Interesting Information

I have no idea where this came from so I can not credit (or blame) the folk that created it. Some of these are pretty cool!

 

• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

   

• Rene Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling.

   

• 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.

   

• Ballroom dancing is a major at Brigham Young University.

   

• Some biblical scholars believe that Aramaic, the language of the ancient Bible, did not contain an easy way to say "many things" and used a term which has come down to us as 40. This means that when the bible -- in many places -- refers to "40 days," they meant many days.

   

• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

   

• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down -- hence the expression "to get fired."

   

• Canada is an Indian word meaning "big village."

   

• There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

   

• Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.

   

• "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

   

• The term "the whole 9 yards" came from World War II fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50-caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."

   

• The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy."

   

• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

   

• The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

   

• Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.

   

• The "y" in signs reading "ye olde..." is properly pronounced with a "th" sound, not "y." The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman-occupied, present-day England used the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y."

   

• The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."

   

• The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

   

• The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

   

• The little bags of netting for gas lanterns, called "mantles," are radioactive -- so much so that they will set off an alarm at a nuclear reactor.

   

• Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots.

   

• Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tectonic destruction. 2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.

   

• Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.

   

• It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.

   

• Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to the right-hand side was done on a weekday at 5 pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.

   

• Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.

   

• The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

   

• Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."

   

• In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."

   

• Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."

   

• Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott."

   

• Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

   

• More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.

   

• The 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."

   

• The flag of the Philippines is the only national flag that is flown differently during times of peace or war. A portion of the flag is blue, while the other is red. The blue portion is flown on top in time of peace and the red portion is flown on top in time of war.

   

• Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.

   

• The "huddle" in football was formed due to a deaf football player who used sign language to communicate -- his team didn't want the opposition to see the signals he used so they huddled around him.

   

• Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.

   

• If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.

   

• Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike.

   

• The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke out someone's eye.

   

• Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.

   

• Sir Isaac Newton was an ordained priest in the Church of England.

   

• A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

   

• The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

   

• Certain frogs can be frozen solid, then thawed, and continue living.

   

• 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.

   

• The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.

   

• Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.

   

• Steve Young, the San Francisco '49ers quarterback, is the great-great-grandson of Mormon leader Brigham Young.

   

• Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of linen.

   

• Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

   

• Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.

   

• If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The head picture weighs slightly more, so it ends up on the bottom slightly more often.

   

• The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.

   

• A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

   

• If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away.

   

• The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is its plural, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses.

   

• Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydesoxycorticosterones are the longest anagrams.

   

• Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula."

   

• Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

   

• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

   

• The band Duran Duran got its name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie "Barbarella."

   

• Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.

   

• 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 company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego was the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

   

• Al Capone's business card said that he was a used furniture dealer.

   

• Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."

   

• The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.

   

• Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's maiden name was Betty Jean McBricker.

   

• A pregnant goldfish is called a wit.

   

• The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II, who fathered over 160 children.

   

• If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, because they need gravity to swallow.

   

• It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents. Finally, the frog swallows the stomach back down again.

   

• White-Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith, formerly of The Monkees.

   

• Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar in "Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six minutes.

   

• Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.

   

• 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 was Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.

   

• In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

   

• Playing cards were issued to British pilots in World War II. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.

   

• The "L. L." in L. L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.

   

• Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing 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.

   

• 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.

   

• The saying "It's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from the time of 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, hence the saying.

   

• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, otherwise it will digest itself.

   

• The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."

   

• A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks and sounds like they are actually talking.

   

• 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy, et al) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die during the movie.

   

• "Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

   

• A whale's penis is called a dork.

   

• Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always the same sex.

   

• Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.

   

• To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs -- it will let go instantly.

   

• Reindeer like to eat bananas.

   

• 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 geese is called a gaggle.

   

• 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.

   

• Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named subatomic particles known as quarks for a random line in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"

   

• 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.

   

• "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.

   

• A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.

   

• 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily. (That's one every two hours.)

   

• 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary are misspelled.

   

• A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints.

   

• A duck's quack doesn't echo.

   

• A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.

   

• A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there.

   

• A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.

   

• A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.

   

• A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans.

   

• According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged for trying.

   

• Actor Tommy Lee Jones and vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.

   

• Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is taken up by automobiles.

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