• A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
• A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group of geese in the air is a skein.
• The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.
• Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.
• Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
• Dogs have about 100 different facial expressions, most of them made with the ears.
• Pollsters say that 40% of dog and cat owners carry pictures of the pets in their wallets.
• In Budapest, they control the pigeon population by mixing birth control chemicals with the birdseed.
• Sixty cows can produce a ton of milk a day.
• To survive, every bird must eat at least half its own weight in food each day.
• Relative to their weight and size, birds are stronger than people.
• Gigantactis, which swims at a depth of 6,000 feet, lights its way through the ocean depths by a bright light it carries at the end of a rod projecting from its head.
• The Marine Iguanas of Galapagos fight duels by standing forehead to forehead and pushing against each other.
• The chameleon has eyes independent of each other and can simultaneously look in 2 directions.
• The sea hare lays 478,000,000 eggs in 4 months.
• Hens don't crush the eggs they sit on because the hen is squatting, not sitting. Her full weight is not on the egg. Also, her body is contoured to fit just right over the egg, surrounding it with warmth without crushing it.
• In parts of Alaska, it's illegal to feed alcohol to a moose.
• In Utah, birds have the right of way on all highways.
• The groundhog is only accurate in predicting the weather 28% of the time.
• In England there is no difference between a pig and a hog, but in North America, if a pig is over 180 pounds, it is considered a hog.
• What happens to houseflies in the winter? In fact, none of them make it from one summer to the next no matter where they are. Most don't even make it through the month, with a typical life-span that ranges from one to three weeks. So shouldn't their reappearance en masse each summer fly in the face of logic? No, because a few manage to survive - and because a single pair can generate more than three trillion offspring in one season.
• The biggest hog ever recorded was a creature named Big Boy who weighed in at 1,904 pounds.
• Magicians pull a rabbit from a hat with this routine. A top hat is placed upright on the back of a table. On a shelf on the magician's side of the table, concealed from the audience, is a handkerchief holding the rabbit. The handkerchief is formed into a bag by a rubber band that ties its corners together. While the magician waves his wand over the hat with one hand, he uses the fingers on the other to simultaneously grasp the hat brim and the top of the bag below it. As he pulls the hat off the table he sweeps the bag into it, simultaneously flipping off the rubber band and turning over the hat. Voila! Out comes the rabbit.
• Dogs talk with their tails, as they do with their eyes, mouth, and paws. They're pretty articulate with their body language, as anybody who owns a dog can tell you. For example, when it comes to communicating with their tails, canines understand each other precisely. A tail sticking straight up means "I'm top dog here. "Tucking the tail means "you're the boss." But these universal signals are not so clear and precise when the "conversation" is dog-to-person. That's because centuries of breeding have muddled the animal's natural, inborn responses.
• When reflected from bright lights (head lights) deer's eyes are orange, wheras cats and dogs are green. Rabbits eyes remain black.
• Dogs will yawn in order to express that there is a conflict of interest between their own ideas or desires and those of their owners.
• The heaviest dog on record is an Old English Mastiff named Zorba, who weighed 343 pounds and measured 8 feet and 3 in. from nose to tail.
• The average cat food meal is the equivalent to about five mice.
• Termites are affected by music. They will eat your house twice as fast if you play loud music.
• Deep sea clams can live to be more than 100 years old.
• Dolphins don't automatically breath, they have to tell themselves to.
• The RCMP's first tracking dog was named Dale.
• Sheep prefer to drink running water.
• A seagull drinks salt water because it has special glands that filter out the salt.
• Forty percent of the farm-grown catfish in the United States is consumed by Texans.
• To combat the deadly killer bee, the Harris County Fire Department (Houston, Texas) has 11 trucks equipped with soapy water sprayers that do nothing but respond to killer bee calls. Currently, the Austin Texas Fire Department will only deal with emergency situations involving killer bee attacks in progress.
• Mayflies live only one day as an adult. During that day they molt twice, mate, and lay eggs in water.
• The male gypsy moth can "smell" the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away
• A rhinoceros horn is made of compacted hair.
• Tuna swim at a steady rate of nine miles per hour for an indefinite period of time -- and they never stop moving. Estimates indicate that a fifteen year old tuna must have traveled one million miles in its lifetime
• "Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos, actually) to keep from freezing.
• Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you are there.
• Deer can abort a pregnancy if there is not enough food to support the deer population. She absorbs the fetus back into her system, or she can hold off giving birth until there are the right conditions.
• Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."
• Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
• If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town.
• Camel's milk does not curdle.
• An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
• Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.
• A certain musical note can sexually excite cats -- the same note when played for kittens makes them want to go to the bathroom.
• If disconnected, the sex organs of an armadillo are still active.
• The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.
• All porcupines float in water.
• Only male crickets chirp.
• The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the round floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
• Dutch engineers have developed a computerized machine that allows a cow to milk itself. Each cow in the herd has a computer chip in its collar. If the computer senses that the cow has not been milked in a given period of time, the milk-laden animal is allowed to enter the stall. The robot sensors locate the teats, apply the vacuum devices, and the cow is milked. The machine costs a mere $250,000 and is said to boost milk production by 15%.
• The names of the three wise monkeys are: Mizaru: See no evil, Mikazaru: Hear no evil, and Mazaru: Speak no evil.
• When opossums are playing "possum", they are not playing. They actually pass out from sheer terror.
• Lobsters can move up to 25 feet per second underwater.
• You can tell a turtle's sex by its sound. Males grunt, females hiss.
• Human birth control pills work on gorillas.
• The eagle has sex while going up to 60 mph. in flight, and it is common for both eagles to hit the ground before they finish.
• Apart from humans, certain species of chimpanzee are the only animals to experiment sexually. They have been known to 'wife swap' and indulge in group sex.
• According to Dr. David Gems, a British geneticist, sex-craved male mice, who spend 5 to 11 hours per day pursuing female mice, could live years longer if they abstained.
• Some dinosaurs were as small as hens.
• Some spiders have eight eyes.
• The Southern Elephant Seal is the largest living carnivore
• Kitti's Hognosed Bat is the smallest living mammal
• The monarch butterfly's sense of taste is about 12,000 times more sensitive than a human's.
• Sixty cows can produce a ton of milk a day.
• The Blesbok, a South African antelope, is almost the same color as grape juice.
• Zebras have stripes because the stripes camouflage a zebra and help them hide from their enemies. This is done by breaking the outline of a zebra when it moves through tall grass. Rather than receiving a full view of a zebra, a predator only sees a bunch of vertical lines. This effect is particularly accented on a hot day when heat waves are rising from the earth.
• An ostrich's eye is bigger that it's brain.
• The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
• Elephants can't jump, however, every other mammal can.
• It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
• Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• Cows fart on average about 300 times a day. Humans fart, on average, only 8 times per day.
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
• The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven is $6,400.
• Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food.
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
• Owls are the only birds who can see the color blue.
• Slugs have four noses.
• There wasn't a single pony in the Pony Express, just horses.
• Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
• A jellyfish is 95 percent water.
• The starfish is one of the only animals who can turn it's stomach inside-out.
• The penguin is the only bird who can swim, but not fly.
• A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
• Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.
• A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
• Polar bears are left handed.
• A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
• A mosquito has 47 teeth.
• Migrating geese fly in a tight V-formation, as if they had undergone military training. They're actually taking advantage of the aerodynamic phenomenon that requires less energy to fly in a V formation, which reduces the air pressure or drag against their wings. By flying to the side rather than directly behind the bird in front, they also avoid the air turbulence caused by the lead bird's flight.
• The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
• Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, dogs only have about ten.
• The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. That makes the catfish rank #1 for animal having the most taste buds.
• The flea can jump 350 times its body length. That is like a human jumping the length of a football field.
• The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.
• Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
• Butterflies taste with their feet.
• Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
• About 80 percent of all bird species in the world inhabit wetlands.
• A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.
• Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
• The placement of a donkey's eyes in its head enables it to see all four feet at all times.
• Ants stretch when they wake up in the morning.
• In Cleveland, Ohio, it's illegal to catch mice without a hunting license.
• The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
• A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.
• Over 1,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.
• The world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand, weighing less than a penny.
• A garter snake can give birth to 85 babies.
• If you unfolded and laid out the delicate membranes from inside a dogs nose, the membranes would be larger than the dog itself.
• Kangaroos can hop as fast as 40 miles per hour.
• Crickets hear with their legs.
• A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
• In the past 60 years, the groundhog has only predicted the weather correctly 28% of the time.
• A polar bear's skin is black. Its fur is not white, but actually clear.
• A snail can sleep for 3 years.
• If you keep a goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white.
• The mudskipper is a fish that can actually walk on land.
• A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• On an American one dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left hand corner of the "1" encased in the "shield" and a spider hidden in the front upper right-hand corner.
• The flying gurnard, a fish, swims in water, walks on land, and flies through the air.
• Penguins typically mate only once a year and lay one egg.
• Very few species of shark, including the Mako and great white, are warm blooded.
• There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.
• A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
• A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
• A lobster's blood is blue
• There are more plastic flamingos in the US than real ones.
• It's against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland.
• The oldest known goldfish was 41 years old.
• The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.
• For $150 you can become a licensed dead animal hauler in Texas.
• The world's horse population is estimated at 75,000,000, the oldest horse recorded being Old Billy who was foaled in 1760 and died in 1822 at the age of 62.
• The oldest cat lived in Austin , TX. He died at the age of 34.
• The katydid bug hears through holes in its hind legs.
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
• Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
• A group of unicorns is called a blessing. Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink." A group of frogs is called an army. A group of rhinos is called a crash. A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of whales is called a pod. A group of ravens is called a murder. A group of officers is called a mess. A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of owls is called a parliament.
• Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always the same sex.
• The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
• In Tokyo, they sell toupees for dogs.
• Squirrels don't dig up nuts they previously buried. They actually track down nuts other squirrels buried. You see, squirrels have a keen sense of smell but a lousy memory. They forget where they buried their own stash, but can sniff out others.
• There are over 52.6 million dogs in the US.
• Dogs and cats consume almost $7 billion worth of pet food a year.
• The peregrine falcon dives at more than 200 miles an hour.
• It takes 640 days, or 21 months, to make an African elephant.
• You should not eat raw shellfish. Shellfish often eat raw sewage and contain high levels of bacteria.
• According to National Geographic, scientists have settled the old dispute over which came first -- the chicken or the egg. They say that reptiles were laying eggs thousands of years before chickens appeared, and the first chicken came from an egg laid by a bird that was not quite a chicken. That seems to answer the question. The egg came first.
• In Minnesota, its illegal to tease skunks
• The blue whale is the largest animal ever known.
• Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day.
• An average adult female wolf in Minnesota weighs 60 to 80 pounds.
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• You can't plow a cotton field with an elephant in North Carolina - it's against the law.
• There are close to 4,000 known species of frogs, including toads. The biggest frog is the appropriately named Goliath frog (Conraua goliath) of Cameroon. They reach nearly 30cm (a foot) and weigh as much as 3.3 kilograms. The smallest frog is the Gold frog (Psyllophryne Didactyla) of Brazil. They grow to only 9.8 mm (3/8 inch).
• The zoo in Tokyo closes for two months of the year so animals can have a holiday from visitors.
• On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
• The duckbill platypus (male) is the only venomous mammal in the world.
• The last ever cavalry charge in the world took place at the battle of Omdurman. The young Winston Churchill took part in it.

APOLLO-SATURN FACTS & FIGURES

• The possibility of a micrometeoroid as big as a cigarette ash striking the command module during an 8-day lunar missions has been computed as 1 in 1230. If a meteoroid did strike the module, it would be at a velocity of 98,500 feet per second. The probability of the command module getting hit is 0.000815. The probability of the command module not getting hit is 0.999185.
• The heat leak from the Apollo cryogenic tanks, which contain hydrogen and oxygen, is so small that if one hydrogen tank containing ice were placed in a room heated to 70 degrees F, a total of 8-1/2 years would be required to melt the ice to water at just one degree above freezing. It would take approximately 4 years more for the water to reach room temperature. The gases in the cryogenic tanks are utilized in the production of electrical power by the Apollo fuel cell system and provide oxygen for the use of the crew.
• When the Apollo spacecraft passes through the Van Allen belts on its way to the moon, the astronauts will be exposed to radiation roughly equivalent to that of a dental X-ray.
• With gravity on the moon only one-sixth as strong as on earth, it is necessary that this difference be related to the Apollo vehicle. A structure 250 feet high and 400 feet long in which cables lift five-sixth of the spacecraft vehicle weight is being used in tests to simulate lunar conditions and their effect on the vehicle.
• The command module panel display includes 24 instruments, 566 switches, 40 even indicators (mechanical), and 71 lights.
• The command module offers 73 cubic feet per man as against 68 feet per man in a compact car. By comparison, the Mercury spacecraft offered 55 cubic feet for its one traveler and Gemini provided 40 cubic feet per man.
• The angular accuracy requirement of midcourse correction of the spacecraft for all thrusting maneuvers is one degree.
• If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).
• When the Apollo spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere it will generate energy equivalent to approximately 86,000 kilowatt hours of electricity - enough to light the city of Los Angeles for about 104 seconds; or the energy generated would lift all the people in the USA 10-3/4 inches off the ground.
• The fully loaded Saturn V launch vehicle with the Apollo Spacecraft stands 60 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty on its pedestal and weighs 13 times as much as the statue. During its 3.5 second firing, the Apollo Spacecraft's solid-fuel launch escape rocket generates the horsepower equivalent of 4,300 automobiles.
• The engines of the Saturn V launch vehicle that will propel the Apollo spacecraft to the moon have combined horsepower equivalent to 543 jet fighters.
• The Apollo environmental control system has 180 parts in contrast to 8 for the average home window air conditioner. The Apollo environmental control system performs 23 functions compared to 5 for the average home conditioner. There are 23 functions of the environmental control system, which include: air cooling, air heating, humidity control, ventilation to suits, ventilation to cabin, air filtration, CO2 removal, odor removal, waste management functions, etc.
• The 12-foot-high Apollo spacecraft command module contains about fifteen miles of wire, enough to wire 50 two-bedroom homes.
• The astronaut controls and monitors the stabilization and control system by means of two handgrip controllers, 34 switches, and 6 knobs.
• The Apollo command module can sustain a hole as large as 1/4 inch in diameter and still maintain the pressure inside for 15 minutes, which is considered long enough for an astronaut to put on a spacesuit.
• The boost protective cover will protect the command module from temperatures expected to reach 1200 degrees during the launch phase.
• The power of one Saturn V is enough to place in earth orbit all U.S. manned spacecraft previously launched.
• Here is an analogy pertaining to the benefits of the multistage concept as opposed to the single-stage, brute-force method. If a steam locomotive pulling three coal cars carries all three cars along until all fuel is exhausted, the locomotive could travel 500 miles. By dropping off each car as its coal is expended the locomotive could travel 900 miles.
• The F-1's fuel pumps push fuel with the force of 30 diesel locomotives.
• Enough liquid oxygen is contained in the first stage tank to fill 54 railroad tank cars.
• The five F-1 engines equal 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines.
• The interior of each of the first stage propellant tanks is large enough to accommodate three large moving vans side by side.
• The Saturn V's second stage construction is comparable to that of an eggshell in efficiency, the amount of weight and pressure constrained by a thin wall.
• Total amount of propellant (fuel and oxidizer) in the Saturn V launch vehicle, service module, and lunar module is 5,625,000 pounds. The ratio of propellant to payload in Saturn V is 50 to 1.
• The main computer in the command module occupies only one cubic foot.
• While an automobile has less than 3,000 functional parts, the command module has more than 2,000,000 not counting wires and skeletal components.
• The command module uses only about 2000 watts of electricity, similar to the amount required by an oven in an electric range.
• The honeycomb aluminum used in Apollo's inner crew compartment is 40-percent stronger and 40-percent lighter than ordinary aluminum.
• The tanks which hold the cryogenic (ultra-cold) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen on the Apollo spacecraft come close to being the only leak-free vessels ever built. If an automobile tire leaked at the same rate that these tanks do, it would take the tire 32,400,000 years to go flat.
• There are approximately 2-1/2 million solder joints in the Saturn V launch vehicle. If just 1/32 of an inch too much wire were left on each of these joints and an extra drop of solder was used on each of these joints, the excess weight would be equivalent to the payload of the vehicle.
• The Apollo Lunar Landing program during the 1960's used the most powerful and largest rocket to date, the Saturn V. The Saturn V rocket was 363 feet tall and 33 feet wide at its widest. It held 3 stages and carried the 90 ton Apollo spacecraft up and into lunar orbit.
• Because of the supercold propellants in its tanks, the Saturn V gained an additional 1,400 pounds of weight in ice forming on the skin of the propellant tanks before liftoff. It was almost all shed from the vehicle as the Saturn V's F-1 engines ignited and built up thrust before liftoff.
• During each launch, the Saturn V would generate eighty-five times as much power as the Hoover Dam. The combined power of the first two stages generated enough energy to supply all of New York City for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
• The explosive potential of a fully-fueled Saturn V was the equivalent of a small nuclear weapon.
• With the exception of emergency fire-rescue crews stationed about 1 kilometer (3280 feet) from the pad, the nearest spectators were 3-1/2 miles (5.6 km) away near the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).
• A fully-fueled Saturn V stood 7&7/8 inches (20 cm) shorter than when un-fueled, due to settling caused by the weight of the propellants.
• General Motors' Saturn line of cars is named after the Saturn launch vehicles. (On the other hand the Saturn (car) SL1 will nearly fit inside the bell of a single F-1 engine, and gets MUCH better gas mileage)
• If you laid the Saturn V on its side, its overall length exceeds the length of a football or soccer field. The height of the vehicle is equivalent to a 36-story building.
• During the launch of SA-512 (Apollo 17), the glow its fiery liftoff and the exhaust plume were visible as far north as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and as far south as Cuba. As SA-512 built up thrust and lifted off from the pad, many described the launch as a second sunrise, even tricking the photocells on nearby street lamps into turning off. The actual, official sunrise was only but a few hours away.
• During the launch of Apollo 4, sensitive instruments in New York City picked up the shock wave of the liftoff of the Saturn V.
•  

ELVIS PRESLEY

Similarities between Jesus and Elvis Presley...

• JESUS is the Lord's shepherd. ELVIS dated Cybill Shepherd.
• JESUS was a carpenter. ELVIS' favorite high school class was wood shop.
• JESUS was part of the Trinity. ELVIS' very first band was a trio.
• JESUS' entourage, the Apostles, had 12 members. ELVIS' entourage, the Memphis Mafia, had 12 members.
• JESUS is a Capricorn. (December 25) ELVIS is a Capricorn (January 8).
• JESUS was the lamb of God. ELVIS had mutton chop sideburns.
• JESUS was first and foremost the Son of God. ELVIS first recorded with Sun Studios, performing what are still considered to be his foremost recordings.
• JESUS' Father is everywhere. ELVIS' father was a drifter, and moved around quite a bit.
• JESUS said, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink." (John 7:37) ELVIS said, "Drinks on me!" (Jailhouse Rock, MGM:1957)
• JESUS fasted for 40 days and nights. ELVIS had irregular eating habits. (e.g.: 5 banana splits for breakfast)
• JESUS said: "Man shall not live by bread alone." ELVIS liked his sandwiches with peanut butter and bananas.
• Matthew was one of JESUS' many biographers. (The Gospel According to Matthew) Neil Matthews was one of ELVIS' many biographers. (Elvis: A Golden Tribute)
• "[JESUS'] countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow." (Matthew 28:3) ELVIS wore snow-white jumpsuits with (TCB) lightning bolts.
• JESUS said: "Love thy neighbor." (Matthew 22:39) ELVIS said: "Don't be cruel." (RCA 1956)
• JESUS walked on water. (Matthew 14:25) ELVIS surfed on water. (Blue Hawaii, Paramount:1965)
• Mary, an important woman in JESUS' life, had an Immaculate Conception. Priscilla, an important woman in ELVIS' life, attended Immaculate Conception High School.
• JESUS H. CHRIST has 12 letters. ELVIS PRESLEY has 12 letters. No one knows what the "H" in "JESUS H. Christ" stood for. No one was really sure if ELVIS' middle name was "Aron" or "Aaron".
• JESUS wore a crown of thorns. ELVIS wore Royal Crown hair styler.
• JESUS had his famous Resurrection. ELVIS had the famous 1968 "comeback" TV special.
• JESUS lived in a state of grace, in a Near Eastern land. ELVIS lived in Graceland, in a nearly eastern state.

NUMBERS

• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
• Multiply 37,037 by any single number (1-9), then multiply that number by 3. Every digit in the answer will be the same as that first single number.
• The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000
• In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not re-number the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1.
• And the answer is 17...
  • There are 17 notes in the 17th measure of the 17th Prelude in Bach's Well Tempered Clavier.
  • Bach was born in the 17th century, married his wife on October 17, 1707, became the Weimar Kapellmeister in 1717.
  • According to a study by Masters & Johnson, the average American teenage boy has a sex-related thought once every 17 seconds.
  • The Universe is roughly 10^17 seconds old. The nearest star to the sun is about 10^17 meters away.
  • After a 17 week long convention, the United States Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787.
  • The cicada, whose Latin name is Cicada Septemdecim (17 letters), is a locust that takes 17 years to mature. After the cicada eggs hatch, the resulting nymph burrows in the ground for 17 years.
  • The consecutive application of the three basic trigonometric functions sine, cosine, tangent on any number n in degrees always results in .017... i.e., tan(cos(sin(n))) = .017... for ANY n in degrees.
  • K_17 is the smallest complete graph which must have a monochromatic triangle when 3-colored. Seventeen people in the world understand what this really means.
  • If you look up Haiku, a 17-syllable Japanese poetry form, in the index of Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglass Hofstader (17 letters), you will find on page 765 (45 * 17) a reference to page 153 (9 * 17).
  • The Tower of Pisa is leaning 17 feet from the vertical.
  • The 1988 Seoul Olympics lasted for 17 days. The time difference between Seoul and Los Angeles (site of the 1984 Olympics) is 17 hours. On 9/28/88 (92888 = 17 * 5464), the United States had a total of 51 (17*3) medals: 17 Gold, 17 Silver, 17 Bronze.
  • On his voyage in 1493 (1+4+9+3 = 17) Columbus and his two brothers brought 17 shiploads of settlers to Hispaniola.
  • There are 17 sentences in the 17th paragraph of the 17th chapter of War and Peace by Tolstoy. In 1862 (1 + 8 + 6 + 2 = 17), at the age of 34 (34 = 17 * 2), Tolstoy married a woman 17 years of age.
  • The eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is 0.017.
  • In the English language, the seventeenth letter, Q, appears with the frequency of 0.17%.
  • 17 million immigrants came through Ellis Island from the time it opened until the end of World War II. The main building on Ellis Island opened on December 17, 1900. Only 17 tiles in the vaulted ceiling had to be replaced since its opening.
  • The two great universities in Cambridge are Harvard University (17 letters) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (34 = 17*2 letters)...
  • In the 1993-1994 issue of the CUE Guide the entry for Chemistry 17 was spread out on pages 250, 251 (2 * 5 + 0 + 2 + 5 * 1 = 17) and it says that in the term Fall 1992 (1992/17 = 117.17...), there were 34 (17 * 2) first years. The Subject matter was rated 3.4 (17 * .2).
• One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.
• Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.
• America once issued a 5-cent bill.
• In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons.
• You'll eat about 35,000 cookies in a lifetime.
• Taxpayers spent $57,000 on gold-embossed playing cards for Air Force One.
• If you were to spell out numbers you would have to go until "One thousand" until you will find the letter "A"
• A lead pencil is good for about 50,000 words.
• 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.
• If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends upon the bottom.
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• The Gettysburg address is 269 words, the Declaration of Independence is 1,337 words, and the Holy Bible is only 773,000 [what version?] words. However, the tax law has grown from 11,400 words in 1913, to 7 million words today. There are at least 480 different tax forms, each with many pages of instructions. Even the easiest form, the 1040E has 33 pages in instructions, and all in fine print. The IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions each year. Laid end to end, they would stretch 28 times around the earth. Nearly 300,000 trees are cut down yearly to produce the paper for all the IRS forms and instructions. American taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours working to comply with federal taxes each year, more than it takes to produce every car, truck, and van in the United States. The IRS employs 114,000 people; that's twice as many as the CIA and five times more than the FBI. 60% of taxpayers must hire a professional to get through their own return. Taxes eat up 38.2% of the average family's income; that's more than for food, clothing and shelter combined.
• Third World countries how about First and Second World nations? Third World nations are in third place because their economic development lags behind that of countries such as the U.S., Britain, and Germany, which are part of the First World (although they are rarely labeled that way). But then who are the mysterious members of World Number Two? The answer is in the history books. The three groupings date from the Cold War and originally depended on politics even more than economics. In The First World were the Western nations, those countries still economically number one today. The Second World consisted of the Communist countries. In the Third World were those "neutral" nations committed to neither of the two main power "blocs." Many of them are still third economically. Although we don't use "Second World" any more, Russia and China would probably be in it today based on their economies.
• Some people consider the $1 bill unlucky because there are so many 13's on it: 13 stars, 13 stripes, 13 steps, 13 arrows and even an olive branch with 13 leaves on it.
• Ten percent of the Russian government's income comes from the sale of vodka.
• On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
• In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
• In the USA, the average price of a day in the hospital is $360, in Japan one day is $60.
• Average age of top GM executives in 1994 was 49.8 years. Average age of the Rolling Stones in 1994 was 50.6.
• The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
• A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.
• More Monopoly money is printed in a year than real money printed throughout the world.
• 33% of women surveyed lie about their weight.
• The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
• Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 calorie.
• The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.
• 7% of Americans don't know the first nine words of the American anthem, but know the first seven of the Canadian anthem. 5% of Canadians don't know the first seven words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first nine of the American anthem.
• You're born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206.
• Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day.
• Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
• You blink about 84,000,000 times a year.

FOODS

• Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ.
• The world's largest wine cask is in Heidelberg, Germany.
• On Sunday, it is illegal to sell cornflakes in Columbus, Ohio.
• Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
• It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.
• M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest Mars, Sr., then candy maker, and his associate Bruce Murrie.
• The shape of plant collenchyma cells and the shape of the bubbles in beer foam are the same - they are orthotetrachidecahedrons.
• Non-dairy creamer is flammable.
• Iron deficiency causes the most common form of anaemia.
• According to Archives of General Medicine, coffee drinkers have sex more frequently and enjoy it more than non-coffee drinkers.
• Americans spend more on dog food every year than they spend on baby food.
• The first cook book was written by the Greeks in 400 B.C.
• The A&W of root beer fame stands for Allen and Wright.
• Tomatoes were originally thought to be poisonous. But a Virginia doctor demonstrated that wasn't the case in 1733. Dr. Siccary ate the fruit and declared it was not only edible, but very delicious.
• Sensitivity to foods may increase when they are consumed with, or around, the same time as alcohol.
• What do they do with the rest of the lobster when restaurants serve lobster tails? The secret is that there are two kinds of lobsters. There's the kind that gives its all to make sure you have eaten well. This is the Maine or American lobster, all of which, claws to tail, is eaten, usually with pronounced slurping noises and looks of satisfaction (on the diner's face, of course). The spiny or rock lobster, on the other hand is the source of lobster tails, has only one really thick and juicy part, and it's aft. The rest ends up in soups, sauces, seafood salad and egg rolls.
• Dr. Miles Compound Extract of Tomato, a patent medicine, went on the market in the 1830s - it was ketchup.
• The first drive through window at a restaurant was at the McDonald's in Sierra Vista, AZ. It was put in so the soldiers from Ft. Huachuca could get food since the base had a regulation prohibiting anyone in uniform from entering a business establishment.
• Ben and Jerry's sends 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 Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.
• Coca-Cola was originally green.
• Unless you have a doctor's note, its illegal to buy ice cream after 6 p.m. in Newark, New Jersey.
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.
• Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation.
• More than 17-billion hot dogs are sold annually in the United States.
• Scientists have found chocolate has a chemical that helps counteract depression.
• 1 out of 3 of all cows in the US used for food purposes (beef) are used by the McDonald's Corp.
• Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil.
• 85% of us will eat Spam this year.
• 70% of us drink orange juice daily.
• Snickers is the most popular candy.
• The average chocolate bar has 8 insects' legs in it.
• In America in 1977, the punishment for smuggling marijuana was 15 years less than the punishment for smuggling coffee.
• Boxes of candy given as romantic gifts must weigh more than 50lbs. in Idaho
• If you doubt the importance of BEER in history read on...
  • It was the accepted practice in Babylonia 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."
  • Before thermometers were invented, brewers would dip a thumb or finger into the mix to find the right temperature for adding yeast. Too cold, and the yeast wouldn't grow. Too hot, and the yeast would die. This thumb in the beer is where we get the phrase "rule of thumb."
  • In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's."
  • Beer was the reason the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It's clear from the Mayflower's log that the crew didn't want to waste beer looking for a better site. The log goes on to state that the passengers "were hasted ashore and made to drink water that the seamen might have the more beer."
  • After consuming a bucket or two of vibrant brew they called Aul, or ale, the Vikings would head fearlessly into battle often without armor or even shirts. In fact, the term "berserk" means "bare shirt" in Norse, and eventually took on the meaning of their wild battles.
  • In 1740 Admiral Vernon of the British fleet decided to water down the navy's rum. Needless to say, the sailors weren't too pleased and called Admiral Vernon "Old Grog," after the stiff wool grogram coats he wore. The term "grog" soon began to mean the watered down drink itself. When you were drunk on this grog, you were "groggy."
  • 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.
• Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
• Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
• A pound of termites has more nutrients than a pound of beef or pork.
• The Chinese were the first to invent ketchup which was called ke-tsiap and which had pickled fish and spices (no tomatoes). In the 1870's New England colonists mixed tomatoes into the sauce creating present day ketchup.
• The drink '7UP' used to contain lithium (an anti-depressant).
• The 3 most valuable brand names on earth are Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
• The tomato was originally considered a fruit
• Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
• If every Oreo cookie ever made were stacked on top of each other (more than 345 billion), the pile would reach to the moon and back more than five times. Then again, if placed side-by-side, they would encircle the earth 381 times at the equator.
• Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey.
• The average American consumes a pound of chocolate a month...plus an extra pound on Christmas and Easter and two extra pounds at Halloween.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• The average American visits a fast food restaurant six times a month.
• After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again.
• The world's largest oatmeal cake was baked and built in Bertram, Texas during Labor Day weekend 1991. The 33-layer cake stood more than 3 feet tall, weighed 333 pounds, and served 3,333 people.
• You would have to drink 100 cups of coffee in four hours to get a lethal dose of caffeine--ten grams.
• The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.
• The first product to have a UPC bar code on its packaging was Wrigley's gum.
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
• The average American will eat about 11.9 pounds of cereal per year.
• During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food. That's the weight of about six elephants.
• The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9,000 years old.
• The number one selling snack in the U.S.A. is potato chips.
• The average American drinks about 600 sodas a year.
• Eskimo ice cream is neither icy, or creamy.
• Properly kept, vitamins remain stable for four years.
• Caffeine can produce the same symptoms as anxiety neurosis: insomnia, muscle twitching, headache, restlessness, and irritability.
• Kidney failures can be brought on by overuse of analgesics.
• The only place in the world where they make Dr. Pepper according to the original formula is in Dublin, Texas.
• Before it was unsolicited email, Spam was a luncheon meat. It is so resistant to spoilage that, if kept in the closed can, it may well outlast eternity and will certainly live longer than you. Believe it or not it was first promoted as a health food. In Korea it comes in gift boxes, and placed end to end, all the Spam ever sold would circle the Earth more than ten times.
• Three popular misconceptions about Thanksgiving:
  • It's only a U.S. holiday. Nope. Canada declared their Thanksgiving holiday in 1879. These days they observe it on the second Monday in October.
  • Turkeys originated in Turkey. No way. The English called it a turkey-cock, the same name they used for the guinea fowl that came from the Ottoman Empire. Colonists brought it over to America, where it became simply a turkey.
  • Turkeys have always been bred for their meat. Nah. Until the mid 1930s, it was their pretty plumage that people wanted most. However, it *is* true that they were never bred for their intelligence.
• Why do you sometimes see green tint on potato chips? The green is chlorophyll that was produced when a portion of the potato grew aboveground and was exposed to sunlight. This exposure also caused the production of another substance called solanine, which can be toxic.
• Why do onions make you cry? A fresh onion, when cut, releases a gas called propanethiol-Sin to the air. When this gas reaches your eyes, it mixes with the water in the eye to form a weak acid. This acid irritates the eye and causes the tear-producing glands to flood the eye with water in an attempt to wash away the irritant. These tears are what makes you look like you're crying.
• Why are sellers of illegal whiskey called bootleggers? Back in the days of the Old West it was illegal to sell alcohol to Native Americans. Disreputable vendors/peddlers would sometimes smuggle the alcohol onto Indian reservations by hiding flasks in the leg of their boots. These smugglers became known as "bootleggers," a term which now means anyone who smuggles illegal alcohol.
• Why do ice cubes stick together in a glass? Pressure causes ice to melt. Actually, this is what causes an iceberg/glacier to move. The tremendous weight of the glacier causes the ice on the very bottom to melt, creating a layer of water on which the glacier glides. When two ice cubes in a glass of water touch for a prolonged period of time, the slight pressure of one against the other causes a little bit of ice at the point of contact to melt. The melted water then flows away from the point of contact and immediately refreezes. This refrozen water forms sort of a "weld" which causes ice cubes to stick together.
• The Ritz cracker was introduced to markets in 1934, but gourmets had to wait until 1953 for the invention of cheese in a can.
• Teflon was discovered in 1938.
• The candy bar Baby Ruth wasn't named after Babe Ruth, but rather after the daughter of President Grover Cleveland.
• A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.
• Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep him cool. He changed it every two innings.
• Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
• Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
• You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
• Texas holds the record for the most chicken eaten by one person in a life time (estimated 1 Million Chickens In Only 40 Years).
• Over 90% of the calories you burn are used to maintain your body temperature. A good way to lose weight is, therefore, to expose your body to the cold.
• A McDonald's Big Mac bun has an average of 178 sesame seeds.
• Bananas grow on a tropical plant that is not a tree -it has no trunk. Bananas are gigantic herbs that spring from underground stems. What appears to be the trunk is a false stem formed by tightly wrapped leaf sheaths. With stalks 25 feet high, they're the largest plant on earth without a woody stem.
• In Lehigh, Nebraska it's against the law to sell donut holes.
• If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

MARKETING SCREW-UP'S

• Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose," into Spanish where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea."
• When Braniff translated a slogan touting its upholstery, "Fly in Leather," it came out in Spanish as "Fly Naked."
• Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate."
• When Vicks first introduce its cough drops on the German market, they were chagrined to learn that the German pronunciation of "v" is "f," which in German is the guttural equivalent of "sexual penetration."
• Not to be outdone, Puffs tissues tried later to introduce its product, only to learn that "Puff" in German is a colloquial term for a whorehouse.
• Fresca, the soft drink, had problems when it was sold in Mexico. Fresca is slang for lesbian.
• Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.
• Clairol introduced the "Mist Stick", a curling iron, into German only to find out that "mist" is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the "manure stick."
• When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the beautiful Caucasian baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside, since most people can't read.
• Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine.
• The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries. "No Va" means "It Does Not Go" in Spanish.
• An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of "I saw the Pope" (el papa), the shirts read "I saw the potato" (la papa).
• Pepsi's "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", in Chinese.
• Frank Perdue's chicken slogan, "it takes a strong man to make a tender chicken" was translated into Spanish as "it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate."
• The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Ke-kou-ke-la", meaning "Bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax", depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent "ko-kou-ko-le", translating into "happiness in the mouth."
• When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, "it won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." Instead, the company thought that the word "embarazar" (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."

PEOPLE

• The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)
• The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."
• Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
• Isaac Singer invented the sewing machine for home use in 1851.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
• 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.
• William Howard Taft, a former President who weighed 332 pounds, got stuck in the White House tub the first time he used it.
• Astronaut Neil Armstrong (Apollo 11) first stepped on the moon with his left foot.
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
• If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
• Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.
• If Barbie were life-size her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.
• Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
• Famous People Who Never Married...
  • Susan B. Anthony
  • Ludwig Van Beethoven
  • James Buchanan
  • Elizabeth I Queen of England
  • Joan of Arc
  • J. Edgar Hoover
  • Sir Isaac Newton
  • Florence Nightingale
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Voltaire
• The last words of Nathan Hale, the American hanged as a spy by the British during the Revolution, are usually quoted as, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." But according to the diary of a British soldier who took down the remarks, what Hale said was much less poetic: "It is the duty of every good officer to obey any orders given to him by his commander-in-chief"
• President James Garfield was ambidextrous and could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other simultaneously.
• Charles Lindburgh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.
• Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
• US President with the Least Time in Office...William H. Harrison (32 days), second place goes to James A. Garfield (199 days)
• On the Forth of July 1992, Susan Jeske established a World Record, by singing the National Anthem at 17 events in 14 cities within a 24-hour period. She traveled 373 miles by a limousine, 8 miles by a helicopter, 3 miles by a boat and used a motorcycle to help her get through traffic and crowds.
• St. Stephen is the patron saint of bricklayers.
• In 1555, Ivan the Terrible ordered the construction of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. He was so thrilled with the work done by the two architects that he had them blinded so they could never be able to build anything else more beautiful.
• Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour.
• Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
• The length of the finger dictates how fast the finger-nail grows. Therefore, the nail on your middle finger grows the fastest, and on average, your toenails grow twice as slow as your finger-nails.
• Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
• Joe Louis is the only pro heavyweight champion to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was there by Presidential orders because of all the work he did for the servicemen.
• Victor Hugo's Les Miserables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language--823 words without a period.
• Men have more blood than women. Men have 1.5 gallons for men versus .875 gallons for women.
• Vincent van Gogh didn't cut off his ear--not all of it anyway. He only cut a portion of the lobe.
• Both writer Edgar Allen Poe and LSD advocate Timothy Leary were kicked out of West Point.
• Americans will hold more parties in their homes on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year.
• The real Red Baron, Manfred von Richtofen, Germany's air ace in World War I, was nicknamed by Allied pilots for his plane, a red Albatros fighter. The other pilots in his squadron also flew colorful aircraft, earning the name "Flying Circus" for their group. Von Richtofen's 60 confirmed kills made him a feared and formidable opponent, a seemingly super-human pilot. But his luck ran out over France on April 21, 1918 when bullets from ground gunners and Canadian pilot Roy Brown ended his career and his life.
• Mary Todd once dated both Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.
• The first typewriter was built by William Burt in 1829 and was intended to be used for the blind.
• Is it true that every U.S. president elected in years divisible by 20 has died in office? It isn't exactly true, but... the winner may have trouble buying life insurance. So far, nine presidents were elected in years divisible by 20. Six died before their term ended: William Henry Harrison (1840), Lincoln (1860), Garfield (1880), McKinley (1900), Harding (1920), and Kennedy (1960). Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected in 1940 but died in 1945, after his 1944 reelection. So that's really seven out of nine.
• Why "sideburns"? Elvis Presley had them. So did several presidents of the United States in the late 19th century. But more to the point, Civil War General Ambrose Everett Burnside wore them and started a fashion trend. They were even called burnsides, after him. In fact, it's about the only thing at which he was really a success. He developed the breech-loading rifle, but then failed to market it effectively. He was a flop as a general, and was blamed for Union losses at Fredericksburg and Petersburg. Later he was a U.S. Senator and Governor of Rhode Island, but nobody can remember anything he did while in office.
• The Queen Does Not Look Well. When Pedro I became King of Portugal in the 14th century, he had his dead mistress dug up so she could be crowned queen alongside him. Many of the nobles at the coronation even kissed her hand!. After the ceremonies they put her back in the box and returned her to her tomb.
• Humans really use only 10% of their brains? The truth is though, that while we don't understand enough about the brain to know exactly how much of it we use, we know that we make use of much more than 10%. The brain has too much to do for 90% of it to be dormant. So where did this 10% business come from? No one's sure how the myth started. It may have simply been made up to illustrate through exaggeration the idea that human beings are far from reaching their mental potential. Or it may have been based on the fact that about 5% of our brain cells are functioning at any one time.
• Mao Zedong, like many Chinese of his time, refused to brush his teeth. Instead, he rinsed his mouth with tea and chewed the leaves. Why brush? "Does a tiger brush his teeth?" argued Mao. As you can imagine, his teeth were green. Chairman Mao also loved to chain-smoke English cigarettes, when his doctor asked him to cut down, he explained that "smoking is also a form of deep-breathing exercise, don't you think?"
• In Boston you can visit the grave of Elizabeth Goose, who in 1719 wrote the nursery rhymes now attributed to "Mother Goose." That's one version of the story. Another has it that a bookstore owner in Boston, Elizabeth Goose's son-in-law, published a collection of rhymes for children called "Songs for the Nursery or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children". His title, supposedly a tribute to Elizabeth Goose, was actually ironic. Her son-in-law found her singing unbearable. There's only one problem with these stories. They are about as true and reliable as, well, fairy tales. The character known as Mother Goose was first heard from in English in a collection of British nursery rhymes, "Mother Goose's Melody; or Sonnets for the Cradle", published in 1781 in Britain. She was fictional, probably derived from a French collection of fairy tales, "Tales of Mother Goose," published in 1697.
• Why does a sudden scare sometimes cure hiccups? Hiccups are spasms of the muscles in the diaphragm controlled by the vagus nerves. The spasms occur when the nerves are irritated, such as with a full stomach, carbonated water, etc. It is sometimes possible to stop the spasms by giving the vagus nerves other tasks to perform. Since a sudden scare sends a host of signals down the vagus nerves to slow the heartbeat and decrease blood pressure, this distraction often causes the nerves to forget about the spasms and the hiccups to stop.
• Why do we tie old shoes to the newlywed's car? Shoes are of course related to the foot, and feet have been considered phallic symbols since the beginning of civilization. The spirit embodied in the shoes is the same as that motivating the throwing of rice: it's a wish that the couple's union will be fruitful, that they will produce offspring.
• We've all known stuffed shirts. In old movies it was often the boss, who used words like "hrrumph!" Or teachers whose existence seemed to be justified by their ability to dampen any child's spirit. Such people always keep their top button buttoned and are never able to unbutton in any other sense. They have starch in their veins and are held upright and stiff by the narrowness of their outlook. Stuffed shirts have about as much life and dynamism as a scarecrow, the object from which the expression comes. We know we've come across the human variety when their shirt or blouse might as well be stuffed with straw for all the vitality and flexibility they display.
• Homo sapiens shouldn't feel too high and mighty, even though they currently dominate the Earth. After all, they are covered with flesh that medical scientists have determined bears an important resemblance to Silly Putty. The specific gravity of your skin and the gooey stuff is close enough that doctors have actually used Silly Putty to align and test CAT scan machines.
• The image of the king used in most standard decks of playing cards is said to have been based on Charles I, the English monarch who was beheaded in 1649.
• "King Louis XIV of France owned about 1,000 wigs.
• The 12th president of the United States was David Rice Atchinson, a Missouri senator who served for one day in 1849. The new president usually took office on March 4. But that year it fell on a Sunday, and although President James Polkleft on schedule, Zachary Taylor did not take the oath until the next day. Rice was president pro tempore of the Senate, and under the provisions of the Constitution, he served until Taylor was sworn in. Atchinson neither started a war nor raised any taxes: he just left quietly after 24 hours.
• People who have never been married are seven and a half times more likely than married people to be admitted to a psychiatric facility.
• Why do eyes sometimes appear red in a flash photograph? This occurs when a flash is aimed so that its light reflects off of the back of the eye and into the camera lens. The red you see in a photo is caused by the blood vessels in the retinal tissue on the back of the eye.
• Julius Caesar was self-conscious about his receding hairline.
• The only member of Custer's Brigade to survive the battle at Little Bighorn was an Indian Scout named known as "Curley".
• Professional football player Fred Cox invented the Nerf football because he wanted soft spiral football to protect players from injuries.
• Joseph Stalin refused a German request to swap prisoners in World War II. His son, who was captured during the war, died in a prison camp as a result.
• Douglas MacArthur's mother used to send letters to his military superiors suggesting that they promote her son.
• Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, was supposedly killed by a tortoise that was dropped on his head by an eagle who mistook the chrome dome (bald head) for a rock.
• More than 100-million Americans wear glasses.
• It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace"
• Paul Cezanne had a parrot who he taught to say, "Cezanne is a great painter."
• The British once went to war over a sailor's ear. It happened in 1739, when Britain launched hostilities against Spain because a Spanish officer had supposedly sliced off the ear of a ship's captain named Robert Jenkins.
• Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisma Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.
• In the name of art, Chris Burden arranged to be shot by a friend while another person photographed the event. He sold the series of pictures to an art dealer.
• The world record for a photographic memory feat is held by a man in Burma who recited 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts from memory.
• According to the US Government people have tried nearly 28,000 different ways to lose weight.
• During the reign of Catherine I of Russia, the rules for parties stipulated that no man was to get drunk before 9 o'clock and ladies weren't to get drunk at any hour.
• What occurs more often in December than any other month? Conception.
• Jane Barbie was the woman who did the voice recordings for the Bell System.
• The only real person to be a Pez head was Betsy Ross.
• Leontina Albina of San Antonio,Chile, gave birth to her 55th child in 1981, making her the world's most prolific mother.
• In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of dried leaves of the common foxglove plant, digitalis purpurea, on heart action. Still used in heart medications, digitalis slows the pulse and increases the force of heart contractions and the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat.
• The characters Bert and Ernie, on Sesame Street, were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life."
• How most of us spend our lives...
  • 25 years sleeping
  • 14 years at work and at school
  • 12 years watching TV
  • 5 years socializing
  • 3 years reading
  • 3 years eating
  • 2 years bathing and grooming
  • 1 year on the telephone
  • 10 months on the toilet
  • 5 months having sex
  • 10 years miscellaneous activity: housekeeping, shopping, waiting in lines, walking, driving, entertainment, and doing nothing
• John Walker, an English chemist, never patented the match (he invented it) because he thought it was too important to be anything but public property.
• Boys who have unusual first names are more likely to have mental problems than boys with common names. Girls don't seem to have this problem.
• If you're cold put a hat on. 80% of your body temperature escapes through your head.
• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• The record number of people crammed into a 1998 Volkswagen Bug and still able to close all doors is 18. They were college students.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
• Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
• The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
• Second hand tobacco smoke is the third leading preventable cause of death, after active tobacco smoking and alcohol use.
• More women (80%) wash their hands in the bathroom than men (55%).
• 37% of all women prefer shoe shopping to sex.
• A vast majority of married men sleep on the right hand side of the bed (facing from the headboard), regardless of race, creed or age. Divorced men often switch to the left side.
• Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace.
• Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.
• John Lennon's first girlfriend was named Thelma Pickles.
• The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
• 1 in 8 people in have been employed by McDonald's in the US.
• The average U.S. high school graduate has a vocabulary of about 60,000 words.
• Joe Kittinger made the highest intentional skydive in history when in 1960 he jumped out of a balloon at 103,000 ft., and is the only person to have broken the sound barrier with his body alone.
• In 1968, Steve McPeak traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles on a unicycle. The trip took him six weeks.
• According to The Guinness Book of Records, the quickest picker-upper when it comes to beer is one Tom Gaskin, who in Northern Ireland in 1996 managed to lift a 137-pound keg over his head 902 times in only six hours.
• The alarm clock was not invented by the Marquis de Sade, as some suspect, but rather by a man named Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, in 1787. Perversity, though, characterized his invention from the beginning. The alarm on his clock could ring only at 4 am.
• Henry David Thoreau, the author of "Walden" was also a pencil-maker.
• Quick-frozen food was marketed by a man named Birdseye.
• An organ company was created by a man named Hammond.
• The Marx Brothers went from Broadway to Hollywood.
• On an island in northern Wales there's a village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.
• Historically, only Hawaiian men danced the Hula.
• The credit card is rooted in the idea of allowing consumers to buy on time, which took hold in the 1920s. By the late 1940s, some department stores and gasoline companies had issued courtesy cards to their customers, granting them credit in advance of a purchase. Then, in 1950, businessman Francis Xavier McNamara was having lunch and discovered he had left his cash at home. He was so embarrassed that he invented the Diners Club, which issued a card good for meals, lodging and other travel expenses, the prototype for all future credit cards.
• U.S. President Calvin Coolidge (30th) was born on July 4, 1872. Presidents John Adams (2nd) and Thomas Jefferson (3rd) both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. President James Monroe (8th) died on July 4, 1831.
• Mir Bahboob Ali Khan (1856-1911), 6th Nizam of Hyderabad and richest prince in India, never wore the same garment twice in his entire lifetime. His clothing, fashioned of fine white muslin, was worn once and then given to palace servants.
• Most deaths in a hospital are between the times of 4pm and 6pm, the time when the human body is at its weakest.
• Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
• Length of beard an average man would grow if he never shaved... 27.5 feet.
• Amount of time an average man spends shaving... 3350 hours.
• Number of whiskers on the face of the average man... 30,000.
• Number of inches whiskers grow per year... 5.5
• The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
• Percentage of American women who say they would marry the same man... 50%
• According to a major hotel chain, approximately the same numbers of men and women are locked out of their rooms, 32 percent are less than fully dressed.
• In 1972, a group of scientists reported that you could cure the common cold by freezing the big toe.
• Flamenco dancer Jose Greco took out an insurance policy thorough Lloyd's of London against his pants splitting during a performance.
• The largest number of children born to one woman is recorded at 69. From 1725-1765 a Russian peasant woman gave birth to 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets.
• Greatest Lovers in History...
  • King Solomon - Had 300 wives & hundreds of mistresses
  • Cleopatra - Took her first lover at age 12 and could allegedly take dozens of lovers a night
  • Empress Theodora - Took dozens of lovers each day
  • Queen Zingua - Had her lovers killed in the morning when she was through with them
  • Giovana Giacomo Cassanova - Seduced thousands of women, over 100 of them are recorded
  • Catherine The Great - An insomniac, consequently taking hundreds of lovers
  • Marquis De Sade -  Sadism is a term we get from his name, was put in an asylum for all his sex crimes
  • Mae West - Had an active sex life until her 80s, and had one lover that lasted for 15 hours
  • Mata Hari - Spy who slept her way to war secrets to kill over 50, 000 soldiers
  • Brigitte Bardot - Admitted that she "Must have a man every night"
• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down ~ hence the expression "to get fired."
• 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.
• Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
• Jeanne Pierre Francois Blanchard built the first parachute and tested it using a dog. He put the dog in a basket equipped with his invention and then dropped it from a hot air balloon.
• Queen Victoria eased the discomfort of her menstrual cramps by having her doctor supply her with marijuana.
• Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to have been born in a hospital.
• There are 18 doctors in the US called Dr. Doctor, and one called Dr. Surgeon. There is also a dermatologist named Dr. Rash, a psychiatrist called Dr. Couch and an anesthesiologist named Dr Gass.
• In 1990, a 64-year old Hartsville, Tennessee, woman entered a hospital for surgery for what doctors diagnosed as a tumor on her buttocks. What surgeons found, however, was a four-inch pork chop bone, which they removed. They estimated that it had been in place for five to ten years. The woman could not remember sitting on it, or eating it for that matter.
• Electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain can revive long-lost memories.
• The average person sheds 1 pound of skin a year
• According to the Texas Department of Transportation, one person is killed annually painting stripes on the state's highways and roads.
• Early Spanish missionaries in Texas hoped to encourage the spread of European values by offering flannel underwear to Native Americans.
• A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years.
• The trick to curing hiccups is to get the nerves that regulate breathing synchronized.

1.      Hold your breath as long as you can, then exhale very gradually.

2.      Deep slow breathing.

3.      Nonstop, slow sipping of a glass of warm water.

4.      Taking a teaspoon of granulated sugar.

• Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
• 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.
• The average person laughs 15 times a day.
• In Bangladesh, kids as young as 15 can be jailed for cheating on their finals.
• 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.
• In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
• Most people speak at about 60 words per minute, which is about a word a second, if you get really excited you might get to 120/150 words per minute. Steve Woodmore holds the current World Record for fast talking, he can speak at 637 words per minute, which is 10.25 words per second.
• Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
• George Washington was the first Irish US President
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
• One in eight women and one in seven men will have an affair within the first two years of marriage.
• State with the Highest Divorce Rate.. Texas
• Thomas Edison, light bulb inventor, was afraid of the dark.
• There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
• Alaska has the highest percentage of people who walk to work.
• Most Common Last Names in the United States...

0.      Smith

1.      Johnson

2.      Williams

3.      Brown

4.      Jones

5.      Miller

6.      Davis

7.      Wilson

8.      Anderson

9.      Taylor

• In space, astronauts cannot cry, because there is no gravity, so the tears can't flow.
• About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.
• More people use blue toothbrushes than red ones.
• Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.
• Martha Washington had the equivalent of 6 million dollars when she married George
• Left-handedness is extremely common in twins. It is unusual, however, for both to be left-handed.
• Most deaths in a hospital are between the times of 4pm and 6pm, the time when the human body is at its weakest.
• There are 10 doctors in the U.S. with the last name of 'Nurse'.
• More than half the American men surveyed in a recent poll admit to having sex with women they disliked.
• Hitler named the new Germany the Third Reich, promising a link to the glory of the country's past. ("Reich" is German for empire.) The first Reich was the medieval Holy Roman Empire, which united much of what is now Germany and Italy. The second was created by Otto Von Bismarck in 1871. The Fuhrer promised that his Third Reich would last 1,000 years. But it died along with the master race in 1945, in the ruins of Berlin, after a mere twelve.
• Money man Cornelius Vanderbilt was an insomniac and a believer in the occult. He was not able to fall asleep unless each leg of his bed was planted in a dished filled with salt. He felt this kept out the evil spirits.
• Neil Sedaka's 1959 hit "Oh Carol" was about singer Carole King.
• A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
• The human heart creates enough pressure while pumping to squirt blood 30 feet.
• Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
• There are more collect calls on Father's Day than any other day of the year.
• More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.
• Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
• Nevada has the highest alcohol consumption level (4.85 gallons per person per year, New Hampshire is #2, Alaska is #3)
• 35.5% of Mississippi residents over the age of 25 have not finished high school (Alaska is the best state with only 13.4%)
• 30.7% of the adult residents in Mississippi are overweight (Colorado & Wyoming are the lowest, 18.4%)
• Being too thin is as dangerous to your health as being too fat.
• Most Common New Year Resolutions...

0.      Lose weight

1.      Stop smoking

2.      Stick to a budget

3.      Save more money

4.      Find a better job

5.      Become more organized

6.      Exercise more

7.      Be more patient at work/with others

8.      Eat better

9.      Become a better person

• Left-handers comprise 4% to 10% of the American population.
• China has more English speakers than the United States.
• The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
• Emperor Nero played the harp while Rome burned
• By the age of 60, most people have lost 50% of their taste buds. Losing their sense of taste.
• Queen Supayalat of Burma ordered about 100 of her husband's relatives clubbed to death. She did this to ensure the throne to her husband.
• A man's beard grows fastest when he anticipates sex.
• You share your birthday with at least 9 million people.
• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
• 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.
• Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed people do.
• In a recent customer survey, over 60% of women confirmed they could not have an orgasm without the aid of a vibrator.
• In the U.S. there is, on average, three sex change operations per day.
• A man irate about his income tax paid Uncle Sam with a plaster of paris check that weighed several pounds. He wasn't all that bright, because once the government cashed the check, it was returned to him and he had to keep it for five years for his records.
• Men are 1.6 times more likely to undergo by-pass surgery than women.
• In a short period, Ryoki Inoue ruled 95% of all the pocket books published in Brazil. He wrote 999 great tales across six  years, together with stories, about far west, war, cops, spying, love and science fiction.
• Four out of five Americans throw sweepstakes mailings into the trash.
• Bob Dole is 10 years older than the Empire State Building.
• The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
• Bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers were all invented by women.
• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• In 1893 two fighters were duking it out for the lightweight championship of the south. They ended in a draw after 110 rounds.
• You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
• The world's oldest and longest-reigning monarch is King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.
• Most people think that John F. Kennedy was the youngest President. In fact,he was not. Theodore Roosevelt was. Teddy Roosevelt was President McKinley's vice-president. When Mckinley was assassinated, Roosevelt was 42, making Roosevelt the youngest president. John Kennedy, at 43, was the youngest elected President.
• P. J. Tierney, developer of the modern diner, died of indigestion in 1917 after eating at a diner.
• 40% of all people who come to a party in your home will snoop in your medicine cabinet.
• The record for the longest hair in the world belongs to Diane Witt.
• In ancient Egypt, Priests plucked every hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
• If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
• Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, every time you breathe.
• Only 30% of us can flare our nostrils.
• 21% of us don't make our bed daily. 5% of us never do.
• Men do 29% of laundry each week. Only 7% of women trust their husbands to do it correctly.
• 40% of women have hurled footwear at a man.
• 85% of men don't use the slit in their underwear.
• 67.5% of men wear tightie whities (briefs).
• The average bra size today is 36C whereas 10 years ago it was a 34B. 85% of women wear the wrong bra size.
• 3 out of 4 of us store our dollar bills in rigid order with singles leading up to higher denominations.
• 13% of us admit to occasionally doing our offspring's homework.
• 91% of us lie regularly.
• 27% admit to cheating on a test or quiz.
• 29% admit they've intentionally stolen something from a store.
• 50% admit they regularly sneak food into movie theaters to avoid the high prices of snack foods.
• 90% believe in divine retribution.
• 10% believe in the 10 Commandments.
• 82% believe in an afterlife.
• 45% believe in ghosts.
• 13% (mostly men) have spent a night in jail.
• 29% of us are virgins when we marry.
• 58.4% have called into work sick when we weren't.
• 10% of us switch tags in the store to pay less for an item.
• Over 50% believe in spanking - but only a child over 2 years old.
• 35% give to charity at least once a month.
• How far would you go for $10 million? 25% would abandon their friends, family, and religion. 7% would murder.
• 69% eat the cake before the frosting.
• When nobody else is around, 47% drink straight from the carton.
• 22% of us skip lunch daily.
• 9% of us skip breakfast daily.
• 66% of us eat cereal regularly.
• 22% of all restaurant meals include French fries.
• 14% of us eat the watermelon seeds.
• Only 13% brush our teeth from side to side.
• 45% use mouthwash every day.
• 22% leave the glob of toothpaste in the sink.
• The typical shower is 101 degrees F.
• Nearly 1/3 of US women color their hair.
• 9% of women and 8% of men have had cosmetic surgery.
• 53% of women will not leave the house without makeup on.
• 58% of women paint their nails regularly.
• 62% of us pop our zits.
• 33% of women lie about their weight.
• 10% of us claim to have seen a ghost.
• 57% have had deja vu.
• 49% believe in ESP.
• 4 out of 5 of us have suffered from hemorrhoids.
• 44% have broken a bone.
• Only 30% of us know our cholesterol level.
• 14% have attended a self-help meeting.
• 15% regularly go to a shrink.
• 78% would rather die quickly than live in a retirement home.
• 46.5% of men say they ALWAYS put the seat down after they've used the toilet, yet women claim to ALWAYS find it up.
• 30% of us refuse to sit on a public toilet seat.
• 54.2% of us always wash our hands after using the toilet. 23.5% admit they don't always flush.
• 55.2% will let someone else come in the bathroom while they're using the toilet.
• 39% of us peek in our host's bathroom cabinet. 17% have been caught by the host.
• 81.3% would tell an acquaintance to zip his pants.
• 29% of us ignore RSVP.
• 71.6% of us eavesdrop.
• 22% are functionally illiterate. Less than 10% are trilingual.
• 37% claim to know how to use all the features on their VCR.
• 53% prefer ATM machines over tellers.
• 56% of women do the bills in a marriage.
• 2 out of 3 of us wouldn't give up our spouse even for a night for a million bucks.
• 20% of us have played in a band at one time in our life.
• 40% of us have had music lessons.
• 44% reuse tinfoil.
• 57% save pretty gift paper to reuse.
• 66% of women and 59% of men have used a mix to cook and taken credit for doing it from scratch.
• 53% read their horoscopes regularly.
• 16% of us have forgotten our own wedding anniversary (mostly men).
• 59% of us say we're average-looking.
• 90% of us depend on alarm clocks to wake us.
• 53% of us would take advice from Ann Landers.
• 28% of us have skinny-dipped. 14% with the opposite sex.
• 51% of adults dress up for a Halloween festivity.
• On average, we send 38 Christmas cards every year.
• 20% of women consider their parents to be their best friends.
• 2 out of 5 have married their first love.
• The biggest cause of matrimonial fighting is money.
• Only 4% asked the parents' approval for their bride's hand.
• 1 in 5 men proposed on his knees. 6% propose over the phone.
• 71% can drive a stick-shift car.
• 45% of us consistently follow the speed limit. 2/3 of us speed up at a yellow light.
• 1/3 of us don't wear seat belts.
• 12% of men never use their car blinkers.
• 44% of men tailgate to speed up the person in front of them.
• 25% of us drive after we've been drinking.
• 4 out of 5 sing in the car.

PLACES

• The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
• Texas is also the only state that is allowed to fly its state flag at the same height as the U.S. flag.
• The first song played on Armed Forces Radio during operation Desert Shield was "Rock the Casba" by the Clash.
• The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
• The deepest spot in the ocean is in the Mariana Trench at 11.7 km
• 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.
• The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
• Real estate developers are forever coming up with warm sounding names for what had only recently been a swamp or garbage dump--witness all the Pleasant Valleys, Forest Glens, and the like. The man who started this practice was the Norseman, Eric the Red, who in 982 A.D. discovered a huge piece of real estate in the North Atlantic covered with ice and called it Greenland, solely to attract settlers.
• The customs house in Mexico City, now the federal treasury, was started in 1730. Work was halted immediately when the builders estimated it would require ten years to complete the project. A beautiful Mexican girl, Sara de Acuna, promised to marry Juan Guitierrez if he would finish the building in six months. He accomplished the task just three days short of the deadline.
• The wettest spot in the world is located on the island of Kauai. Mt. Waialeale consistently records rainfall at the rate of nearly 500 inches per year.
• In Britain, banks are required to accept any check that's correctly made out, no matter what it's written on. It took the editor of the humor magazine Punch to put this rule to a test: he made out a check to a writer on the side of a cow.
• Hoover Dam's structural volume surpasses the largest pyramid in Egypt, which took 20 years and 100,000 men to complete. It took 4 years and 5,000 workers to complete Hoover Dam.
• Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
• The fastest tectonic movement on Earth, 24 cm per year, is at the Tonga microplate near Samoa.
• The United States was the first and only to incorporate daylight savings time
• The Sahara desert stretches for more than three-million square miles. It's bigger than all of Australia, three times bigger than the Arabian desert, which itself is twice as big as the Gobi in Mongolia, which in turn is twice as big as the Great Basin desert of Utah and Nevada.
• The only nation whose name begins with an "A", but doesn't end in an "A" is Afghanistan.
• The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
• Three Amazon Basin waterfalls are at least two-thousand feet long from top to bottom.
• Reno, Nevada is west of Los Angeles, California.
• Have you ever heard of? Tarzan, Texas - Chicken Head, Florida - Scarface, California - Latex, Louisiana - Hot Coffee, Mississippi - Paradox, New York - Crapo, Maryland - Boogertown, North Carolina - Spasticville, Kansas - Hellhole, Idaho - Purgatory, Maine - Gun Barrel City, Texas - Climax, Michigan - Hooker, California - Spread Eagle, Wisconsin - Blue Ball, Pennsylvania - Dildo Key, Florida - Needmore, Arkansas - Hardup, Utah - Intercourse, Pennsylvania - Big Bogue Homo, Mississippi - Hornytown, North Carolina - Conception Junction, Missouri - Rudeville, New Jersey - Boring, Oregon - Mary's Igloo, Alaska - Hell, Michigan - Virgin, Utah - Dulls Corner, Maryland - Bowlegs, Oklahoma - Volcano, Hawaii - Beersville, Pennsylvania - Fleatown, Ohio - Burnt Corn, Alabama - Two Guns, Arizona - Toad Suck, Arkansas
• In Santa Cruz there is a law on the books that makes "unauthorized deposit of coins" in a parking meter illegal. In other words, if you put coins in a meter other than the one you are parked at, you can be cited.
• The historic Ford 1,100-acre facility near the Rouge River was once the world's largest auto plant. Henry Ford built the plant in 1918 because he dreamed of building a car from start to finish in one location.
• The national anthem of Greece has 158 verses. No one in Greece has memorized all 158 verses.
• The harp is the official emblem of Ireland, not the shamrock
• Weathervanes topped by the silhouette of a rooster? In the Middle Ages a Papal edict decreed that the image should appear on top of churches as a kind of wake-up call to parishioners that they should attend services. The image was actually a reference to Peter's betrayal of Jesus, who said, "I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me." The faithful, by attending church, would show that they were not betraying Christ by turning away from Him. Eventually the image became secularized, appearing atop other kinds of buildings on weathervanes.
• It's illegal in Alabama to wear a fake moustache that causes laughter in church.
• You're subject to fines and/or imprisonment for making "uglyfaces" at dogs in Oklahoma.
• Vatican City has its own money and stamps
• 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.
• Sicily was not part of Italy until after WWII
• On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag.
• Utah is the only state in the Union that executes criminals by firing squad?
• All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
• When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.
• Until 1796, there was a state in the United States called Franklin. Today it is known as Tennessee.
• It's against the law to burp or sneeze in a church in Omaha, Nebraska.
• The state of Florida is bigger than England.
• It snowed in the Sahara desert on February 18, 1979.
• Finland was the only country to repay its war reparations after World War I.
• Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village."
• It's against the law to slam your car door in Switzerland.
• In Texas, it's illegal to put graffiti on someone else's cow.
• By law, in Bourbon, Miss., one small onion must be served with each glass of water in a restaurant.
• The Tower of Independence clock on the back of a U.S. $100 dollar bill shows the time as 4:10.
• The Union ironclad, Monitor, was the first U.S. ship to have a flush toilet.
• The U.S. city with the highest rate of lightning strikes per capita is Clearwater, Florida.
• It would take 13 years and eight months to stay one night in every room at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.
• Kitsap County, Washington, was originally called Slaughter County, and the first hotel there was called the Slaughter House.
• Most common town names in the US...
  1. Fairview
  2. Midway
  3. Oak Grove
  4. Franklin
  5. Riverside
  6. Centerville
  7. Mount Pleasant
  8. Georgetown
  9. Salem
  10. Greenwood
• Hong Kong has taken overtaken Tokyo as the world's most expensive city. US cities don't even make the list until number 21 (New York).
• There are 10 million bricks in the Empire State building.
• The Eiffel Tower is second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a suicide location.
• The University of Calgary offers a two-day course in igloo building
• The first subway was built in London (1860-63) by the cut and cover method. Other notable subways: Paris (the Metro 1898), New York (1900)
• The Catholic Church is the largest land owner in New York City.
• The Anglo-Chinese School (Singapore) holds the record for the most number of people in a musical chairs event, which took place in 1992. Over a thousand students, teachers and assorted other people took part in the event.
• Jamaica has the most churches per square mile of any country in the world.
• The forest of Canadian Lake District is so dense that during winter the snow stays on top of the trees and the forest floor stays bare.
• The ancient city of Pompeii was buried by a volcanic eruption.
• The first Bryan Baptist Church in Savannah lays claim to being the oldest African-American church in the United States. It was established in 1788, and services are still held.
• The coldest place in our solar system is not Pluto, it's Triton, one of Neptune's moons.
• The Windiest place on earth is Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire.
• During the blackout of 1977 when New York City was without power from early evening to late the next afternoon, a record 80 million telephone calls were made.
• The names of some cities in the United States are the names of other U.S. states. These include Nevada in Missouri, Oregon in Wisconsin, Kansas in Oklahoma, Wyoming in Ohio, Michigan in North Dakota, Delaware in Arkansas, and Indiana in Pennsylvania.
• In 1845 Boston had an ordinance banning bathing unless you had a doctor's prescription.
• In 1929, the Stock Market Crash and The Vatican became its own nation.
• In 1969 a brief battle broke out between Honduras and El Salvador. Although tensions had been rough between the two countries, the reason for the war was El Salvador's victory over Honduras in the World Cup Soccer playoffs. Gunfire was exchanged for about 30 minutes before reason could prevail.
• During the Roman Empire, the Romans used lead as sweetening Agent.
• The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.
• The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is one of the few places in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
• In 1980, more than 6 million trees were uprooted or flattened by the blast of Mount St. Helens in Washington.
• Lightning strikes the earth somewhere more than seventeen million times every day, or about two hundred times every second.
• The hottest temperature ever recorded was 136 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Libya on Sept. 13, 1922. The coldest temperature of -128 degrees was recorded in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.
• Of the seven wonders of the world noted in the Antipater of Sidon in the second century B.C. only the Pyramids of Egypt (the oldest of the seven) remain. The other six are: the hanging gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pharos (Lighthouse) at Alexandria.
• The continents names all end with the same letter with which they start.
• Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
• Mount Everest is more than 29-thousand feet high, which makes it almost 50-percent taller than Mount McKinley. Mount McKinley is taller than Africa's Kilimanjaro or Japan's Mount Fuji or any of the Alps.
• The sari has been used continuously and relatively unchanged for thousands of years.
• Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonald's

STAR TREK

• Across all media, Star Trek licenses have generated more than 2.1 billion dollars in revenues to its many copyright holders.
• Star Trek: Voyager is the only television show in TV Guide history to be featured on the cover of the publication before editors could even see the show.
• Star Trek is seen in over 100 countries and has been translated into dozens of languages.
• 13 Star Trek books are sold every minute in the United States.
• Over 63 million Star Trek books are in print and have been translated into more than 15 languages, including Chinese, Norwegian, Hungarian and Hebrew.
• "Trekkies" or more correctly - "Trekkers" are the only fans listed by name in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• A 1993 study from Purdue University found that children learn more about science from Star Trek than anything else outside the home.
• Since July 1986, every new classic Star Trek novel publication by Pocket Books has been a New York Times paperback best-seller. To date, the novels have sold close to 30 million copies, making it the best-selling series in publishing history.
• The U.S. Space Shuttle, the Enterprise, was given its name after NASA received 400,000 requests from Star Trek fans.
• Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is offering a course on Star Trek. Fifty-two students are watching episodes of the original television series and are exploring the relationships between popular culture and science. The course is called "Where No One Has Gone Before". Required reading includes "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey." There are 29 students on the waiting list and it's so popular that a lawyer from Olympia wanted to enroll at Evergreen just for the class, and one student's mother called from Colorado trying to get her son in. "Star Trek"
• After the first season of "Star Trek," Nichelle Nichols was planning to leave the series because she felt her character was underused. That weekend however, she was introduced to a fan of hers: Dr. Martin Luther King! When she told him that she was planning on leaving the show, he told her: "You cannot! Don't you know who you are? Don't you know what you have? Don't you know you're a part of history? You're opening a door that can never be closed. You're changing the face of television forever. Nichelle, you cannot leave!" That Monday, she went to Gene Roddenberry and told him what had happened. "Thank God, someone important out there understands what I'm trying to do!" he said. The rest is history.
• Mr. Spock was outlined in the initial proposal as a Martian with a reddish skin.
• The original outline for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" listed Captain Jean-Luc Picard as Julien Picard and Wesley Crusher as a female, Leslie Crusher. Worf did not appear in the original outline.
• The Next Generation episode "The High Ground" was originally banned in Britain by the BBC because of its reference to terrorism and the IRA.
• The Original Type 2 phaser featured on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was nicknamed the 'dustbuster' due to its resemblance to a famous handheld vacuum cleaner.
• The Borg were originally conceived as a race of insects. This idea was eventually dropped for budgetary reasons.
• When Patrick Stewart was filming the movie "Death Train" in Zagreb in 1992 in Croatia, he went to a restaurant. An extremely dignified Croatian in tailcoat took the order. Without any reference to the fact that he might've known who Patrick was, he served the salad that Patrick had ordered as a first course. Sitting in the middle of the salad was an Enterprise carved out of peppers, carrots and cucumber! Star Trek is indeed everywhere!

TELEVISION/MOVIES

• In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
• All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
• Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
• According to Nielson Media Research, the average person watches television about 4 hours per day - or, more precisely, 27 hours and 53 minutes a week.
• Most extras assembled for a single scene: 300,000, for the two-minute funeral scene in Gandhi.
• Most insects used in a film: 22 million bees in The Swarm.
• Most kisses in a movie: 127, by Lionel Barrymore in Don Juan(1926). The recipients were Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor. This was also the first feature film with a musical soundtrack (but no dialogue).
• The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver."
• Michael J. Fox's middle name is really Andrew.
• In the movie 'The Lion King', when grown up Simba goes on top of the cliff and lies down and causes a cloud of dust to rise in the air, you can see the word, 'sex' appear in the dust.
• It is a misdemeanor to show movies that depict acts of felonious crime in Montana
• "I Love Lucy", a 1950's sitcom, airs every hour of every day somewhere in the world.
• The original title of the musical "Hello Dolly!" was "Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman."
• One year, Elvis Presley once paid 91% of his annual income to the IRS.
• A theater manager in Seoul, Korea felt that The Sound of Music was too long, so he shortened it by cutting out all the songs.
• "Fritz the Cat", the popular cartoon character some years ago was created by an Australian, Pat Sullivan. Fritz was the world's most popular cartoon until the arrival of Mickey Mouse in the late 20's
• Theaters in Glendale, California can show horror films only on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.
• 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.
• In the movie, 'Star Wars', during the scene in which Luke gets out of his X-wing fighter after blowing up the Death Star, he accidentally calls Princess Leia 'Carrie' (her real first name).
• The First episode of "Joanie Loves Chachi" (Happy Days spin-off) was the highest rated American TV program on Korean television. "Chachi" is Korean for penis.
• Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy.
• The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.
• The Professor's real name was Roy Hinkley, Mary Ann's last name was Summers and Mrs. Howell's maiden name was Wentworth.
• The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life."
• The longest title in cinema history belongs to the 1993 film "Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Zombified, Flesh-eating, Sub-Humanoid Living Dead - Part 4."
• Actor Andy Garcia was a Siamese twin. When he was born, he had a twin the size of a small ball attached to his left shoulder which was surgically removed and died. He still has a scar.
• In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
• Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
• In June 1969, six months after Richard Nixon took office, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was replaced by Hee Haw.
• In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 1010.
• Who's that playing the piano on the "Mad About You" theme? Paul Reiser himself.
• Who's that singing the "Frasier" theme? It's Frasier himself, Kelsey Grammer.
• One in every four Americans has appeared on television.
• 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.
• Still loving Lucy... It's been almost fifty years since "I Love Lucy" debuted on CBS on October 15, 1951: - Lucille Ball had starred in a similar show on radio, "My Favorite Husband." - CBS executives initially thought that Desi Arnaz, Lucy's *real life* spouse, wouldn't be believable as her husband on the show. - "I Love Lucy" was the first major network program filmed before a live audience. - Lucy was on the cover of the first issue of TV Guide.
• Warwick Davis had a cameo in the Phantom Menace. He was watching the pod race with Watto. When Warwick Davis was ten years old he played Wicket the Ewok, in The Return of the Jedi.
• In 1959 and prior years it was common practice to begin viewing a movie after it had already started. Alfred Hitchcock was the first to require theaters to not allow people to come in after the film had started. He did this in 1959 for his movie Psycho so as to maintain the shocking effect of the ending.
• Paul McCartney's song "Yesterday", which was recently voted the most popular song of the century by a BBC poll, had music before firm lyrics. Paul used the working words "scrambled eggs" before coming up with 'yesterday' while composing this song.
• What separates "60 Minutes," on CBS from every other TV show? No theme song.
• Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to watch TV for three hours.

SPORTS

• No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Super Bowl... that is until 2000 when the St. Louis Rams won the 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-star Game.
• The highest "par" sanctioned by the United States Golf Association is six.
• The average life span of a major league baseball is 7 pitches.
• The Tokyo World Lanes Bowling Center is the largest bowling establishment in the world. It has 252 lanes.
• Billiards great, Henry Lewis once sank 46 balls in a row
• The Matterhorn at Disneyland in Anaheim has a full basketball court at the very top of the structure, because at the time it was built the only structures that could be that tall were sports arenas.
• Prior to 1900, prize fights lasted up to 100 rounds.
• On November 29, 1941, the program for the annual Army-Navy football game carried a picture of the Battleship Arizona, captioned: "It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs." Today you can visit the site--now a shrine--where Japanese dive bombers sunk the Arizona at Pearl Harbor only nine days later.
• $10,000 was the size of the fine issued to Charles Barkley by the NBA for accidentally spitting on an eight year old girl.
• $7,500 was the size of the fine issued by the French Open to John McEnroe for swearing during his loss in the tournament's first round.
• There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
• Gene Sarazen, a golfer from several generations ago, set the record for the fastest golf drive: 120 mph.
• Michael Sangster, who played in the 1960s, had tennis' fastest serve, once clocked at 154 mph.
• Baseball cards have been around since 1886. Modern cards, with high-resolution color photographs on the front and player statistics on the back, date from 1953. The photos are taken in the spring, with and without team caps, just in case the player is traded to another team.
• It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.
• Nolan Ryan is the oldest pitcher in major league history to pitch a no-hitter.

TELEPHONE

• The first telephone exchange opened on January 28, 1878, in New Haven, Connecticut. Month after month, the little Bell Company lived from hand to mouth. No salaries were paid in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid at all. In Watson's notebook there are such entries during this period as "Lent Bell fifty cents," "Lent Hubbard twenty cents," "Bought one bottle beer--too bad can't have beer every day."
• When Bell's patent was sixteen months old, there were 778 telephones in use.
• The first "Hello" badge used to identify guests and hosts at conventions, parties, etc. was traced back to September 1880. It was on that date that the first Telephone Operators Convention was held at Niagara Falls and the "Hello" badge was created for that event.
• Western Electric invented the loudspeaker which was initially called "loud-speaking telephone."
• Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.
• During the depths of the Depression, telephones in use fell from 16 to 13 per 100 population and by the late 1970's the number had surpassed 75 per 100 population.
• Western Electric mass-produced color telephones for the first time in 1954.
• In Japan, Western Electric first sold equipment in 1890, then in 1899 helped form the Nippon Electric Company (NEC). This was Japan's first joint venture with an American firm. Northern Telecom, Alcatel N.V. and NEC all had roots in Western Electric.
• The use of telephone answering machines became popular in 1974.
• In the first month of the Bell Telephone Company's existence in 1877, only six telephones were sold.
• On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.
• In 1953, Sony Corporation obtained a transistor license from Western Electric Co. that led to its development of the world's first commercially successful transistor radio.
• In the early days of the telephone, operators would pick up a call and use the phrase, "Well, are you there?". It wasn't until 1895 that someone suggested answering the phone with the phrase "number please?"
• Sometimes, early telephone operators would get to know their customers so well, the customers would ask for a reminder call when it was time to remove a cake from the oven, leave the phone off the hook near their sleeping child when they left the house, hoping the operator would hear any cries of distress, request a wake up call before taking a long nap.
• Telephone is derived from two Greek words, tele + phone, meaning far off voice or sound (Tele, far off + phone, voice or sound).
• In Milan, Italy, when an operator dialed a wrong number, the phone company fined the operator.
• Just like today's computers, early telephones were very confusing to new users. Some became so frustrated with the new technology, they attacked the phone with an ax or ripped it out of the wall.
• In the U.S., 54% of wireless phone users are men and 46% are women.

·  The number one reason people choose to buy a wireless phone is for safety (nearly 50% of those who own wireless phones purchased it for safety).

·  The first prototype of the sound-proof phone booth was built in 1877. Mr. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's trusty assistant, used a bunch of bed blankets around a box. He created the booth to prevent his landlady from listening in on his conversations. Some callers didn't like using the early phone booths because the doors would get stuck, forcing users to fight their way out.

·  In the early 1880's some well-to-do telephone owners started the unusual trend of paying to have a theatre employee hold a telephone receiver backstage, transmitting live plays and operas into their living rooms.

·  The commercial wireless phone was first introduced in Chicago in 1982 by Ameritech. The first mobile car phones were located in the car's trunk, taking up nearly half of the space.

·  Phone service was established at the White House one year after its invention. President Rutherford B. Hayes was the first to have phone service (1877-81).

·  Fifteen years after its invention in 1876, there were five million phones in America.

·  Fifteen years after its invention, more than 33 million wireless phones were in the U.S.

·  Being rude to a telephone operator in Prussia was once a crime. In 1908, a respected citizen was reprimanded by the government after becoming exasperated with an operator and saying "My dear girl!"

·  When Alexander Graham Bell died on August 4, 1922, millions of phones went dead. In Bell's honor, all phones served by the Bell System in the USA and Canada went silent for one minute.

·  The first transatlantic wedding took place on December 2, 1933. The groom was in Michigan. The bride, in Sweden. The ceremony took seven minutes and cost $47.50.

·  In the late 30's, a man named Abe Pickens of Cleveland, Ohio, attempted to promote world peace by placing personal calls to various country leaders. He managed to contact Mussolini, Hirohito, Franco and Hitler (Hitler, who didn't understand English, transferred him to an aide). He spent $10,000 to "give peace a chance."

·  In the Catholic church, St. Gabriel, an archangel, is the patron saint of telecommunications.

·  One of the first telephone answering machines was developed in Switzerland during the 1950's. It took three days to install.

·  The famous emergency hotline, whereby the President could have immediate contact with the Kremlin wasn't established until 1984. Prior to 1984, the only direct contact to the Kremlin was a cumbersome teleprinter link, supplying text messages that then had to be translated, responses drafted and sent back.

·  During President Lyndon Johnson's term, many people misdialed the White House number and instead reached the home of a New York housewife. Rose Brown had a near identical phone number. He wrote and thanked her for her diplomacy in receiving his highly sensitive calls and promised to return the favor when her friends and family accidentally dialed the White House.

·  Two days before Alexander Graham Bell married Mabel Hubbard in 1877, he gave her 99 percent of his company shares as a wedding gift. He kept a mere ten for himself.

USELESS FACTS

• Only one-fifth of air is oxygen. Most of the rest is nitrogen.
• The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards.
• The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
• Windmills always turn counterclockwise.
• The address where Mrs. O'Leary's cow presumably kicked over a lantern, starting the Chicago fire in 1871, is now the address of the Chicago Fire Academy.
• When the state fire marshal sent an investigator to seven fire stations in Manchester, New Hampshire, 256 fire safety problems were found. The previous year one of the city's oldest fire stations burned down while the crew was out on a call.
• How do pumpkins become jack-o'-lanterns on Halloween? It all started with the Druids, a learned, priestly class among the ancient Celts. At their October 31 feast celebrating the end of summer, the spirits of the dead returned for a night. The Druids, the first ghostbusters, lit fires to keep away the unwanted guests. In the early Middle Ages, the Church co-opted the holiday, making it All Saint's Day (also called All Hallows Day and Eve, from which we get Halloween). It was brought to America in the 1840s by Irish Catholic immigrants, along with the holdover custom from pagan times of carrying a light to ward off evil spirits. In Ireland, candles had been placed in carved out potatoes to make jack-o'-lanterns. But in America, pumpkins were plentiful, and it was the light shining from them that told marauding spirits: hit the road, Jack.
• Human skulls had been used as drinking cups for hundreds of years. The muscles and flesh were scraped away, the bottom was hacked off and then they were suitable to hold any beverage.
• The first successful video game... Pong, that simple black and white arcade game resembling ping-pong, in which two players used virtual paddles to bat a blip of light back and forth. As the digital age goes, its origins are truly ancient history, dating back to 1972 in its commercial incarnation and to 1958 when it first saw the light of day as the brainchild of a man named William Higinbotham. Higinbotham invented it for the amusement of visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked. But he didn't commercialize it. By the time Atari brought out the arcade version, it was too late for Higinbotham, who had never bothered to get a patent and was thus shut out of the profits.
• Did you play with LEGO blocks when you were a kid?
  • Since 1949, the LEGO company, based in Denmark, has produced more than 200,000,000,000 of the plastic elements that make up the Lego System.
  • There are 102,981,500 ways to combine six of the 8-studed bricks of one color.
  • The name LEGO did not come from the cry of an angry mother who couldn't get her kid to put down his toys and come to dinner: "LEGO of those bricks or I'll kill you!" It's from the Danish, "LEg GOdt," which means "play well."
• Bamboo can grow up to three feet in a 24 hour period.
• Computer Crime adds up to more than 10 billion dollars per year.
• The Cairo Opera House was destroyed by fire in 1970. It was rather ironic considering the Cairo fire station was located inside the same building.
• Linseed oil soaked rags burst into flames spontaneously late one night in a restaurant in Alameda, California. The heat from the fire popped the tops on the bottles of ten cases of beer. The suds doused the flames.
• Halloween isn't an established holiday by law. It is traditional that Halloween is Oct. 31 no matter what day of the week it falls on. Halloween dates from 837 when Pope Gregory IV instituted All Saints or All Hallows Day on Nov. 1 to take the place of an earlier festival known as the Peace of the Martyrs. The day was set aside to honor all saints, known and unknown. Halloween then is a shortened form of All Hallows Eve - the evening before All Hallows Day.
• By 1995 8 million U.S. households had computers with CD-ROM drives, a 1600% increase over 1990.
• Computer Crime adds up to more than 10 billion dollars per year.
• The chance of contracting an infection during a hospital stay in the USA is 1 in 15.
• In the US, the error rate for doctors prescribing the wrong medicine for their patient's ailment is 12%.
• AM and PM stand for "Ante-Meridian" and "Post-Meridian," respectively, and A.D. actually stands for "Anno Domini" rather than "After Death."
• Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet.
• The foot is 12 inches long because the arm of King Henry I of England measured 36 inches, and he decreed that the standard foot should be 1/3 of that measurement.
• Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested? Obsession.
• The chance of contracting an infection during a hospital stay in the USA is 1 in 15.
• Here's one way to determine if your diamond is real or not: put it in an oven set at 850 degrees Fahrenheit, wait an hour, if it's not there anymore then it was real. Diamonds dissipate when exposed to higher temperatures for an extended amount of time....cubic zirconium doesn't.
• $1000 was the fine issued by the state of Texas on a man arrested for possession of four automatic weapons and five silencers.
• Mailing an entire building has been illegal in the U.S. since 1916 when a man mailed a 40,000-ton brick house across Utah to avoid high freight rates.
• The Boeing 777 relies completely on its avionics systems. The triple-redundant flight control system is completely "fly-by-wire." In other words, this airliner has no control cables or hydraulics attached between the control surfaces and the control wheel; when the pilot moves the control wheel, a computer communicates with another and moves the control surface.
• Another recent study shows computer users blink an average of 7 times per minute. The average persons blinks 22 times per minute.
• According to American Programmer, 31.1% of computer software projects get canceled before they are completed, and 52.7% will overrun their initial cost estimates by 189%. 94% of project start-ups are restarts of previously failed projects.
• The earth's magnetic field pulls the electron beams hitting the cathode ray tube in computer monitors. Every computer monitor has to be calibrated relative to its position in the earth's magnetic field. Adjust a monitor in the northern hemisphere and its colors will be wrong if you plug it into a computer in the southern hemisphere.
• The devices that make up computer memory, in a 64 Meg computer chip, are so small that up to 10,000 devices could fit in the diameter of a human hair!
• While beta testing a newly compiled computer program, government workers found a real-life Donald Duck! It turns out the programmers used this 'fictional' name to check out their military personnel software. The problem was that there was already an Army Engineer with that name. The soldier became famous and was invited as a guest on the Johnny Carson Show as a result of this discovery.
• Artificial Christmas trees have outsold real ones every year since 1991.
• A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened.
• Methane gas can often be seen bubbling up from the bottom of ponds. It is produced by the decomposition of dead plants and animals in the mud.
• In 1752, 11 days were dropped from the year when the switch was from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The December 25 date was effectively moved 11 days backwards. Some Christian church sects, called old calendarists, still celebrate Christmas on January 7 (previously Dec. 25 of the Julian calendar)
• Floral wreaths are placed on graves as part of an ancient belief it was necessary to provide comforts for the dead and give them gifts in order for their spirits to not haunt the mourners. The circular arrangement represents a magic circle which is supposed to keep the spirit within its bounds.
• There is an elevator company named Schindler's, meaning that there are Schindler's lifts!
• Contrary to popular belief, the first day of the 21st Century is Monday, January 1, 2001, not January 1, 2000. This is due to the fact counting did not start for the current calendar in the year 0.t
• The Union ironclad, Monitor, was the first U.S. ship to have a flush toilet.
• The first automatic turn signal was an illuminated human like mechanical hand on the Hispano-Suiza Alfonso that extended to indicate right and left turns.
• The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English garden.
• The first Rolls-Royce sold for $600.00 in 1906.
• Play-doh was first invented as a wallpaper cleaner.
• Edison's first light bulb filament was made of cotton (1879).
• The reason sheriff's badges are star-shaped is because in primitive societies, the star was believed to possess magical powers. Principal among these was the power to guard against danger and control evil forces. During the Middle Ages the star was considered by many to represent all-powerful forces. It is believed because of its wide acceptance as the symbol of guardianship.
• Pitcairn Airlines was the first to provide air sickness bags.
• The American Red Cross was founded May 21st, 1881.
• The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet thick.
• A gale force wind is a wind blowing between 39 to 26 miles per hour.
• Quinine is an alkaloid extract of the bark of the Cinchona tree.
• The most abundant metal in the Earth's crust is aluminum.
• On average, an iceberg weighs 20 million tons.
• The largest taxi fleet in the world is found in Mexico City. The city boasts a fleet of over 60,000 taxis.
• The written test for University of Texas at Austin campus police in the 1960's asked applicants the shape of their excrement to test their ability to be observant.
• The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.
• 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 that *this* was the day of the changeover.
• Environmental tobacco smoke, as it is also called, contributes to more than 50,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone.
• Jet skis produce more pollution per year than barges, tugboats, and cruise ships combined.
• More than 50% of water applied to lawns is lost to evaporation or run-off due to over watering.
• One gram of PCB's can make up to one billion liters of water unsuitable for freshwater aquatic life.
• Women spend more than $65 million on new cars and trucks, influence 80 percent of all new-car purchases, and will buy 60 percent of new cars in 2000.
• The typical American family has 2-3 cars that each log in 15,000 miles per annum.
• Every 45 seconds, a house catches fire in the United States.
• Most burglaries happen above the first but below the seventh floor in a hotel.
• The Bureau of Standards says that the electron is the fastest thing in the world.
• Henry Ford produced the model T only in black because the black paint available at the time was the fastest to dry.
• The Steel Phantom in West Millen, PA, is the fastest roller coaster in America, reaching speeds of 80 mph.
• Foam insulation releases formaldehyde gas after installation in a house.
• Bacteria buildup in open tubes of mascara leads to eye infections.
• Standard, narrow, hard leather bicycle seats may compress nerves in the pubic area. This could lead to impaired sexual responses in men and (possibly) women.
• The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
• Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been over mixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since. (It floats in gasoline, too.)

SPACE

• There are more stars in the universe, than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world?, there is written proof that there are over 100 billion billion as of 1982.
• If there were ever an ocean big enough, Saturn would be the only planet that could float, this is because its density is lighter than that of water (it is mostly gas).
• There are over 500,000 craters on the moon that can be seen from the planet Earth. It would take over 400 hours to count them all, not including the ones on the far side of the moon.
• If the sun were to burn out, we would not know for 8 minutes.
• Pioneer 11's speed going past Jupiter was over 107,000 mph, the fastest speed ever traveled by a man-made object.
• Each of the Space Shuttle's solid rocket motors burns 5 tons (5,080 kilograms) of propellant per second, a total of 1.1 million pounds (500,000 kilograms) in 120 seconds. The speed of the gases exiting the nozzle is more than 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) per hour, about five times the speed of sound or three times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet. The plume of flame ranges up to 500 feet (152 meters) long.
• The interior of the Sun is 29 million degrees Fahrenheit
• Earth is hit by 6 tons of meteorites every day.
• The Sun burns off and shrinks 5' per hour
• Stars closest to Earth...
  1. Sun
  2. Proxima Centauri 4.22 light years
  3. Alpha Centauri 4.35 light years
  4. Bernard's Star 5.98 light years
  5. Wolf 359 7.75 light years
  6. Lalande 21185 8.22 light years
  7. Luyten 726-8 8.43 light years
  8. Sirius 8.64 light years
  9. Ross 154 9.45 light years
  10. Ross 258 10.4 light years
• Pluto is the smallest and lightest known planet in our solar system
• The greatest distance between two planets is between Neptune and Pluto
• The Earth's Moon is responsible for the ocean's tides
• The Earth's Moon is 1 million times drier then the driest desert on the planet, the Gobi desert
• 100 Million meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere every day
• There is direct proof of 100 billion stars, but still counting
• If a piece of popcorn was dropped in a neutron star, it would produce an explosion similar to a World War II atomic bomb
• You would weigh over a trillion pounds on a neutron star
• Our galaxy is only one of 100 billion known galaxies in the universe
• Stars collide once every thousand years or so.
• Voyager 1 and 2 together discovered 22 planetary satellites (moons): 3 new moons for Jupiter, 3 for Saturn, 10 for Uranus and 6 for Neptune.
• The rings of Uranus are so dark that Voyager's challenge of taking their picture was comparable to the task of photographing a pile of charcoal briquettes at the foot of a Christmas tree, illuminated only by a 1 watt bulb at the top of the tree, using ASA-64 film.
• The Voyager delivery accuracy at Neptune of 100 km (62 mi), divided by the trip distance or arc length traveled of 7,128,603,456 km (4,429,508,700 mi), is equivalent to the feat of sinking a 3630 km (2260 mi) golf putt, assuming that the golfer can make a few illegal fine adjustments while the ball is rolling across this incredibly long green.
• The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data. The tape head should not begin to wear out until the tape has been moved back and forth through a distance comparable to that across the United States. Imagine playing a two-hour video cassette on your home VCR once a day for the next 22 years, without a failure.
• A "day" in Earth orbit is approximately 90 minutes, 45 minutes of daylight and 45 minutes of night, which means that astronauts in space can see 16 sunsets and 16 sunrises in 24 hours.
• The first U.S. astronaut to eat in space was John Glenn during the second manned Mercury space flight flown in April, 1962.  The first food item he ate was applesauce packaged in an aluminum tube, similar to that of a toothpaste tube.
• The Space Shuttle travels at approximately 5 miles per second (17,500 miles/hour).
• Gemini 3 was the first spacecraft to use an onboard computer.
• The escape velocity for Earth is 7 miles per second, 3.2 miles per second for Mars and 390 miles per hour for the Sun.
• Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, and is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto.
• If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.
• The actual length of an astronomic year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. If it were exactly 365 days, 6 hours (365 1/4 days), leap years would occur every 4 years without exceptions. Instead, leap years are omitted on years ending with '00', unless it's a year divisible by 400 (e.g. 1600, 2000, 2400). The year 2000 will therefore be a leap year. (If astronomer's calculations are correct, this method will be good for another 3,200 years, until another adjustment will be necessary.
• A day on Venus lasts 243 earth days, longer than its year which only lasts 225 earth days.

WORDS

• The longest word that can be typed using only the right hand is lollipop.
• Stewardesses and reverberated are the two longest words (12 letters each) that can be typed using only the left hand
• Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands.
• Shakespeare invented the word "assassination" and "bump."
• We do something by hook or by crook? Because in the Middle Ages, peasants dared not cut down the trees on the Lord's estate to gather fuel for their hearth. But traditionally they were allowed to take whatever wood they could cut from the branches using a hook, a pole with a curved blade at the end, or a shepherd's crook, the long staff with the curved end. Over the centuries, ironically, this expression that originated in doing something only under specified conditions came to mean doing anything in any way you could.
• "Pass the buck"? "Buck" was originally buckshot, which was used as a token in card games, being passed to the person whose turn it was to deal. One responsibility the dealer had was to place the first bet, which not everyone wanted to do. If they weren't up to it, they could pass the buck.
• The longest word used by Shakespeare in any of his works is "honorificabilitudinitatibus," found in "Love's Labours Lost."
• The phrase left-handed compliment refers to marriage in medieval Germany. In those days the powers that be sought to discourage the nobility from marrying commoners. A nobleman who did marry down had to give his bride not the usual right hand at their wedding but his left. Neither his wife nor his children could inherit his property or title. In many ways it was a marriage in name only. It was left-handed, meaning not really what it seemed. Hence the insincerity of a left-handed compliment.
• What a "red letter day"? Its origins are in the Roman Catholic Church. In the Middle Ages, monks working as scribes marked Saint's days and other religious observances in red on the calendar. Such dates needed to stand out because they were special and sometimes required preparation. Modern calendar makers have preserved that practice, marking holidays in red. By extension, any day that's really special for you, because you did something great or had some good fortune, is a red letter day.
• Someone who has seen better days has "gone to pot" because in the Middle Ages, table scraps ended up in a big pot for stew. Once the centerpiece of a big meal, main courses were demoted to leftovers. Eventually "going to pot," meaning going downhill.
• "One fell swoop"? "Fell" doesn't mean drop from the sky. It's Middle English for cruel - from the same root as felon. Swoop meant "snatch" in Middle English. So one fell swoop does describe what birds of prey do, but not exactly in the way you might have thought.
• Colonel? Of all the irregular spellings in English, this has always seemed one of the weirdest. It turns out that it's not so much the spelling of colonel that's irregular, but rather the pronunciation. The word derives from "column," because a colonel headed the first company of a regiment. But for some reason it entered the English language in the 16th century as "coronel." Eventually the spelling veered back towards its original source, the word column, but the pronunciation just kept marching straight ahead.
• Ever wonder why we talk about making money "hand over fist?" Picture the hands of a fisherman as he hauls in a net full of fish. One fist first holds the rope while the other hand moves over it to get a new grip further down. Then that fist holds the rope while the first hand moves over it to get a new grip - and so on "hand over fist." Now picture the net full of money.
• What does the bar code lines on supermarket products mean? It's the Universal Product Code (UPC) it hold 11 numbers, each of which is a code that describes the product. The size, weight, and manufacturer or distributor, for example, are each represented by a number. The numbers are in the form that computers can read, 0's (black lines) and 1's (white lines).
• The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ispneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.
• The English language now contains close to a million words.
• Cheesy, meaning bad, is a late 1800s term stemming from the bad smell of some cheeses.
• The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the 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.
• Parka means "reindeer pelt" to natives of the Aleutian Islands.
• The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
• 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. Same 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 words "racecar" and "kayak" are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
• The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
• Politician - From the Greek "poly" ("many") and the French "tete" ("head" or "face," as in "tête-à-tête": head to head or face to face). Hence "polytetien", a person of two or more faces.
• The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
• Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."
• The Sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," uses every letter in the alphabet. (Developed by Western Union to test telex/TWX communications.
• Acute hasopharyngitis is more commonly known as a cold.
• The passenger sitting next to the driver of a car said to be "riding shotgun" because in the days of the Old West, a guard would often sit next to the stagecoach driver. Since this guard carried a shotgun, he was said to be "riding shotgun." Americans, always eager for a connection with the Old West, adapted the term to describe the front passenger seat of a car. By the way, the seat next to the driver is often called the "death seat" because it's said to be the most dangerous spot in accidents.
• The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
• The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead."
• Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
• The rumbling sound your stomach sometimes makes is called a "borborygmi."
• Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams.
• The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.10
• Words most often used in English - the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it.
• The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
• The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the Zoo' In 1922,
• The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw AN, and OZ, hence "Oz."
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
• "Going whole hog?" Dates from the medieval Crusades. The crusaders had contempt for the Moslemdietary laws forbidding the eating of pork. They said that since Moslems used pigskins to make water bags and made use of other parts of the animal as well, why not use the whole hog and also eat the creatures? Eventually the expression going whole hog came to mean setting no limits when referring to anything.
• "Rub you the wrong way"? Several hundred years ago upper class housewives had servant problems. It seems that some of the hired help just didn't understand how to mop up after wet-rubbing a wooden floor. They mopped against the grain, rubbing it the wrong way and leaving streaks. This must have been truly traumatic because the expression gradually came to mean the way anything annoying affects us.
• "Eavesdropper"? This phrase is at least several hundred years old and its source is architectural. It comes from the eaves, the edge of a roof. The eavesdrip, or drop, was the space next to the wall where rain running off the roof fell to the ground. A person could overhear conversations by standing near the wall of a house in the eavesdrop under an open window.
• Tank? That's an amazingly benign name for such a powerful weapon. As it turns out, the name was meant to sound incongruous with the thing itself. It was used by the British as a code name for their new armored vehicles in World War I. They wanted to preserve the element of surprise, and so they referred to it by this innocuous name, which surprisingly took hold and has lasted through the present.
• Quicksand is not really a type of sand! It is a condition that occurs within any type of soil - but most common in sand. When there is any upward flow of water through sand, the sand becomes "agitated" and the grains of sand lift away from each other. This separation of grains reduces the strength of the sand, and it then begins to act like liquid. It might appear to be solid ground, but it's behavior is more like that of a pool of water. You sink in quicksand for the same reason you sink in water - the differences of density. Contrary to popular belief, it is not possible to drown in quicksand unless you really work at it, because the density of quicksand is much greater than that of water. Since you can almost float in water, you should be easily able to float in quicksand. Then again, for purposes of disclaimer - don't try this at home, folks.
• Why is the bathroom on a ship called "the head"? The use of "head" in this context sounds like an anatomical joke, or the work of someone who, to put it delicately, didn't know their head from their foot. But after a dip into some maritime history, calling a ship's bathroom the head makes perfect sense. That's head, as in the forward part of the ship, the bow. In the days of sailing vessels, there wasn't any indoor plumbing on land or at sea. Sailors took care of business while hanging over the edge of the ship by ropes or on a platform - always at the bow. Why the bow? Because sailing ships had to have the wind coming from behind them to power their sails. Thus if the sailor chose the stern, or back of the ship, the wind would be coming toward him. And, well... you wouldn't *spit* into the wind, would you?
• A "dog and pony" show originally described a small circus which had little to offer in the way of animal life. No elephants, lions, bears, or horses, just dogs and ponies. After a period of time, this expression was used to describe any unimpressive performance.
• Why do we abbreviate "at" with @? Why abbreviate something as short as "at?" Blame the medieval monks. Inscribing everything by hand on scarce parchment, they took every short cut they could. But long after words like "ye" got dumped into the linguistic dustbin, @ just kept on going. Its continued existence was insured when several early typewriter manufacturers trying to impress commercial clients, added it as a shift-key character. Then, in 1971, when a programmer needed a character to separate names from addresses on early email, there it was. Voil @!
• How did "I'm from Missouri" come to mean "Show me, I'm skeptical?" It all came about because of what someone said at a Philadelphia banquet in 1899. William Vandiver, (a Missouri congressman who, but for a bit of phrase-making, would be long forgotten), was addressing a Navy audience. Perhaps he knew history was listening. What he said was: "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."
• The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside, they would crack and break off... Thus the saying.
• The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bed frame. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
• "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt."
• On an island in northern Wales there's a village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.
• 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.
• Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo DE Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula"-and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size "L.A."
• The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
• "Q" is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States.
• In England, in the 1880s, "Pants" was considered a dirty word.
• Cyberphobia- Fear of computers or working on a computer.
• There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet.
• Why do we call a sure thing a "cinch"? Racing fans love to find a sure thing, a horse that's a cinch to win. As sure as there's a saddle on that horse, the nag can't lose--or so they've been told. As a matter of fact, the origin of "cinch" meaning a sure thing, comes from saddling a horse. It started with the Spanish word cincha, which was Americanized into cinch during the 1849 California Gold Rush. The cincha was the rope Mexicans used to secure their saddle to a horse. Prospectors in the Gold Rush were accustomed to buckled straps to perform that task. But the buckles needed refastening during the day, while the cincha, or cinch, held fast all day without adjustment. Once you fastened the cinch, it was a sure thing. And sure enough, that's what the word came to mean.
• The word penthouse comes from "pentis," Middle English (about the 14th century) for shed. When the fancy apartments on top of apartment buildings began to appear around 1900, they reminded people--in terms of their location--of the small shed like structures that covered the top of the stairs leading to the roof. The word pentis then just got stretched out a bit into penthouse.
• The scientific name for typtophan synthetase has 1,909 letters in it.
• The derivation of the word trivia comes from the Latin "tri-" + "via", which means three streets. This is because in ancient times, at an intersection of three streets in Rome (or some other Italian place), they would have a type of kiosk where ancillary information was listed. You might be interested in it, you might not, hence they were bits of "trivia."
• On average, a woman will speak 7000 words over the course of a day while a man will only speak 2000 words in the same period of time.
• S.O.S. doesn't stand for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls" -- It was just chosen by an 1908 international conference on Morse Code because the letters S and O were easy to remember and just about anyone could key it and read it, S = dot dot dot, O = dash dash dash.
• The "ZIP" in Zip Code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."