Odiecus - Trivia miscellaneous

Trivia - Miscellaneous

There is 1 mile of railroad track in Belgium for every one and a half square miles of land.
There is an entire opera written about the Mona Lisa by Mac von Schillings.
There is no living descendant of William Shakespeare.
There is no one who does not dream. Those who claim to have no dreams, laboratory tests have determined, simply forget their dreams more easily than others.
During the early days of the Gold Rush in San Francisco a glass of whiskey would cost as much as $7.
During the middle ages, only men wore diamonds, as a symbol of their courage and virility. However, since 1477, when Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave a diamond ring to Mary of Burgundy, diamonds have been the gem of choice for men who wanted to melt a woman's heart.
Edgar Allan Poe and James Abott McNeill Whistler both went to West Point Military Academy.
Fagin, the sinister villain in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, was also the name of Dickens' best friend, Bob Fagin.
Forensic scientists can determine a person's sex, age, and race by examining a single strand of hair.
Franz Liszt was Richard Wagner's father-in-law. Atruro Toscanini was Vladimir Hhorowitz's father-in-law.
Gasoline has no specific freezing point--it freezes at any temperature between -180 and -240 degrees Fahrenheit. When gasoline freezes, it never solidifies totally, but resembles gum or wax.
Gibbon spent 20 years writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Noah Webster spent 36 years writing his dictionary.
Gin and canasta are both descended from an ancient Chinese game, mah-jongg, which is more than a thousand years old.
Granite conducts sound ten times faster than air.
There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants.
There is only one river in the world that has its source near the equator and from there flows into a temperate zone: the Nile. For some little-understood reason, the flow of most rivers is in the opposite direction.
One 75-watt bulb gives more light than three 25-watt bulbs.
To see how many children a newlywed couple will have, the Finns count the number of grains of rice in the bride's hair. Czechs send off the newlyweds under a barrage of peas. Italians throw sugared almonds. An African tradition is to throw corn kernels (to signify fertility).
Petroleum accounts for nearly half the world's energy supply.
Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter.
Playing cards in India are round.
Turning a clock's hands counterclockwise while setting it is not necessarily harmful. It is only damaging when the timepiece contains a chiming mechanism.
Residents of Nevada bet an average of $846 a year in gambling casinos.
Twenty-four-karat gold is not pure gold; there is a small amount of copper in it. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.
Rubber is one of the ingredients of bubble gum. It is the substance that allows the chewer to blow a bubble.
Two chapters in the Bible, 2 Kings and Isaiah 37, are alike almost word for word.
Samuel Beckett's play "Breath" is the shortest recorded play ever written, consisting of 35 seconds of human cries and breathes.
Undertakers report that human bodies do not deteriorate as quickly as they used to. The reason, they believe, is that the modern diet contains so many preservatives that these chemicals tend to prevent the body from decomposition too rapidly after death.
Shakespeare once wrote a play called What You Will. (Its alternate title: Twelfth Night.)
Until the 1950's, Tibetans disposed of their dead by taking the body up a hill, hacking it into little pieces, and feeding the remains to the birds.
St. Miles Partridge once played dice with Henry VIII for the bells of St. Paul's church, won, and collected the bells.
Until the 19th century, solid blocks of tea were used as money in Siberia.
Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.
Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that the passage in the bible known as the Sermon on the Mount is actually an ancient Essene prayer dating to hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.
Greece's national anthem has 158 verses.
Horse-racing regulations state that no race horse's name may contain more than eighteen letters. Names that are too long would be cumbersome on racing sheets.
Hot water weighs more than cold.
Houdini was the first man to fly an airplane solo in Australia.
If a glass of water were magnified to the size of the Earth, the molecules comprising it would be about as big as a large orange.
If hot water is suddenly poured into a glass that glass is more apt to break if it is thick than if it is thin. This is why test tubes are made of thin glass.
If you lace your shoes from the inside to the outside the fit will be snugger around your big toe.
In 1060 a coin was minted in England shaped like a clover. The user could break off any of the four leaves and use them as separate pieces of currency.
In 1776 a man who made $4,000 a year was considered wealthy.
In 18th century English gambling dens, there was an employee whose only job was to swallow the dice if there was a police raid.
"The Washington Post March" by John Phillip Sousa was named after the newspaper, the Washington Post.
A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.
A bubble is round because the air within it presses equally against all its parts, thus causing all surfaces to be equidistant from its center.
Verdi wrote the opera Aida at the request of the khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez canal.
A car operates at maximum economy, gas-wise, at speeds between 25 and 35 miles per hour.
Voltaire considered Shakespeare's works so deplorable that he referred to the Bard as "that drunken fool."
Studies shown by the Psychology Department of DePaul University show that the principal reason to lie is to avoid punishment.
A car that shifts manually gets 2 miles more per gallon of gas than a car with automatic shift.
Water has a greater molecular density in liquid form than as a solid. This is why ice floats.
Suzie Derkins is the only character in Bill Watterson's comic strip, 'Calvin and Hobbes,' to have a first and last name. Calvin's parents have no names at all.
A car uses 1.6 ounces of gas idling for one minute. Half an ounce is used to start the average automobile.
When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follow taste, smell, and touch.
Tablecloths were originally meant to serve as towels with which guests could wipe their hands and faces after dinner.
A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.
When glass breaks the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second.
Ten cords of wood stacked 4 feet wide by 4 feet high by 80 feet long have the same heating potential as 1,400 gallons of oil.
A perfectly clean fire produces almost no smoke. Smoke simply means that a fire is not burning properly and that bits of unburned material are escaping.
When he was a child, Blaise Pascal once locked himself in his room for several days and would not allow anyone to enter. When he emerged, he had figured out all of Euclid's geometrical propositions totally on his own.
The A & P was the first chain-store business to be established. It began in 1842.
A person uses more household energy shaving with a hand razor at a sink (because of the water power, the water pump, and so on) than he would by using an electric razor.
When using the first pay telephone, a caller did not deposit his coins in the machine. He gave them to an attendant who stood next to the telephone. Coin telephones did not appear to 1899.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter.
A person who is lost in the woods and starving can obtain nourishment by chewing on his shoes. Leather has enough nutritional value to sustain life for a short time.
X-rays of the Mona Lisa show that there are three completely different version of the same subject, all painted by Leonardo, under the final portrait.
The American Bible Association has published almost a billion Bibles since it was founded in 1816.
The average American sees or hears 560 advertisements a day.
The average American uses eight times as much fuel energy as an average person anywhere else in the world.
The average house wife walks 10 miles a day around the house doing her chores. In addition she walks nearly 4 miles and spends 25 hours a year making beds.
In 1950 at the Las Vegas Desert Inn, a anonymous sailor made 27 straight passes (wins) with the dice at craps. The odds against such a feat or 12,467,890 to 1. The dice today are enshrined in the hotel on a velvet pillow under glass.
In 1965, a collection of eight bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild was sold at auction of $2,200.
In 1971, at Memorial Hospital in New York City, a woman weighting less than 100 pounds ran a fever of 114 degrees--and survived without brain damage or physiological after effects.
In 1975 a birdhouse costing $10,000 was built in Quebec by the city fathers.
In 1976 a Los Angeles secretary named Jannene Swift officially married a 50-pound rock. the ceremony was witnessed by more than twenty people.
In 1986, a guard in an armored car was killed when $50,000 worth of quarters fell on him.
In ancient times, the traditional color of bridal gowns was red. The wife of Napoleon III broke the tradition and wore a white gown. Then, brides began wearing white gowns (that were worn only once) as a symbol of their wealth.
In every hour that one listens to the radio in the United States, one hears approximately 11,000 spoken words.
In Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more that a hundred years before either moon was discovered.
In India it is perfectly proper for men to wear pajamas in public. Pajamas are accepted as standard daytime wearing apparel.
The average medium size piano has about 230 strings, each string having about 165 pounds of tension, with the combined pull of all strings equaling approximately eighteen tons.
The average person can live for eleven days without water, assuming a mean temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
The bandaging of a mummy often took from 6 to 8 months and required a collection of special tools, including a long metal hook that was used to draw the dead person's brains out through his nose.
The best diamonds are colored blue-white.
The Boston Nation, a newspaper published in Ohio during the mid-nineteenth century, had pages seven and a half feet long and five and a half feet wide. It required two people to hold the paper in proper reading position.
The cello's real name is the violoncello.
The color black absorbs heat. White reflects it.
The color combination with the strongest visual impact is black on yellow. Next to follow black on white, yellow on black, white on black, dark blue on white, and white on dark blue.
The country of Tonga once issued a stamp shaped like a banana.
The country with the most post offices is India with over 152,792 compared with just over 38,000 in the United States.
In James M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the place where children go with Peter Pan is not called "Never-Never Land." It is called "Neverland."
In Japan there is a deadly martial art, called tessenjutsu, based solely on the use of a fan.
In many countries, urine was used as a detergent for washing. (One of urine's major components, ammonia, is used in cleaning products.
In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.
In one night, the World Trade Center in New York uses more electricity than the entire city of Troy, New York.
In one second 6,242,000,000,000,000,000 electrons pass any given point in an electrical current.
In the city of Reykjavik, Iceland, one can see the stars eighteen hours a day during the heart of the winter. During the summer, sunlight is visible 24 hours a day.
In trucking circles, a "bumper sticker" is a tailgater who is following another vehicle too closely.
In turkey the color of mourning is violet. In most Moslem countries and in China the color is white.
In Turkey the colour of mourning is violet. In most Muslim countries and in China it is white.
The Eisenhower Interstate System requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
The English poet Thomas Chatterton died at 17. Mozrt died at 36, Raphel died at 37, Aubrey Beardsley died at 26, and the painter Mazaccio died at 27.
The first coin minted in the United States was a silver dollar. It was issued on October 15, 1794.
The first contraceptive diaphragms - centuries ago - were citrus rinds - i.e.: half an orange rind.
The first macaroni factory in the United States was established in 1848. It was started by Antoine Zegera in Brooklyn, New York.
The first operators employed by the Bell Telephone Company were young boys who worked standing up. Only after several years did it occur to anybody to provide them with chairs.
The first successful parachute jump to be made from a moving airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912.
The first telephone book ever issued contained only fifty names. It was published in New Haven, Connecticut, by the New Haven District Telephone Company in February, 1878
The first toy product ever advertised on television was MR. POTATO HEAD. Introduced in 1952, MR. POTATO HEAD took advantage of TV's explosive growth to gain access to tens of millions of newly "plugged-in" households.
The flag of the U.K. is properly known as the Union Flag. It is only called the Union Jack when it is flown from the jack mast of a ship
A quarter has 119 grooves on its circumference. A dime has one less.
A study of American coins and currency revealed the presence of bacteria, including staphylococcus, E. coli, and klebsiella, on 18% of the coins and 7% of the bills.
A ten-gallon hat holds less than a gallon of liquid.
A whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.
According to Gambler's Digest, an estimated $1 million is lost at race tracks each year by people who lose or carelessly throw away winning tickets.
According to Gambler's Digest, more cheating takes place in private, friendly gambling game than in all other gambling games combined.
According to Newton's Law of Motion, when a car going 60 miles per hour in one direction gets hit by a mosquito going one mile per hour in the opposite direction, the car will slow down one-millionth of a mile per hour.
According to The Farmers Almanac - To test your love, you and your lover should each place an acorn in water. If they swim together, your love is true; if they drift apart, so will you.
It is believed that 90 percent of all scientists who have ever lived realize now, and that as many scientific paper have been published in the years since 1950 as were published in all the centuries before 1950.
According to the Federal Aviation Authority, United States airlines are four times safer than the airlines of any other country.
It is estimated that 4 million "junk" telephone calls--phone solicitations by persons or programmed machine--are made every day in the United States.
According to the federal Trade Commission. there are 20,000 television commercials made each year that are aimed exclusively at children. Of these, 7,000 are for sugared breakfast cereals.
It is estimated that a plastic container can resist decomposition for as long as 50,000 years.
It is possible to drown and not die. Technically the term "drowning" refers to the process of taking water into the lungs, not to death caused by that process.
It takes 120 drops of water to fill a teaspoon.
It takes as much heat to turn one once of snow to water as it does to make an ounce of soup boil at room temperature.
Lead poisoning has been blamed for contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire. Women became infertile by drinking wine from vessels whose lead had dissolved in the wine, and the Roman upper classes died out within a couple centuries. The Romans used lead as a sweetening agent and as a cure for diarrhea. It added up to massive self-inflicted poisoning.
Libra, the Scales, is the only inanimate symbol in the zodiac.
Lloyd's of London, the best-known association of insurance underwriters, does not write life insurance.
Madam de Montespan, second wife of Louis XIV, once lost 4 million francs in a half-hour at the gambling table.
The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
The Greek national anthem has 158 verses.
The Indian epic poem the Mahabhrata is eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
The King James version of the Bible has 50 authors, 66 book, 1,189 chapters, and 31,173 verses.
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache on a playing card.
The loop on a belt that holds the loose end is called a "keeper".
The Lord's Prayer appears twice in he Bible, in Matthew VI and Luke XI.
The medal which is presented to Nobel Peace Prize winners depicts three naked men with their hands on each other's shoulders.
The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages were often born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there, and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off.
According to the General Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, the typical American spends an average of one year of his or her life speaking on the telephone.
According to the New York Telephone Company, of the 398 million telephone in the world, more than on-third are in the United States.
According to The Old Farmers Almanac, 1903 - the best time of the day to select a new pair of shoes is in the afternoon, when the exercise of the day has stretched the muscles to their largest extent.
Air pressure at sea level is roughly equal to the weight of an elephant spread over a small coffee table.
Alaska has a sand desert with dunes over 100 feet high. It is located along the flatland of the Kobuk River in the northwestern part of the state.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a 6,000-word epic poem when he was twelve years old.
All the proceeds earned from James M. Barrie's book Peter Pan were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for the Sick Children in London.
Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada.
Among the Danakil tribesmen of Ethiopia, when a male dies his grave is marked with a stone for every man he killed.
An airplane uses more fuel flying at 25,000 feet than 30,000 feet. The higher it flies, the thinner the atmosphere and the less atmospheric resistance it must buck.
The Mona Lisa measures less than 2 feet by 2 feet.
The name of the first airplane flown at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers was Bird of Prey. The maiden flight of the Bird of Prey, however, was less than a flight--the plane stayed in the air only long enough to sail 59 feet.
The name piano is an abbreviation of Cristofori's original name for the instrument: piano et forte or soft and loud.
The national anthems of Japan, Jordan and San Marino each have only four lines. Does that include "Play Ball"?
The oldest piano still in existence was built in 1720. No one knows where Mozart is buried.
The only house in England that the Queen may not enter is The House of Commons as she is not a commoner. She is also the only person in England who does not need a license plate.
The original title of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice was First Impression.
The Penny is the only coin currently minted in the United States with a profile that faces to the right. All other coins - the silver dollar, half dollar, quarter, dime and nickel - all feature profiles that face to the left.
The piece that protrudes from the top end of an umbrella is called a "ferrule". The word "ferrule" is also used to describe the piece of metal that holds a rubber eraser on a pencil.
The plastic covering on the end of a shoelace is called an 'aglet'.
An ice cube in a glass of water will not raise the water level when it melts. The amount of space it displaces as a cube is equal to the amount it takes up when liquified.
Ancient Chinese artists freely painted scenes of nakedness and coition. Never, absolutely never, would they depict a simple bare female foot.
Anyone writing a letter to the New York Times has one chance in twenty-one of having the letter published. Letter writers to the Washington Post do significantly better: one letter out of eight finds it way to print.
As of January 1998, American Express had not issued a single credit card with an expiration date past December 1999. The company hoped to protect cardholders from Y2K problems.
Assuming that each fold neatly overlaps its opposite side, a dollar bill can be folded only six times - seven if put into a vise.
At race tracks, the favorite wins fewer than 30 percent of all horse races.
Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid may contain 50 million of them.
Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
Before 1933, the dime was legal as payment only in transactions of $10 or less. In that year Congress made the dime legal tender for all transactions.
By the end of the Civil War, between one-third and one-half of all U.S. paper currency in circulation was counterfeit. This served as the catalyst behind the creation of the U.S. Secret Service. On July 5, 1865, the Secret Service was created under the U.S. Treasury Department. In less than a decade, counterfeiting was sharply reduced.
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past contains almost 1.5 million words.
Men laugh longer, more loudly, and more often than women.
Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonald's.
More than 50 percent of the people who are bitten by venomous snakes in the United States and who go untreated still survive.
Most automobile trips in the United States are under 5 miles.
Most lipsticks contain fish scales.
Most precious gems are actually colorless. Their color comes form impurities in the stone than act as pigmenting agents.
Neck ties were first worn in Croatia. That's why they were called cravats (CRO-vats).
The psychology Department of Dayton University reports that loud talk can be ten times more distracting than the sound of a jackhammer. Loud, incessant chatter can make a listener nervous and irritable, and even start him on the road to insanity.
No one can drown in the Dead Sea. It is 25 percent salt, which makes the water very heavy.
The real name of the Mona Lisa is actually La Giaconda. It is a portrait of a middle-class Florentine woman, the wife of a merchant named Francesco del Giacondo.
No patent can ever be taken out on a gambling machine in the United States.
The ruby, sapphire, and emerald are not specific minerals. The ruby is red, a sapphire the blue, variety of corundum. An emerald is the green, and aquamarine the blue, variety of beryl.
The San Blas Indian women of Panama consider giant noses a mark of great beauty. They paint black lines down the center of their noses to make them appear longer.
The shortest verse in the Bible consists of two words: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).
The short-term memory capacity for most people is between five and nine items or digits. This is one reason that phone numbers were kept to seven digits for so long.
The sound heard by a listener when holding a seashell to his ear does NOT come from the shell itself. It is the echo of the blood pulsing in the listeners own ear.
The statue bu Auguste Rodin that has come to be called "The Thinker" was not meant to be a portrait of a man in thought. It is a portrait of the poet Dante.
The United States Postal Service assures its customers that whey will not get fat licking stamps. There is no more than one-tenth of a calorie's worth of glue on every stamp.
The weight of air in a milk glass is about the same as the weight of one aspirin tablet.
Castor oil is used as a lubricant in jet planes.
Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly the Atlantic. He was the sixty-seventh. The first sixty-six made the crossing in dirigibles and twin-engine mail planes. Lindbergh was the first to make the dangerous flight alone.
Christendom did not begin to date its history from the birth of Christ until 500 years after his death. The system was introduced in 550 by Dionysius Exigus, a monk in Rome.
Crystals grow by reproducing themselves. The come the nearest to being "alive" of all members of the mineral kingdom.
Diamonds are rare: an average of 350 tons of ore must be mined and processed to find an uncut diamond large enough to cut a single one-carat polished diamond. Of all the diamonds mined, only 20 percent are even suitable for jewelry.
Diamonds mined in Brazil are harder than those found in Africa.
Dirty snow melts faster than clean.
Dry ice does not melt. It evaporates.
During the American Revolution, inflation was so great that the price of corn rose 10,000 percent, the price of wheat 14,000 percent, the price of flour 15,000 percent, and the price of beef 33,000 percent.
During the early 1920's, at the height of the inflation in the German Weimar Republic, one American dollar was equal to 4 trillion German marks.
Norfolk County, Massachusetts, is the birthplace of three United States presidents: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and John F. Kennedy.
Nothing can be burned again that has already been burned once.
Obsidian balls, or occasionally brass balls, were placed in the eye sockets of Egyptian mummies.
Of all professionals in the United States, journalists are credited with having the largest vocabulary--approximately 20,000 words.
Of all the ore dug in diamond mines, only one carat in every 23 tons proves to be a diamond.
Of all the world's peoples, the only ones known not to use fire are the Andaman Islanders and the Pygmies.
On average, Clergymen, Lawyers, and Doctors each have 15,000 words in their vocabulary. Skilled workers who haven't had a college education know between 5,000 and 7,000 words. Farm laborers about 1,600.
On March 16, 1970, a bidder at Sotheby & Company in London paid $20,000 for one glass paperweight.
The working section of the piano is called the action. There are about 7500 parts here, all playing a role in sending the hammers against the strings when keys are struck.
On November 9, 1965, the day of the great blackout in the northeastern United States, 62 million phone calls were placed in New York City during a 24-hour period. that is the greatest number of telephone calls ever made in one day.
The world consumes 1 billion gallons of petroleum a day.
On the Chinese written language, the ideograph that stands for "trouble" represents two women under one roof.
There are more than 40,000 characters in Chinese script.
There are more than 5,919,682 telephones in New York City, more phones than in the entire country of Spain. The cables serving the New York City area have nearly 33,072,975 miles of wire.
There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
There are two radios for every man, women, and child in the United States.