courses in the US and over 3,000 globally. The game is now played in over 40 countries worldwide, primarily in North America, Central and Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

The Wristwatch

In 1880 Constant Girard (Girard-Perregaux) develops a concept of wristwatches, made for German naval officers and ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. Two-thousand watches were produced, which represents the first important commercialization of wristwatches. Anyhow, for civilian the wristwatches were not popular among men.
At the beginning of the century wristwatches were mostly worn by women. In 1904, Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend Louis Cartier to come up with an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls while timing his performances during flight. Cartier and his master watchmaker, Edmond Jaeger soon came up with the first prototype for a man's wristwatch called the Santos wristwatch. The Santos first went on sale in 1911, the date of Cartier's first production of wristwatches.
During the First World War soldiers needed access to their watches while their hands were full. They were given wristwatches, called 'trench watches', which were made with pocketwatch movements, so they were large and bulky and had the crown at the 12 o'clock position like pocketwatches. After the war pocketwatches went out of fashion and by 1930 the ratio of wrist- to pocketwatches was 50 to 1. The first successful self-winding system was invented by John Harwood in 1923.