And in the rare horrific crash, the seat will not remain attached to the floor anyway.

Exactly. This is a 60s thing, not a 70s thing.

They must have skipped yellow-pea/green-pea day in high school Biology.

From reading the text, I speculate that Franklin was alluding to the preexisting saying as well – alluding to the cat in the dark as an accepted axiom.

Sorry – it is a reference to Monty Python, where a father is trying to get his son to marry.

Edit: as one of your honorary fathers, I advise you to go watch the movie, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

NaoPb! You must marry this girl! She has huge … tracts of land!

And no singing!

What do non-Americans think it is?

That’s an analogy that might appeal to the LE types.

That seems to illustrate the point that LadyLikesSpiders was making – quite nicely.

I don’t think that it actually answers your question, but I would like to point out that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas: a gigantic nuclear furnace.

Thanks. Other comments and replies have been alluding to this, but this is the only one that described the mechanism.