I pulled this from a fellow blog post I read a few days ago and figured I’d snatch it. It held my interest enough during my lunch breakthe other day. At least I learned a few things.
A polar bear’s skin is black. Its fur is not white, but actually clear.
Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
Shakespeare invented the words “assassination” and “bump.”
If you keep a goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
The names of the continents all end with the same letter with which they start.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No one knows why.
On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily!
Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants.
There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.
The name Wendy was made up for the book “Peter Pan”. There was never a recorded Wendy before
The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War 2 killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to s-l-o-w the film down so you could see his moves. That’s the opposite of the norm.
The phrase “rule of thumb” is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
Sherlock Holmes NEVER said “Elementary, my dear Watson“.
The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!!
The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.
Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.
The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska ßthank you mythbusters =]
The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28%
The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400
The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910. ßnot true! There was a 5 year old who had a baby
The youngest pope was 11 years old.
The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
Those San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn’t added until 5 years later.
“I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Hershey’s Kisses are called that because the machine that make them looks like it’s kissing the conveyor belt.
No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Super bowl.
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 all-stars Game.
In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed Firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase “goodnight, sleep tight”.
It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month or what we know today as the honeymoon.
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It’s where we get the phrase “mind your P’s and Q’s”
Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. “Wet your whistle” is the phrase inspired
by this practice.
In ancient England a person could not have sex unless you had consent of the King (unless you were in the Royal Family). When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King, the King gave them a placard that
they hung on their door while they were having sex. The placard had F.U.C.K. (Fornication Under Consent of the King) on it.
In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden…. and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.
Q. What occurs more often in December than any other month?
A. Conception.
Q. What separates “60 Minutes,” on CBS from every other TV show?
A. No theme song
Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?
A. Their birthplace.
Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?
A. Obsession
Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter “A”?
A. One thousand
Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laserprinters all have in common?
A. All invented by women.
Q. What is the only food that doesn’t spoil?
A. Honey
Q. There are more collect calls on this day than any other day of the year?
A. Father’s Day
Q. What trivia fact about Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) is the Most ironic?
A. He was allergic to carrots.
Q. What is an activity performed by 40% of all people at a party?
A. Snoop in your medicine cabinet.
Dragon boat racing is the 8th most popular sport in the world!
998 million people play Volleyball
If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough energy to heat a cup of coffee.
Banging your head off a wall uses 150 calories an hour!
There are more plastic lawn flamingos in the US than real ones.
Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down.
There are more chickens in the world than people.
A typist fingers travel over 12 and a half miles in an average day.
2,500 left handers die each year using products designed for right handers.
The Roman Catholic Church did not acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun until the mid 1990’s.
The average life span of an umbrella is under two years.
The world’s most common non-contagious disease is tooth-decay
The only words in the English language to contain two “U’s” back to back are: vacuum, residuum, and continuum.
The only word in the English language to contain three back to back double letter combinations is; Bookkeeper.
The first non-human to win an Oscar was Mickey Mouse.
Pi has been calculated to over 2,260,321,363 digits.
A can of SPAM™ is opened every 4 seconds.
The McDonald’s™ at Toronto’s ‘SkyDome’ is the only McDonald’s™ location that sells hot dogs.
An ostrich egg would take four hours to hard boil.
The left leg of a chicken is more tender than the right one.
A novel with 50,000 words, none of which contained the letter ‘E’ was written by Ernest Wright.
You consume one tenth calories when you lick a stamp.
A donkey will sink in quick sand, while a mule will not.
Every year more people are killed by donkeys, than in aircraft crashes.
The average speed of Heinz™ ketchup leaving the bottle is 25 miles per year.
In an average day, a four year old child will ask 437 questions.
4,000 people are injured by tea pots every year.
Little more than half of the people living in the U.S. would rather fold, than wad their toilet paper.
The short phrases of organ music played at a baseball game is called a tucket.
Dungarees is another word for Denim
If a word has two consecutive vowels, and both are pronounced, a diaeresis [dy-AIR-ih-sis] is used. Diaeresis are two dots over a vowel. Example: ä or ö. For instance; the word noel. Noel is actually spelled Noël. This is used in English, though it is not commonly written.
Gibraltar is the only place in Europe were you can find wild monkeys.
Every year, the moon moves 1/2 an inch further from the earth.
In 1977, George Willig was fined $1.10 for climbing the World Trade Center building.
There are only 18 countries richer than Bill Gates
There have been fewer people below 2km in sea than have been on the moon
In 50 million years, it is likely that Mars will have a ring around it.
A deltiologist is someone who collects postcards
One million $1 bills weighs 1 ton
People descended from the Scottish clan of Kerr are more likely to be left handed than any other ancestral group.
The shortest war ever recorded lasted only 38 minutes. (Britain vs. Zanzibar in 1896)
Despite a population of over a billion, China has only about 200 family names.
If you told someone that they were one in a million, you’d be saying there were 1,800 of them in China
In 1892, Italy raised the minimum age for marriage for girls to 12
In downtown Lima, Peru, there is a large brass statue dedicated to Winnie-the-Pooh.
In space you cannot cry because there is no gravity to make the tears flow
In the Scottish Hebrides, an island is defined as being an island only if it is big enough to sustain 1 sheep
New York City has 570 miles of shoreline
Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in our solar system
Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States.
The Boston University Bridge is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies
The most remote island in the world is Tristan da Cunha, which is above the subantartic zone
The number of births in India each year is greater than the entire population of Australia.
The smallest ‘country’ in the world to have its own top-level domain name is Norfolk Island, off the coast of Australia.
The surface speed record on the moon is 10.56 miles per hour. It was set in a lunar rover.
There is a city called Rome in every continent.
Two objects have struck the earth with enough force to destroy a whole city. Each object, one in 1908 and again in 1947, struck regions of Siberia. Not one human being was hurt either time.
Up to three thousand species of trees have been cataloged in square mile of the Amazon jungle.
We are in the middle of an ice age. Ice ages include both cold and warm periods; at the moment we are experiencing a relatively warm span of time known as an interglacial period. Geologists believe that the warmest part of this period occurred from 1890 through 1945 and that since 1945 things have slowly begun freezing up again.
A jogger’s heel strikes the ground 1,500 times per mile.
A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years.
A red-haired man is more likely to go bald than anyone else
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