Did You Know: Foo Bar and Football

I had an inquisitive moment today while programming…where did Foo Bar come from anyway? For those of you that don’t know what the heck Foo Bar is, it is commonly used in computer programming as general variable replacements when describing a programming statement or situation.

According to Wikipedia, it has been described as “the association of two metasyntactic variables: foo and bar” with a third, baz.

The etymology of the former two terms either had it’s origins from the military slang, FUBAR. Another though is that it “evolved from electronics, as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a “1″) then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label”.

Aside from being technical and with the Super Bowl coming up, did you know that it takes more than 2,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s woth of footballs? Crazy.