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[ltr]Most of these facts are really interesting!! Don't miss them! 
* Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
* The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S (U.S.)
* Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
* The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet thick.
* There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
* The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is 'Live Free or Die'. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
* The straw was probably invented by Egyptian brewers to taste in-process beer without removing the fermenting ingredients which floated on the top of the container.
* David Prowse, was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.
* The United States government keeps its supply of silver at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY
* There are only thirteen blimps in the world.
* Nine of the thirteen blimps are in the United States.
* The existing biggest blimp is the Fuji Film blimp.
* Naugahyde, plastic "leather" was created in Naugatuck, Connecticut.
* The Swiss flag is square.
* The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation.
* Sames goes for the Italian lira which uses the same abbreviation ('lira' coming from 'libra'). So British currency (before it went metric) was always quoted as "pounds/shillings/pence", abbreviated "L/s/d" (libra/solidus/denarius).
* The three largest land-owners in England are the Queen, the Church of England and Trinity College, Cambridge.
* The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers and compline.
* If you come from Manchester, you are a Mancunian.
* No animal, once frozen solid (i.e., water solidifies and turns to ice) survives when thawed, because the ice crystals formed inside cells would break open the cell membranes. However there are certain frogs that can survive the experience of being frozen. These frogs make special proteins which prevent the formation of ice (or at least keep the crystals from becoming very large), so that they actually never freeze even though their body temperature is below zero Celsius. The water in them remains liquid: a phenomenon known as 'supercooling.' If you disturb one of these frogs (just touching them even), the water in them quickly freezes solid and they die.
* The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.
* Madrid is the only European capital city not situated on a river.
* The name for fungal remains found in coal is sclerotinite.
* The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
* Emus cannot walk backwards.
* It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.
* The shopping mall in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada has the largest water clock in North America.
* Both writer Edgar Allen Poe and LSD advocate Timothy Leary were kicked out of West Point.
* The word posh, which denotes luxurious rooms or accomodations, originated when ticket agents in England marked the tickets of travelers going by ship to the Orient. Since there was no air conditioning in those days, it was always better to have a cabin on the shady side of the ship as it passed through the Mediterranean and Suez area. Since the sun is in the south, those with money paid extra to get cabin's on the left, or port, traveling to the Asia, and on the right, or starboard, when returning to Europe. Hence their tickets were marked with the initials for Port Outbound Starboard Homebound, or POSH.
* The top layer of a wedding cake, known as the groom's cake, traditionally is a fruit cake. That way it will save until the first anniversery.
* The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm and often hid the fact by posing with his hand resting on a sword, or by holding gloves.
* The forward pass was created by the football team at Saint Louis University.
* In every show that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) wrote, there is at least one song about rain.
* A kind of tortoise in the Galapagos Islands has an upturned shell at its neck so it can reach its head up to eat cactus branches.
* The only city whose name can be spelled completely with vowels is Aiea, Hawaii, located approximately twelve miles west of Honolulu.
* Parthenogenesis is the term used to describe the process by which certain animals are able to reproduce themselves in successive female generations without intervention of a male of the species. At least one species of lizard is known to do so.
* Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
* The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat", which means "the king is dead".
* The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2, should always be written as QE2. QEII is the actual queen.
* "Quisling" is the only word in the English language to start with "quis."
* All of the cobble stones that used to line the streets in New York were originally weighting stones put in the hulls of Belgian ships to keep an even keel.
* Nepal is the only country without a rectangular flag (it looks like two pennants glued on on top of the other)
* Libya has the only flag which is all one color with no writing or decoration on it
* The only borough of New York City that isn't an island (or part of an island) is the Bronx.
* The 1957 Milwaukee Braves were the first baseball team to win the World Series after being relocated.
* The tune for the "A-B-C" song is the same as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
* When a coffee seed is planted, it takes five years to yield it's first consumable fruit.
* The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.
* Linn's Stamp News is the world's largest weekly newspaper for stamp collectors.
* Tennessee is bordered by more states than any other. The eight states are Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
* Des Moines has the highest per capita Jello consumption in the U.S
* The Western-most point in the contiguous United States is Cape Alava, Washington.
* There are only three animals with blue tongues, the Black Bear, the Chow Chow dog and the blue-tongued lizard.
* The first fossilized specimen of Austalopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the palentologists' favorite song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, by the Beatles.
* Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
* The geographical center of North America is near Rugby, North Dakota.
* The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.
* Hacky-sack was invented in Turkey.
* If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it measures 87 feet long.
* There are six five words in the English language with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate and duumvir, residuum.
* The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes onstage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.
* Most Americans' car horns beep in the key of F.
* Dirty Harry's badge number is 2211.
* The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
* The shortest French word with all five vowels is "oiseau" meaning bird.
* Camel's milk does not curdle.
* "Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim Morrison.
* The ball on top of a flagpole is called the truck.
* A person from the country of Nauru is called a Nauruan; this is the only palindromic nationality.
* The word "modem" is a contraction of the words "modulate, demodulate."
* Oliver Cromwell was hanged and decapitated two years after he had died.
* In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
* Iowa has more independent telephone companies than any other state.
* Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
* Hamsters love to eat crickets.
* The only "real" food that U.S. Astronauts are allowed to take into space is pecan nuts.
* The word "queueing" is the only English word with five consecutive vowels.
* The first Eagle Scout west of the Mississippi is buried in San Marcos, Texas.
* In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
* Roberta Flack wrote "Killing Me Softly" about singer Don McLean.
* The Greek version of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint.
* Spencer Eldon was the name of the naked baby on the cover of Nirvana's album
* All three major 1996 Presidential candidates, Clinton, Dole and Perot, are left-handed.
* The Madagascan Hissing Cockroach is one of the few insects who give birth to live young, rather than laying eggs.
* The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book which does not mention the name of God.
* Sheriff came from Shire Reeve. During early years of feudal rule in England, each shire had a reeve who was the law for that shire. When the term was brought to the United States it was shortned to Sheriff.
* An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
* Dracula is the most filmed story of all time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is second and Oliver Twist is third.
* The silhouette on the NBA logo is Jerry West.
* The silhouette on the Major League Baseball logo is Harmon Killebrew.
* The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
* The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
* Soweto in South Africa ws derived from SOuth WEst TOwnship.
* Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.
* The Andy Griffth Show was the first spin-off in TV history. It was a spin-off of the Danny Thomas Show.
* Goat's eyes have rectangular pupils.
* Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to the famous Disney logo.
* Other than humans, black lemurs are the only primates that may have blue eyes.
* The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.
* The two longest one-syllable words in the English language are "screeched" and "strengths."
* Great Britain was the first county to issue postage stamps. Hence, the postage stamps of Britain are the only stamps in the world not to bear the name of the country of origin. However, every stamp carries a relief image or a silhouette of the monarch's head instead.
* Images for picture stamps in the United States are commissioned by the United States Postal Service Department of Philatelic Fulfillment.
* Artist Constantino Brumidi fell from the done of the U.S. Capitol while painting a mural around the rim. He died four months later.
* Since 1896, the beginning of the modern Olympics, only Greece and Australia have participated in every Games.
* There were no squirrels on Nantucket until 1989.
* Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated. (August 1972)
* Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
* Will Clark of the Texas Rangers is a direct descendant of William Clark of Lewis and Clark.
* When ocean tides are at their highest, they are called "spring tides." When they are at their lowest, they are call "neep tides."
* February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
* The last NASCAR driver to serve jail time for running moonshine was Buddy Arrington.
* Many Japanese golfers carry "hole-in-one" insurance, because it is traditional in Japan to share one's good luck by sending gifts to all your friends when you get an "ace." The price for what the Japanese term an "albatross" can often reach $10,000.
* The difference between male and female blue crabs is the design located on their apron (belly.) The male blue crab has the Washington Monument while the female apron is shaped like the U.S. Capitol.
* It takes a lobster approxiamately seven years to grow to be one pound.
* The ridges on the sides of coins are called reeding.
* The lot numbers for the cyanide-tainted Tylenol capsules scare back in 1982 were MC2880 and 1910MD.
* Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.
* The Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.
* At latitude 60 degrees south you can sail all the way around the world.
* A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes.
* The hyoid bone, in your throat, is the only bone in the body not attached to another bone.
* Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and man all have seven neck vertebra.
* Sunbeams that shine down through the clouds are called crespucular rays.
* Very small clouds that look like they have been broken off of bigger clouds are called scuds.
* On a dewy morning, if you look at your shadow in the grass, the dew drops shine light back to your eye creating a halo called a heilgenschein (German for halo.)
* The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."
* Giraffes have no vocal cords.
* Joe DiMaggio had more home runs than strikeouts during his career.
* All porcupines float in water.
* Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
* A-1 Steak Sauce contains both orange peel and raisins.
* Many northern parishes (counties) of Louisiana did not agree with the Confederate movement. To show their disapproval, they changed their names. That's why there is a Union Parish, Jefferson Parish, etc.
* The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
* Residents of the island of Lesbos are Lesbosians, rather than Lesbians. (Of course, lesbians are called lesbians because Sappho was from Lesbos.)
* The Chinese ideogram for 'trouble' symbolizes 'two women living under one roof'.
* German has a wood for the peace offerings brought to your mate when you've committed some conceived slight. This is "drachenfutter" or dragon's food.
* In Chinese, the words for crisis and opportunity are the same.
* No word in the English language rhymes with month.
* Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
* The poisonous copperhead smells likefresh cut cucumbers.
* In Disney's "Fantasia", the Sorcerer's name is "Yensid" (Disney backwards.)
* The smallest mushroom's name is "Hop-low."
* Anne Boleyn had six fingernails on one hand.
* Mustard gas was invented in the McKinley Building on the American University campus. Additionally, preliminary work on the Manhattan Project was done in that building. The government used the McKinley Building because of its unusual archticture. If there would be any type of large explosion inside the building, the building would implode onto itself, containing any lethal gas or nuclear material. The building now houses the Physics Department.
* When angered, the ears of Tazmanian devils turn a pinkish-red.
* The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
* The naval rank of "Admiral" is derived from the Arabic phrase "amir al bahr", which means "lord of the sea".
* The Les Nessman character on the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati wore a band-aid in every episode. Either on himself, his glasses, or his clothing.
* A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened
* The roads on the island of Guam are made with coral. Guam has no sand. The sand on the beaches is actually ground coral. When concrete is mixed, the coral sand is used instead of importing regular sand from thousands of miles away.
* Mt. Vernon Washington grows more tulips than the entire country of Holland.
* Jamie Farr (who played Klinger on M*A*S*H) was the only member of the cast who actually served as a soldier in the Korean war.
* The southern most city in the United States is Na'alehu, Hawaii.
* Alaska was the only part of the United States that was invaded by the Japanese during WWII. The territory was the island of Adak in the Aleutian Chain.
* Woodward Ave in Detroit, Michigan carries the designation M-1, named so because it was the first paved road anywhere.
* Michigan was the first state to plow it's roads and the first to adopt a yellow dividing line.
* Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
* The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119.
* The shortest verse in the Bible is "Jesus wept."
* Way back when they were using marble columns, the people selling the columns would carve out the centers and fill it with wax.So the people buying them started asking "Is it without wax?" Or in other words "Are you sincere?"
* Zaire is the world leader in cobalt mining, producing two-thirds of the world's cobalt supply.
* No modern language has a true concept of "I am." It is always used linked with are in reference of another verb.
* Little known Cathedral Caverns near Grant, Alabama has the world's largest cave opening, the largest stalagmite (Goliath), and the largest stalagmite forest in the World.
* The only person ever to decline a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book Arrowsmith.
* Maine is the only state that borders on only one state.
* There are almost twice as many people in Rhode Island than there are in Alaska.
* Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.
* Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
* The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.'
* The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either 'picture cell' or 'picture element.'
* Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz.
* Bananas do not grow on trees, but on rhizomes.
* Astronauts in the Space Shuttle are weightless not because there is no gravity in space, but because they are in free fall around the Earth.
* St. Augustine was the first major proponent of the "missionary" position.
* Lizzie Borden was acquitted.
* Alexander Hamilton was shot by Aaron Burr in the groin.
* Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.
* Roger Ebert is the only film critic to have ever won the Pulitzer prize.
* A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is called a Sadian, not a Sadist (of course).
* Tribeca in Manhattan stands for TRIangle BElow CAnal street. Soho stands for SOuth of HOuston street.
* Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
* Theworld's largest wine cask is in Heidleberg, Germany.
* Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an aligator while he hosted "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."
* Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
* Seven Olympic gold medal winners eventually went on to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World
* Kerimski Church in Finland is world's biggest church made of wood.The St. Louis Gateway Arch had a
* projected death toll while it was being built. No one died. The average ear of corn has eight-hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows.
* A cat has four rows of whiskers.
* Vincent Van Gogh comitted suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.
* An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
* Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly beans in outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21, 1983 voyage of the space shuttle Challenger (the same voyage as the first American woman in space, Sally Ride).
* Baseballer Connie Mack's real name was Cornelius McGilicuddy.
* If you were standing in the northernmost point in the contiguous (48) states, you'd be standing in Minnesota.
* Only thirty percent of the famous Maryland blue crabs are actually from Maryland, the rest are from North Carolina and Virginia.
* Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
* Not all of West Virginia voted to go with the North. When the State of West Virginia was formed from Virginia in 1863 the three western counties in Virginia voted to go with West Virginia, but West Virginia didn't take them because they were poor. Instead they took three counties that voted to stay with Virginia, because they were richer and they had the B&O railroad. Those counties since split and are 5 Jefferson, Hampshire, Berkley, Mineral, and Morgan.
* The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.
* The Dodge brothers Horace and John were Jewish, that's why the first Dodge emblem had a star of David in it.
* Studebaker was the only major car company to stop making cars while making a profit from them.
* Studebaker still exists, but is now called Worthington.
* Chrysler built B-29's that bombed Japan, Mitsubishi built Zeros that tried to shoot them down. Both companies now build cars in a joint plant call Diamond Star.
* On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the clock tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.
* The top three cork-producing countries are Spain, Portugal and
* Algeria. (Cork comes from trees.)
* In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy's last name is Gail. It is shown on the mail box.
* If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the late M*A*S*H star McLean Stevenson were both once assistant football coaches at Northwestern University.
* The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn't have 1 syllable... it has three.
* All swans and all sturgeons in England are property of the Queen. Messing with them is a serious offense.
* Michael Di Lorenzo, who plays Eddie Torres on New York Undercover is one of the lead dancers in Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video.
* Only two people signed the Decleration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on Augest 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 year later.
* October 4, 1957 is a historic date to be remembered, it is the day both "Leave it to Beaver" and the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 were launched.
* Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
* It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.
* The antifungal, nystatin, which is sometime used for treating thrush, is named after New York State Institute for Health (Acronym)
* QANTAS, the name of the Australian national airline, is a (former) acronym, for Queensland And Northern
* Territories Air Service.
* The world's largest four-faced clock sits atop the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
* Almonds are members of the peach family.
* The first video ever played on MTV Europe was "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits.
* If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050
* The "Grinch" singer and voice of Tony the Tiger is a charming man named Thurl Ravenscroft.
* The famous split-fingered Vulcan salute is actually intended to represent the first letter ("shin," pronounced "sheen") of the word "shalom." As a small boy, Leonard Nimoy observed his rabbi using it in a benediction and never forgot it; eventually he was able to add it to "Star Trek" lore.
* The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
* Ham radio operators got the term "ham" coined from the expression "ham-fisted operators", a term used to describe early radio users who sent Morse code (i.e. pounded their fists).
* While the Chinese invented gunpowder, they were not the first to develop firearms. Sam Colt invented the
* "revolving pistol." Therefore, all revolvers are correctly called pistols.
* A 12 gauge "rifled slug" does not spin, even though there are grooves on it's bearing surface. A slug actually travels like a dart.
* Revolvers cannot be silenced, due all the noisy gasses which escape the cylinder gap at the rear of the barrel.
* A bullet fired from the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge (also called the .308 Winchester) is still supersonic at 1000 yards.
* The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
* The home team must provide the referee with 24 footballs for each National Football League game.
* The maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62 oz.
* A flea expert is a pullicologist.
* A bear has 42 teeth.
* M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest Mars, Sr., then candymaker, and his associate Bruce Murrie.
* The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
* The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
* Table tennis balls have been known to travel off the paddle at speeds up to 105.6 miles per hour.
* In Irian Jaya exists a tribe of tall, white people who use parrots as a warning sign against intruders.
* In the Dutch province of Twente people live on average half a year shorter than in the rest of the Netherlands.
* Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running clockwise. This is because all knights used to be
* right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties in climbing the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles except left-handed people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.
* Duddley DoRight's Horses name was "Horse."
* If the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT was a golf ball, to be the proportional size to hit it, you'd be two miles tall.
* On Sesame Street, Bert's goldfish were named Lyle and Talbot, presumably after the actor Lyle Talbot.
* The word "hangnail" comes from Middle English: ang- (painful) + nail. Nothing to do with hanging.
* Louis IV of France had a stomach the size of two regular stomachs.
* Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life.
* Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into veiw. When
* He died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again.
* Pepsi originally contained pepsin, thus the name.
* Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
* The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
* If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birthplace was listed as a post office box in Albequerque.
* Robert Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador Hotel, the same hotel that housed Marilyn Monroe's first modelling agency.
* Ronald Regan sent out the army phoyographer who first discovered Marilyn Monroe.
* Carbonated water, with nothing else in it,can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda pop.
* Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
* The newest dog breed is the Bull Boxer, first bred in the United states in 1990-91.
* The first hard drive available for the Apple ][ had a capacity of 5 megabytes.
* South of Tucson, Arizona, all road signs are in the Metric System.
* In many cases, the amount of storage space on a recordable CD is measured in minutes. 74 minutes is about 650 megabytes, 63 minutes is 550 megabytes.
* The real name of Astro (the dog fromThe Jetsons) is "Tralfaz" -- his real owner appeared one day to claim him but wound up giving him back to the Jetsons.
* Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
* The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy."
* Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intraveinously
* When a film is in production, the last shot of the day is the "martini shot", the next to last one is the "Abby Singer".
* Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp.) Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the U.S., but technically it is number 47. Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote on a resolution to admit Ohio to the Union.
* It is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly -- so says City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California.
* If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
* Other than fruit, honey is the only natural food that is made without destroying any kind of life! What about milk, you say? A cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is living!
* When Saigon fell the signal for all Americans to evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on the radio.
* The Fort George Point in Belize City was formed by the silt runoff of Hurricane Hattie.
* If you lace your shoes from the inside to the outside the fit will be snugger around your big toe.
* Only 1/3 of the people that can twitch their ears can twitch only one at a time.
* The expression "What in tarnation" comes from the original meaning: "What in eternal damnation"
* Gary Burgough who played Walter Radar O'Reily on M*A*S*H has a deformed left thumb. If you watch closely you will see that he never shows his left hand.
* Only two states' names begin with double consonants: Florida and Rhode Island.
* The volume of the Earth's moon is the same as the volume of the Pacific Ocean
* Ingrown toenails are hereditary.
* The Cincinnati Reds baseball team name was officially changed to the Redlegs during the anti-communist movement.
* Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
* "Xmas" does not begin with the Roman letter X. It begins with the Greek letter "chi," which was used in medieval manuscripts as an abbreviation for the word "Christ" (xus = christus, etc.)
* The ampersand (&) is actually a stylised version of the Latin word "et," meaning and."
* The largest city in the United States with a one syllable name is Flint, Michigan.
* The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
* Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
* On the cartoon show 'The Jetsons', Jane is 33 years old and her daughter Judy is 15.
* In Mel Brooks' 'Silent Movie,' mime Marcel Marceau is the only person who has a speaking role.
* Only humans and horses have hymens.
* No NFL team which plays it's home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl. (Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, is not a dome, there is a large hole in the roof.)
* The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
* The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver". Wally and Beaver had a baby alligator which they kept in the toilet.
* In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured
* The most eastern part of the western world is located in Ilomantsi, Finland.
* "Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."
* The term the "Boogey Man will get you" comes from the Boogey people,who still inhabit an area of Indonesia. These people still act as pirates today and attack ships that pass. Thus the term spread "if you don't watch out the Boogey man will get you."
* The Saturn V moon rocket consumed 15 tons of fuel per second.
* The state with the longest coastline in the US is Michigan.
* Race car is a palindrome.
* We will have four consecutive full moons making two blue moons in 1999 (January 2 and 31, March 2 and 31.) The only other time it happened this century was in 1915 (January 1 and 31, March 1 and 31.)
* The Basset Horn, a kind of alto clarinet, was named after its inventor -- a man named Horn. "Basset" is from "Basetto," or "little bass" in Italian.
* There are more bald eagles in the province of British Columbia then there are in the whole United States.
* Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
* The "second unit" films movie shots that do not require the presence of actors.
* Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5 million going to actor's salaries.
* The world's second largest pipe organ is located at the Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
* Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented fiberglass.
* One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition. It is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.
* Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to have exactly fourteen feathers
* The music group Simply Red is named because of its love for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home strip.
* In case you ever find yourself piloting a dogsled, shout "Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!" to go right.
* Richard Nixon left instructions for "California, Here I Come" to be the last piece of music played at his funeral ("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
* The earliest document in Latin in a woman's handwriting (it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a birthday party.
* Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats.
* Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.
* Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world, at 0.08988 g/cc
* Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in the world, at 70.6 g/cc
* The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop, California...
* The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in the city of Paris, Texas, shorty after its box office release.
* The 'y' in signs reading "ye olde.." is properly pronounced with a 'th' sound, not 'y'. The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y".
* Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
* The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
* Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man, woman, and child in the world.
* At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies instead of cherry ones.
* The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
* The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
* The international telphone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
* A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A nibble is half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
* A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
* Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
* If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
* The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's highest airport.
* The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
* The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
* Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de Janeiro.
* Original copy of the Declaration of Independence is lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a holograph. That is a term for a handmade copy of a document and is not the same as a laser produced hologram.
* Singpore is the only country with one train station.
* The little bags of netting for gas lanterns (called 'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of an alarm at a nuclear reactor.
* When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the height of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch). 'Pitch' is a horizontal measurement of the number of letters which can be printed in an inch.
* The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with exactly one endpoint is P.
* In the movie "the Right Stuff" there is a scene where a government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program (played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake, California. His partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to badmouth Yeager claiming they need someone who went to college. During the conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who is standing behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General Yeager is listed low in the movie credits as 'Fred.'
* "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"
* Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
* There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
* Nauru is the only country in the world with no official capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren
* District, but there's no official capital.)
* South Africa is the only country with three official capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
* Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
* Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
* The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
* If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon wil be about three statute miles away.
* The one-hundred eleventh element is known as "unnilenilenium"
* The longest muscle name is the "levator labii superioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.
* The longest time someone has typed on a typewriter continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
* The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225 different ways.
* There was once a town named "6" in West Virginia.
* Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
* A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
* An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
* The oldest word in the English language is "town"
* The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
* Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
* Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all crimes of treason.
* The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
* There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.
* After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
* Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently
* Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
* A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if not held on by skin.
* Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
* Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
* The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
* Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
* Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
* A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
* Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
* It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
* Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
* If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
* The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
* There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
* The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.
* According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
* In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
* Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
* Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
* The "heat" of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.
* Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand
* was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.
* In left hand drive countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car. Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
* Japan is the third most densely populated country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
* Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
* The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
* Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
* Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
* The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name was Temujin.
* Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherd.
* The type specimen for the human species is the skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American paleontologist of the late 1800's. A type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
* The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
* The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
* Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
* The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"
* Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards
* All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
* The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York are an engineering feat. The air circulators in the tunnels circulate fresh air completely every ninety seconds.
* The dirt road that General Washington and his soldiers took to fight off General Clinton during the Battle of Monmouth was called the Burlington Path.
* The only social fraternity founded during the Civil War was Theta Xi fraternity, at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1864.
* The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
* Several buildings in Manhattan have their own zip code! The World Trade Center has several.
* Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means
* "adversary", devil means "liar".
* A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
* Geller and Huchra have made three-dimensional maps of the distrubution of galaxies. In each layer of the map some galaxies are grouped together in such a way that they resemble a human being.
* Avocado is derived from the Spanish word 'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning testicle.
* The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.
* Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.
* Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
* Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
* The smallest port in Canada is Port Williams, Nova Scotia.
* The Canadian province of Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is half an hour behind Atlantic standard time.
* Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.
* The second longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".
* Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese. Big Ben was slowed five minutes one day when a passing group of starlings decided to take a rest on the minute hand of the clock.
* The Velvet Underground was named after a book on the S&M culture.
* The Velvet Underground's first manager was Andy Warhol, who also produced their first album and designed the cover artwork. The cover artwork for the album (called "The Velvet Underground and Nico") featured a bright yellow banana that could be peeled off to reveal a bright pink banana underneath, with the label "Peel Slowly and See." "Peel Slowly and See" is the title of the Velvet Underground comprehensive boxed set, which is the only currently-available Velvet Underground recording to feature a peelable banana. The peelable banana caused substantial delays in the production of the VU's first album and contributed to Lou Reed's firing Andy Warhol as the group's manager.
* The "wild" horses of western North America are actually feral, not wild.
* Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish much more easily than they learn English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish much more easily than they learn Japanese.
* New Zealand kiwis lay the largest eggs with respect to their body size of any bird.
* Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
* When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
* Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.
* Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.
* The topknot that quails have is called a hmuh.
* Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth ... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
* The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
* The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint -- no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
* There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
* New Zealand is also the only country that contains every type of climate in the world.
* Cockroaches' favorite food is the glue on envelopes and on the back of postage stamps
* In 1969, the last Corvair was painted gold.
* Ralph Kramden made 62 dollars a week.
* The only way to stop the pain of the flathead fish's sting is by rubbing the same fish's slime on the wound it gave you.
* Betsy Ross was born with a fully formed set of teeth.
* Betsy Ross's other contribution to the American Revolution, beside sewing the first American flag, was running a munitions factory in her basement.
* Devo's original name was going to be De-evolution. They shortened it to Devo.
* Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book 'The Naked Lunch'.
* Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman.
* Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stone's emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the 'Sticky Fingers' album.
* Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were the two left-handed Beatles.
* Chris Ford scored the first ever NBA three-point shot.
* Of all the East Coast States, New Hampshire has the shortest coastline, about fourteen miles.
* New Hampshire is also the only State name the has four consecutive consonants in it (in the same word).
* Ontario is the only Canadian Province that borders the Great Lakes.
* Alaska has the longest border with Canada of all the fifty states.
* Montana has the longest border with Canada of the lower forty-eight States.
* Montana also borders the most Canadian Provinces of all the fifty states. It borders three of them.
* Arkansas is the only US State that begins with "a" but does not end with "a". All the other States that begin with "a", Arizona, Alabama and Alaska, also end with "a".
* Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible: Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer.
* Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
* Wilma Flinestone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
* Lenny Kravitz's mother played the part of "Helen" on "The Jeffersons."
* The term "devil's advocate" comes from the Roman Catholic church. When deciding if someone should
* become a saint, a devil's advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.
* Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, the reverse of how a record works.
* The term "Mayday" used for signaling for help (after SOS), it comes from the French term "M'aidez" which is pronounced "MayDay" and means, "Help Me"
* Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.
* The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did start in a barn belonging to Patrick and Katherine O'Leary. The O'Leary's house was one of the few that survived the fire. The O'Leary's house had to be guarded by soldiers for weeks afterwards, however, because many enraged residents wanted to burn it down.
* The biggest bell is the "Tsar Kolokol" cast in the Kremlin in 1733. It weighs 216 tons, but alas, it is cracked and has never been rung. The bell was being stored in a Moscow shed which caught fire. To "save" it the caretakers decided to throw water on the bell. This did not succeed in -- the water hit the superheated metal and a giant piece immediately cracked off, destroying the bell forever.
* A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
* The smallest mountain range in the world is outside of Marysville, California and is named the Sutter Buttes.
* The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.
* Many species of bird copulate in the air. In general, a couple will fly to a very high altitude, and then drop. During their descent, the birds mate. Sometimes the couple gets too involved and SPLAT!
* If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die because they need gravity to swallow.
* There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.
* You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter "A" in the English language to spell a whole number.
* The only member of the band ZZ Top without a beard has the last name Beard.
* Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sidewards, like a scissor, to extract the juices from the food.
* The letters H I O X in the latin alphabet is the only ones that look the same if you turn them upside down or see them from behind.
* The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a "porcelator".
* When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home to a sellout crowd, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.
* In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
* Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
* Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott".
* Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
* More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
* The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.
* The metal part at the end of a pencil is twenty percent sulfur.
* John Larroquette of "Night Court" and "The John Larroquette Show" was the narrator of "The Texas
* Chainsaw Massacre."
* Vietnamese currency consists only of paper money; no coins.
* Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting while he was alive, Red Vineyard at Arles.
* A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
* A pig's penis is shaped like a corkscrew.
* It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
* Skin is thickest is at the back -- 1/6 of an inch.
* The most sensitive finger is the forefinger.
* Alaska is the most northern, western and eastern state; it also has the highest latitude,the most eastern longitude and the most western longitude.
* Some of Beethoven's symphonies were performed in Kentucky before they were performed in Paris, France.
* The word denim comes
* Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
* The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S (U.S.)
* Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
* The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet thick.
* There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
* The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is 'Live Free or Die'. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
* The straw was probably invented by Egyptian brewers to taste in-process beer without removing the fermenting ingredients which floated on the top of the container.
* David Prowse, was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.
* The United States government keeps its supply of silver at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY
* There are only thirteen blimps in the world.
* Nine of the thirteen blimps are in the United States.
* The existing biggest blimp is the Fuji Film blimp.
* Naugahyde, plastic "leather" was created in Naugatuck, Connecticut.
* The Swiss flag is square.
* The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation.
* Sames goes for the Italian lira which uses the same abbreviation ('lira' coming from 'libra'). So British currency (before it went metric) was always quoted as "pounds/shillings/pence", abbreviated "L/s/d" (libra/solidus/denarius).
* The three largest land-owners in England are the Queen, the Church of England and Trinity College, Cambridge.
* The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers and compline.
* If you come from Manchester, you are a Mancunian.
* No animal, once frozen solid (i.e., water solidifies and turns to ice) survives when thawed, because the ice crystals formed inside cells would break open the cell membranes. However there are certain frogs that can survive the experience of being frozen. These frogs make special proteins which prevent the formation of ice (or at least keep the crystals from becoming very large), so that they actually never freeze even though their body temperature is below zero Celsius. The water in them remains liquid: a phenomenon known as 'supercooling.' If you disturb one of these frogs (just touching them even), the water in them quickly freezes solid and they die.
* The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.
* Madrid is the only European capital city not situated on a river.
* The name for fungal remains found in coal is sclerotinite.
* The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
* Emus cannot walk backwards.
* It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.
* The shopping mall in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada has the largest water clock in North America.
* Both writer Edgar Allen Poe and LSD advocate Timothy Leary were kicked out of West Point.
* The word posh, which denotes luxurious rooms or accomodations, originated when ticket agents in England marked the tickets of travelers going by ship to the Orient. Since there was no air conditioning in those days, it was always better to have a cabin on the shady side of the ship as it passed through the Mediterranean and Suez area. Since the sun is in the south, those with money paid extra to get cabin's on the left, or port, traveling to the Asia, and on the right, or starboard, when returning to Europe. Hence their tickets were marked with the initials for Port Outbound Starboard Homebound, or POSH.
* The top layer of a wedding cake, known as the groom's cake, traditionally is a fruit cake. That way it will save until the first anniversery.
* The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm and often hid the fact by posing with his hand resting on a sword, or by holding gloves.
* The forward pass was created by the football team at Saint Louis University.
* In every show that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) wrote, there is at least one song about rain.
* A kind of tortoise in the Galapagos Islands has an upturned shell at its neck so it can reach its head up to eat cactus branches.
* The only city whose name can be spelled completely with vowels is Aiea, Hawaii, located approximately twelve miles west of Honolulu.
* Parthenogenesis is the term used to describe the process by which certain animals are able to reproduce themselves in successive female generations without intervention of a male of the species. At least one species of lizard is known to do so.
* Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
* The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat", which means "the king is dead".
* The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2, should always be written as QE2. QEII is the actual queen.
* "Quisling" is the only word in the English language to start with "quis."
* All of the cobble stones that used to line the streets in New York were originally weighting stones put in the hulls of Belgian ships to keep an even keel.
* Nepal is the only country without a rectangular flag (it looks like two pennants glued on on top of the other)
* Libya has the only flag which is all one color with no writing or decoration on it
* The only borough of New York City that isn't an island (or part of an island) is the Bronx.
* The 1957 Milwaukee Braves were the first baseball team to win the World Series after being relocated.
* The tune for the "A-B-C" song is the same as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
* When a coffee seed is planted, it takes five years to yield it's first consumable fruit.
* The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.
* Linn's Stamp News is the world's largest weekly newspaper for stamp collectors.
* Tennessee is bordered by more states than any other. The eight states are Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
* Des Moines has the highest per capita Jello consumption in the U.S
* The Western-most point in the contiguous United States is Cape Alava, Washington.
* There are only three animals with blue tongues, the Black Bear, the Chow Chow dog and the blue-tongued lizard.
* The first fossilized specimen of Austalopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the palentologists' favorite song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, by the Beatles.
* Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
* The geographical center of North America is near Rugby, North Dakota.
* The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.
* Hacky-sack was invented in Turkey.
* If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it measures 87 feet long.
* There are six five words in the English language with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate and duumvir, residuum.
* The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes onstage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.
* Most Americans' car horns beep in the key of F.
* Dirty Harry's badge number is 2211.
* The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
* The shortest French word with all five vowels is "oiseau" meaning bird.
* Camel's milk does not curdle.
* "Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim Morrison.
* The ball on top of a flagpole is called the truck.
* A person from the country of Nauru is called a Nauruan; this is the only palindromic nationality.
* The word "modem" is a contraction of the words "modulate, demodulate."
* Oliver Cromwell was hanged and decapitated two years after he had died.
* In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
* Iowa has more independent telephone companies than any other state.
* Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
* Hamsters love to eat crickets.
* The only "real" food that U.S. Astronauts are allowed to take into space is pecan nuts.
* The word "queueing" is the only English word with five consecutive vowels.
* The first Eagle Scout west of the Mississippi is buried in San Marcos, Texas.
* In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
* Roberta Flack wrote "Killing Me Softly" about singer Don McLean.
* The Greek version of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint.
* Spencer Eldon was the name of the naked baby on the cover of Nirvana's album
* All three major 1996 Presidential candidates, Clinton, Dole and Perot, are left-handed.
* The Madagascan Hissing Cockroach is one of the few insects who give birth to live young, rather than laying eggs.
* The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book which does not mention the name of God.
* Sheriff came from Shire Reeve. During early years of feudal rule in England, each shire had a reeve who was the law for that shire. When the term was brought to the United States it was shortned to Sheriff.
* An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
* Dracula is the most filmed story of all time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is second and Oliver Twist is third.
* The silhouette on the NBA logo is Jerry West.
* The silhouette on the Major League Baseball logo is Harmon Killebrew.
* The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
* The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
* Soweto in South Africa ws derived from SOuth WEst TOwnship.
* Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.
* The Andy Griffth Show was the first spin-off in TV history. It was a spin-off of the Danny Thomas Show.
* Goat's eyes have rectangular pupils.
* Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to the famous Disney logo.
* Other than humans, black lemurs are the only primates that may have blue eyes.
* The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.
* The two longest one-syllable words in the English language are "screeched" and "strengths."
* Great Britain was the first county to issue postage stamps. Hence, the postage stamps of Britain are the only stamps in the world not to bear the name of the country of origin. However, every stamp carries a relief image or a silhouette of the monarch's head instead.
* Images for picture stamps in the United States are commissioned by the United States Postal Service Department of Philatelic Fulfillment.
* Artist Constantino Brumidi fell from the done of the U.S. Capitol while painting a mural around the rim. He died four months later.
* Since 1896, the beginning of the modern Olympics, only Greece and Australia have participated in every Games.
* There were no squirrels on Nantucket until 1989.
* Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated. (August 1972)
* Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
* Will Clark of the Texas Rangers is a direct descendant of William Clark of Lewis and Clark.
* When ocean tides are at their highest, they are called "spring tides." When they are at their lowest, they are call "neep tides."
* February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
* The last NASCAR driver to serve jail time for running moonshine was Buddy Arrington.
* Many Japanese golfers carry "hole-in-one" insurance, because it is traditional in Japan to share one's good luck by sending gifts to all your friends when you get an "ace." The price for what the Japanese term an "albatross" can often reach $10,000.
* The difference between male and female blue crabs is the design located on their apron (belly.) The male blue crab has the Washington Monument while the female apron is shaped like the U.S. Capitol.
* It takes a lobster approxiamately seven years to grow to be one pound.
* The ridges on the sides of coins are called reeding.
* The lot numbers for the cyanide-tainted Tylenol capsules scare back in 1982 were MC2880 and 1910MD.
* Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.
* The Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.
* At latitude 60 degrees south you can sail all the way around the world.
* A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes.
* The hyoid bone, in your throat, is the only bone in the body not attached to another bone.
* Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and man all have seven neck vertebra.
* Sunbeams that shine down through the clouds are called crespucular rays.
* Very small clouds that look like they have been broken off of bigger clouds are called scuds.
* On a dewy morning, if you look at your shadow in the grass, the dew drops shine light back to your eye creating a halo called a heilgenschein (German for halo.)
* The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."
* Giraffes have no vocal cords.
* Joe DiMaggio had more home runs than strikeouts during his career.
* All porcupines float in water.
* Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
* A-1 Steak Sauce contains both orange peel and raisins.
* Many northern parishes (counties) of Louisiana did not agree with the Confederate movement. To show their disapproval, they changed their names. That's why there is a Union Parish, Jefferson Parish, etc.
* The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
* Residents of the island of Lesbos are Lesbosians, rather than Lesbians. (Of course, lesbians are called lesbians because Sappho was from Lesbos.)
* The Chinese ideogram for 'trouble' symbolizes 'two women living under one roof'.
* German has a wood for the peace offerings brought to your mate when you've committed some conceived slight. This is "drachenfutter" or dragon's food.
* In Chinese, the words for crisis and opportunity are the same.
* No word in the English language rhymes with month.
* Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
* The poisonous copperhead smells likefresh cut cucumbers.
* In Disney's "Fantasia", the Sorcerer's name is "Yensid" (Disney backwards.)
* The smallest mushroom's name is "Hop-low."
* Anne Boleyn had six fingernails on one hand.
* Mustard gas was invented in the McKinley Building on the American University campus. Additionally, preliminary work on the Manhattan Project was done in that building. The government used the McKinley Building because of its unusual archticture. If there would be any type of large explosion inside the building, the building would implode onto itself, containing any lethal gas or nuclear material. The building now houses the Physics Department.
* When angered, the ears of Tazmanian devils turn a pinkish-red.
* The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
* The naval rank of "Admiral" is derived from the Arabic phrase "amir al bahr", which means "lord of the sea".
* The Les Nessman character on the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati wore a band-aid in every episode. Either on himself, his glasses, or his clothing.
* A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened
* The roads on the island of Guam are made with coral. Guam has no sand. The sand on the beaches is actually ground coral. When concrete is mixed, the coral sand is used instead of importing regular sand from thousands of miles away.
* Mt. Vernon Washington grows more tulips than the entire country of Holland.
* Jamie Farr (who played Klinger on M*A*S*H) was the only member of the cast who actually served as a soldier in the Korean war.
* The southern most city in the United States is Na'alehu, Hawaii.
* Alaska was the only part of the United States that was invaded by the Japanese during WWII. The territory was the island of Adak in the Aleutian Chain.
* Woodward Ave in Detroit, Michigan carries the designation M-1, named so because it was the first paved road anywhere.
* Michigan was the first state to plow it's roads and the first to adopt a yellow dividing line.
* Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
* The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119.
* The shortest verse in the Bible is "Jesus wept."
* Way back when they were using marble columns, the people selling the columns would carve out the centers and fill it with wax.So the people buying them started asking "Is it without wax?" Or in other words "Are you sincere?"
* Zaire is the world leader in cobalt mining, producing two-thirds of the world's cobalt supply.
* No modern language has a true concept of "I am." It is always used linked with are in reference of another verb.
* Little known Cathedral Caverns near Grant, Alabama has the world's largest cave opening, the largest stalagmite (Goliath), and the largest stalagmite forest in the World.
* The only person ever to decline a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book Arrowsmith.
* Maine is the only state that borders on only one state.
* There are almost twice as many people in Rhode Island than there are in Alaska.
* Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.
* Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
* The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.'
* The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either 'picture cell' or 'picture element.'
* Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz.
* Bananas do not grow on trees, but on rhizomes.
* Astronauts in the Space Shuttle are weightless not because there is no gravity in space, but because they are in free fall around the Earth.
* St. Augustine was the first major proponent of the "missionary" position.
* Lizzie Borden was acquitted.
* Alexander Hamilton was shot by Aaron Burr in the groin.
* Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.
* Roger Ebert is the only film critic to have ever won the Pulitzer prize.
* A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is called a Sadian, not a Sadist (of course).
* Tribeca in Manhattan stands for TRIangle BElow CAnal street. Soho stands for SOuth of HOuston street.
* Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
* Theworld's largest wine cask is in Heidleberg, Germany.
* Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an aligator while he hosted "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."
* Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
* Seven Olympic gold medal winners eventually went on to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World
* Kerimski Church in Finland is world's biggest church made of wood.The St. Louis Gateway Arch had a
* projected death toll while it was being built. No one died. The average ear of corn has eight-hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows.
* A cat has four rows of whiskers.
* Vincent Van Gogh comitted suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.
* An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
* Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly beans in outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21, 1983 voyage of the space shuttle Challenger (the same voyage as the first American woman in space, Sally Ride).
* Baseballer Connie Mack's real name was Cornelius McGilicuddy.
* If you were standing in the northernmost point in the contiguous (48) states, you'd be standing in Minnesota.
* Only thirty percent of the famous Maryland blue crabs are actually from Maryland, the rest are from North Carolina and Virginia.
* Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
* Not all of West Virginia voted to go with the North. When the State of West Virginia was formed from Virginia in 1863 the three western counties in Virginia voted to go with West Virginia, but West Virginia didn't take them because they were poor. Instead they took three counties that voted to stay with Virginia, because they were richer and they had the B&O railroad. Those counties since split and are 5 Jefferson, Hampshire, Berkley, Mineral, and Morgan.
* The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.
* The Dodge brothers Horace and John were Jewish, that's why the first Dodge emblem had a star of David in it.
* Studebaker was the only major car company to stop making cars while making a profit from them.
* Studebaker still exists, but is now called Worthington.
* Chrysler built B-29's that bombed Japan, Mitsubishi built Zeros that tried to shoot them down. Both companies now build cars in a joint plant call Diamond Star.
* On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the clock tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.
* The top three cork-producing countries are Spain, Portugal and
* Algeria. (Cork comes from trees.)
* In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy's last name is Gail. It is shown on the mail box.
* If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the late M*A*S*H star McLean Stevenson were both once assistant football coaches at Northwestern University.
* The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn't have 1 syllable... it has three.
* All swans and all sturgeons in England are property of the Queen. Messing with them is a serious offense.
* Michael Di Lorenzo, who plays Eddie Torres on New York Undercover is one of the lead dancers in Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video.
* Only two people signed the Decleration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on Augest 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 year later.
* October 4, 1957 is a historic date to be remembered, it is the day both "Leave it to Beaver" and the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 were launched.
* Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
* It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.
* The antifungal, nystatin, which is sometime used for treating thrush, is named after New York State Institute for Health (Acronym)
* QANTAS, the name of the Australian national airline, is a (former) acronym, for Queensland And Northern
* Territories Air Service.
* The world's largest four-faced clock sits atop the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
* Almonds are members of the peach family.
* The first video ever played on MTV Europe was "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits.
* If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050
* The "Grinch" singer and voice of Tony the Tiger is a charming man named Thurl Ravenscroft.
* The famous split-fingered Vulcan salute is actually intended to represent the first letter ("shin," pronounced "sheen") of the word "shalom." As a small boy, Leonard Nimoy observed his rabbi using it in a benediction and never forgot it; eventually he was able to add it to "Star Trek" lore.
* The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
* Ham radio operators got the term "ham" coined from the expression "ham-fisted operators", a term used to describe early radio users who sent Morse code (i.e. pounded their fists).
* While the Chinese invented gunpowder, they were not the first to develop firearms. Sam Colt invented the
* "revolving pistol." Therefore, all revolvers are correctly called pistols.
* A 12 gauge "rifled slug" does not spin, even though there are grooves on it's bearing surface. A slug actually travels like a dart.
* Revolvers cannot be silenced, due all the noisy gasses which escape the cylinder gap at the rear of the barrel.
* A bullet fired from the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge (also called the .308 Winchester) is still supersonic at 1000 yards.
* The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
* The home team must provide the referee with 24 footballs for each National Football League game.
* The maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62 oz.
* A flea expert is a pullicologist.
* A bear has 42 teeth.
* M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest Mars, Sr., then candymaker, and his associate Bruce Murrie.
* The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
* The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
* Table tennis balls have been known to travel off the paddle at speeds up to 105.6 miles per hour.
* In Irian Jaya exists a tribe of tall, white people who use parrots as a warning sign against intruders.
* In the Dutch province of Twente people live on average half a year shorter than in the rest of the Netherlands.
* Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running clockwise. This is because all knights used to be
* right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties in climbing the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles except left-handed people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.
* Duddley DoRight's Horses name was "Horse."
* If the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT was a golf ball, to be the proportional size to hit it, you'd be two miles tall.
* On Sesame Street, Bert's goldfish were named Lyle and Talbot, presumably after the actor Lyle Talbot.
* The word "hangnail" comes from Middle English: ang- (painful) + nail. Nothing to do with hanging.
* Louis IV of France had a stomach the size of two regular stomachs.
* Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life.
* Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into veiw. When
* He died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again.
* Pepsi originally contained pepsin, thus the name.
* Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
* The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
* If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birthplace was listed as a post office box in Albequerque.
* Robert Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador Hotel, the same hotel that housed Marilyn Monroe's first modelling agency.
* Ronald Regan sent out the army phoyographer who first discovered Marilyn Monroe.
* Carbonated water, with nothing else in it,can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda pop.
* Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
* The newest dog breed is the Bull Boxer, first bred in the United states in 1990-91.
* The first hard drive available for the Apple ][ had a capacity of 5 megabytes.
* South of Tucson, Arizona, all road signs are in the Metric System.
* In many cases, the amount of storage space on a recordable CD is measured in minutes. 74 minutes is about 650 megabytes, 63 minutes is 550 megabytes.
* The real name of Astro (the dog fromThe Jetsons) is "Tralfaz" -- his real owner appeared one day to claim him but wound up giving him back to the Jetsons.
* Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
* The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy."
* Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intraveinously
* When a film is in production, the last shot of the day is the "martini shot", the next to last one is the "Abby Singer".
* Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp.) Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the U.S., but technically it is number 47. Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote on a resolution to admit Ohio to the Union.
* It is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly -- so says City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California.
* If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
* Other than fruit, honey is the only natural food that is made without destroying any kind of life! What about milk, you say? A cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is living!
* When Saigon fell the signal for all Americans to evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on the radio.
* The Fort George Point in Belize City was formed by the silt runoff of Hurricane Hattie.
* If you lace your shoes from the inside to the outside the fit will be snugger around your big toe.
* Only 1/3 of the people that can twitch their ears can twitch only one at a time.
* The expression "What in tarnation" comes from the original meaning: "What in eternal damnation"
* Gary Burgough who played Walter Radar O'Reily on M*A*S*H has a deformed left thumb. If you watch closely you will see that he never shows his left hand.
* Only two states' names begin with double consonants: Florida and Rhode Island.
* The volume of the Earth's moon is the same as the volume of the Pacific Ocean
* Ingrown toenails are hereditary.
* The Cincinnati Reds baseball team name was officially changed to the Redlegs during the anti-communist movement.
* Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
* "Xmas" does not begin with the Roman letter X. It begins with the Greek letter "chi," which was used in medieval manuscripts as an abbreviation for the word "Christ" (xus = christus, etc.)
* The ampersand (&) is actually a stylised version of the Latin word "et," meaning and."
* The largest city in the United States with a one syllable name is Flint, Michigan.
* The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
* Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
* On the cartoon show 'The Jetsons', Jane is 33 years old and her daughter Judy is 15.
* In Mel Brooks' 'Silent Movie,' mime Marcel Marceau is the only person who has a speaking role.
* Only humans and horses have hymens.
* No NFL team which plays it's home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl. (Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, is not a dome, there is a large hole in the roof.)
* The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
* The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver". Wally and Beaver had a baby alligator which they kept in the toilet.
* In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured
* The most eastern part of the western world is located in Ilomantsi, Finland.
* "Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."
* The term the "Boogey Man will get you" comes from the Boogey people,who still inhabit an area of Indonesia. These people still act as pirates today and attack ships that pass. Thus the term spread "if you don't watch out the Boogey man will get you."
* The Saturn V moon rocket consumed 15 tons of fuel per second.
* The state with the longest coastline in the US is Michigan.
* Race car is a palindrome.
* We will have four consecutive full moons making two blue moons in 1999 (January 2 and 31, March 2 and 31.) The only other time it happened this century was in 1915 (January 1 and 31, March 1 and 31.)
* The Basset Horn, a kind of alto clarinet, was named after its inventor -- a man named Horn. "Basset" is from "Basetto," or "little bass" in Italian.
* There are more bald eagles in the province of British Columbia then there are in the whole United States.
* Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
* The "second unit" films movie shots that do not require the presence of actors.
* Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5 million going to actor's salaries.
* The world's second largest pipe organ is located at the Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
* Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented fiberglass.
* One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition. It is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.
* Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to have exactly fourteen feathers
* The music group Simply Red is named because of its love for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home strip.
* In case you ever find yourself piloting a dogsled, shout "Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!" to go right.
* Richard Nixon left instructions for "California, Here I Come" to be the last piece of music played at his funeral ("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
* The earliest document in Latin in a woman's handwriting (it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a birthday party.
* Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats.
* Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.
* Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world, at 0.08988 g/cc
* Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in the world, at 70.6 g/cc
* The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop, California...
* The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in the city of Paris, Texas, shorty after its box office release.
* The 'y' in signs reading "ye olde.." is properly pronounced with a 'th' sound, not 'y'. The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y".
* Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
* The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
* Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man, woman, and child in the world.
* At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies instead of cherry ones.
* The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
* The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
* The international telphone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
* A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A nibble is half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
* A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
* Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
* If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
* The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's highest airport.
* The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
* The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
* Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de Janeiro.
* Original copy of the Declaration of Independence is lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a holograph. That is a term for a handmade copy of a document and is not the same as a laser produced hologram.
* Singpore is the only country with one train station.
* The little bags of netting for gas lanterns (called 'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of an alarm at a nuclear reactor.
* When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the height of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch). 'Pitch' is a horizontal measurement of the number of letters which can be printed in an inch.
* The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with exactly one endpoint is P.
* In the movie "the Right Stuff" there is a scene where a government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program (played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake, California. His partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to badmouth Yeager claiming they need someone who went to college. During the conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who is standing behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General Yeager is listed low in the movie credits as 'Fred.'
* "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"
* Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
* There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
* Nauru is the only country in the world with no official capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren
* District, but there's no official capital.)
* South Africa is the only country with three official capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
* Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
* Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
* The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
* If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon wil be about three statute miles away.
* The one-hundred eleventh element is known as "unnilenilenium"
* The longest muscle name is the "levator labii superioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.
* The longest time someone has typed on a typewriter continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
* The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225 different ways.
* There was once a town named "6" in West Virginia.
* Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
* A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
* An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
* The oldest word in the English language is "town"
* The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
* Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
* Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all crimes of treason.
* The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
* There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.
* After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
* Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently
* Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
* A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if not held on by skin.
* Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
* Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
* The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
* Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
* Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
* A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
* Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
* It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
* Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
* If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
* The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
* There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
* The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.
* According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
* In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
* Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
* Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
* The "heat" of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.
* Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand
* was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.
* In left hand drive countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car. Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
* Japan is the third most densely populated country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
* Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
* The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
* Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
* Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
* The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name was Temujin.
* Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherd.
* The type specimen for the human species is the skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American paleontologist of the late 1800's. A type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
* The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
* The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
* Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
* The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"
* Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards
* All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
* The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York are an engineering feat. The air circulators in the tunnels circulate fresh air completely every ninety seconds.
* The dirt road that General Washington and his soldiers took to fight off General Clinton during the Battle of Monmouth was called the Burlington Path.
* The only social fraternity founded during the Civil War was Theta Xi fraternity, at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1864.
* The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
* Several buildings in Manhattan have their own zip code! The World Trade Center has several.
* Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means
* "adversary", devil means "liar".
* A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
* Geller and Huchra have made three-dimensional maps of the distrubution of galaxies. In each layer of the map some galaxies are grouped together in such a way that they resemble a human being.
* Avocado is derived from the Spanish word 'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning testicle.
* The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.
* Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.
* Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
* Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
* The smallest port in Canada is Port Williams, Nova Scotia.
* The Canadian province of Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is half an hour behind Atlantic standard time.
* Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.
* The second longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".
* Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese. Big Ben was slowed five minutes one day when a passing group of starlings decided to take a rest on the minute hand of the clock.
* The Velvet Underground was named after a book on the S&M culture.
* The Velvet Underground's first manager was Andy Warhol, who also produced their first album and designed the cover artwork. The cover artwork for the album (called "The Velvet Underground and Nico") featured a bright yellow banana that could be peeled off to reveal a bright pink banana underneath, with the label "Peel Slowly and See." "Peel Slowly and See" is the title of the Velvet Underground comprehensive boxed set, which is the only currently-available Velvet Underground recording to feature a peelable banana. The peelable banana caused substantial delays in the production of the VU's first album and contributed to Lou Reed's firing Andy Warhol as the group's manager.
* The "wild" horses of western North America are actually feral, not wild.
* Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish much more easily than they learn English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish much more easily than they learn Japanese.
* New Zealand kiwis lay the largest eggs with respect to their body size of any bird.
* Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
* When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
* Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.
* Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.
* The topknot that quails have is called a hmuh.
* Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth ... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
* The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
* The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint -- no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
* There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
* New Zealand is also the only country that contains every type of climate in the world.
* Cockroaches' favorite food is the glue on envelopes and on the back of postage stamps
* In 1969, the last Corvair was painted gold.
* Ralph Kramden made 62 dollars a week.
* The only way to stop the pain of the flathead fish's sting is by rubbing the same fish's slime on the wound it gave you.
* Betsy Ross was born with a fully formed set of teeth.
* Betsy Ross's other contribution to the American Revolution, beside sewing the first American flag, was running a munitions factory in her basement.
* Devo's original name was going to be De-evolution. They shortened it to Devo.
* Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book 'The Naked Lunch'.
* Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman.
* Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stone's emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the 'Sticky Fingers' album.
* Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were the two left-handed Beatles.
* Chris Ford scored the first ever NBA three-point shot.
* Of all the East Coast States, New Hampshire has the shortest coastline, about fourteen miles.
* New Hampshire is also the only State name the has four consecutive consonants in it (in the same word).
* Ontario is the only Canadian Province that borders the Great Lakes.
* Alaska has the longest border with Canada of all the fifty states.
* Montana has the longest border with Canada of the lower forty-eight States.
* Montana also borders the most Canadian Provinces of all the fifty states. It borders three of them.
* Arkansas is the only US State that begins with "a" but does not end with "a". All the other States that begin with "a", Arizona, Alabama and Alaska, also end with "a".
* Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible: Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer.
* Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
* Wilma Flinestone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
* Lenny Kravitz's mother played the part of "Helen" on "The Jeffersons."
* The term "devil's advocate" comes from the Roman Catholic church. When deciding if someone should
* become a saint, a devil's advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.
* Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, the reverse of how a record works.
* The term "Mayday" used for signaling for help (after SOS), it comes from the French term "M'aidez" which is pronounced "MayDay" and means, "Help Me"
* Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.
* The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did start in a barn belonging to Patrick and Katherine O'Leary. The O'Leary's house was one of the few that survived the fire. The O'Leary's house had to be guarded by soldiers for weeks afterwards, however, because many enraged residents wanted to burn it down.
* The biggest bell is the "Tsar Kolokol" cast in the Kremlin in 1733. It weighs 216 tons, but alas, it is cracked and has never been rung. The bell was being stored in a Moscow shed which caught fire. To "save" it the caretakers decided to throw water on the bell. This did not succeed in -- the water hit the superheated metal and a giant piece immediately cracked off, destroying the bell forever.
* A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
* The smallest mountain range in the world is outside of Marysville, California and is named the Sutter Buttes.
* The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.
* Many species of bird copulate in the air. In general, a couple will fly to a very high altitude, and then drop. During their descent, the birds mate. Sometimes the couple gets too involved and SPLAT!
* If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die because they need gravity to swallow.
* There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.
* You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter "A" in the English language to spell a whole number.
* The only member of the band ZZ Top without a beard has the last name Beard.
* Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sidewards, like a scissor, to extract the juices from the food.
* The letters H I O X in the latin alphabet is the only ones that look the same if you turn them upside down or see them from behind.
* The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a "porcelator".
* When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home to a sellout crowd, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.
* In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
* Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
* Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott".
* Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
* More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
* The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.
* The metal part at the end of a pencil is twenty percent sulfur.
* John Larroquette of "Night Court" and "The John Larroquette Show" was the narrator of "The Texas
* Chainsaw Massacre."
* Vietnamese currency consists only of paper money; no coins.
* Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting while he was alive, Red Vineyard at Arles.
* A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
* A pig's penis is shaped like a corkscrew.
* It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
* Skin is thickest is at the back -- 1/6 of an inch.
* The most sensitive finger is the forefinger.
* Alaska is the most northern, western and eastern state; it also has the highest latitude,the most eastern longitude and the most western longitude.
* Some of Beethoven's symphonies were performed in Kentucky before they were performed in Paris, France.
* The word denim comes
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