• Did You Know? (03/10)

    From Bruno Barbiere@1:2320/100 to All on Wed May 4 22:57:46 2005
    · A cat has four rows of whiskers.

    · Vincent Van Gogh comitted suicide while painting Wheat
    Field with Crows.

    · An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.

    · Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly beans in
    outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21,
    1983 voyage of the space shuttle Challenger (the same voyage
    as the first American woman in space, Sally Ride).

    · Baseballer Connie Mack's real name was Cornelius
    McGilicuddy.

    · If you were standing in the northernmost point in the
    contiguous (48) states, you'd be standing in Minnesota.

    · Only thirty percent of the famous Maryland blue crabs
    are actually from Maryland, the rest are from North Carolina
    and Virginia.

    · Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer
    wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it
    could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

    · Not all of West Virginia voted to go with the North.
    When the State of West Virginia was formed from Virginia in
    1863 the three western counties in Virginia voted to go with
    West Virginia, but West Virginia didn't take them because
    they were poor. Instead they took three counties that voted
    to stay with Virginia, because they were richer and they had
    the B&O railroad. Those counties since split and are 5
    Jefferson, Hampshire, Berkley, Mineral, and Morgan.

    · The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.

    · The Dodge brothers Horace and John were Jewish, that's
    why the first Dodge emblem had a star of David in it.

    · Studebaker was the only major car company to stop making
    cars while making a profit from them.

    · Studebaker still exists, but is now called Worthington.

    · Chrysler built B-29's that bombed Japan, Mitsubishi
    built Zeros that tried to shoot them down. Both companies now
    build cars in a joint plant call Diamond Star.

    · On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the clock
    tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.

    · The top three cork-producing countries are Spain,
    Portugal and

    · Algeria. (Cork comes from trees.)

    · In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy's last name is Gail. It is
    shown on the mail box.

    · If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New
    Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from
    the town New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the
    late M*A*S*H star McLean Stevenson were both once assistant
    football coaches at Northwestern University.

    · The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that
    doesn't have 1 syllable... it has three.

    · All swans and all sturgeons in England are property of
    the Queen. Messing with them is a serious offense.

    · Michael Di Lorenzo, who plays Eddie Torres on New York
    Undercover is one of the lead dancers in Michael Jackson's
    "Beat It" video.

    · Only two people signed the Decleration of Independence
    on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the
    rest signed on Augest 2, but the last signature wasn't added
    until 5 year later.

    · October 4, 1957 is a historic date to be remembered, it
    is the day both "Leave it to Beaver" and the Russian
    satellite Sputnik 1 were launched.

    · Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

    · It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook
    macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.

    · The antifungal, nystatin, which is sometime used for
    treating thrush, is named after New York State Institute for
    Health (Acronym)

    · QANTAS, the name of the Australian national airline, is
    a (former) acronym, for Queensland And Northern

    · Territories Air Service.

    · The world's largest four-faced clock sits atop the Allen-
    Bradley plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

    · Almonds are members of the peach family.

    · The first video ever played on MTV Europe was "Money For
    Nothing" by Dire Straits.

    · If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5
    etc) the total is 5050

    · The "Grinch" singer and voice of Tony the Tiger is a
    charming man named Thurl Ravenscroft.

    · The famous split-fingered Vulcan salute is actually
    intended to represent the first letter ("shin," pronounced
    "sheen") of the word "shalom." As a small boy, Leonard Nimoy
    observed his rabbi using it in a benediction and never forgot
    it; eventually he was able to add it to "Star Trek" lore.

    · The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an
    octothorpe.

    · Ham radio operators got the term "ham" coined from the
    expression "ham-fisted operators", a term used to describe
    early radio users who sent Morse code (i.e. pounded their
    fists).

    · While the Chinese invented gunpowder, they were not the
    first to develop firearms. Sam Colt invented the

    · "revolving pistol." Therefore, all revolvers are
    correctly called pistols.

    · A 12 gauge "rifled slug" does not spin, even though
    there are grooves on it's bearing surface. A slug actually
    travels like a dart.

    · Revolvers cannot be silenced, due all the noisy gasses
    which escape the cylinder gap at the rear of the barrel.

    · A bullet fired from the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge (also
    called the .308 Winchester) is still supersonic at 1000
    yards.

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

    · The home team must provide the referee with 24 footballs
    for each National Football League game.

    · The maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62 oz.

    · A flea expert is a pullicologist.

    · A bear has 42 teeth.

    · M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest Mars, Sr.,
    then candymaker, and his associate Bruce Murrie.

    · The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is
    the cat.

    · The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.

    · Table tennis balls have been known to travel off the
    paddle at speeds up to 105.6 miles per hour.

    · In Irian Jaya exists a tribe of tall, white people who
    use parrots as a warning sign against intruders.

    · In the Dutch province of Twente people live on average
    half a year shorter than in the rest of the Netherlands.

    · Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running
    clockwise. This is because all knights used to be

    · right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the
    stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which
    was holding the sword because of the difficulties in climbing
    the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles
    except left-handed people could never become knights because
    it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.

    · Duddley DoRight's Horses name was "Horse."

    · If the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT was a golf ball, to
    be the proportional size to hit it, you'd be two miles tall.

    · On Sesame Street, Bert's goldfish were named Lyle and
    Talbot, presumably after the actor Lyle Talbot.

    · The word "hangnail" comes from Middle English: ang-
    (painful) + nail. Nothing to do with hanging.

    · Louis IV of France had a stomach the size of two regular
    stomachs.

    · Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day
    for the last years of his life.

    · Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835
    when Haley's Comet came into veiw. When

    · He died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again.

    · Pepsi originally contained pepsin, thus the name.

    · Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear
    until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.

    · The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the
    lowest point in Colorado.

    · If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the
    Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your
    birthplace was listed as a post office box in Albequerque.

    · Robert Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador Hotel, the
    same hotel that housed Marilyn Monroe's first modelling
    agency.

    · Ronald Regan sent out the army phoyographer who first
    discovered Marilyn Monroe.

    · Carbonated water, with nothing else in it,can dissolve
    limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals.
    Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in
    soda pop.

    · Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a
    registered trademark of AT&T.

    · The newest dog breed is the Bull Boxer, first bred in
    the United states in 1990-91.

    · The first hard drive available for the Apple ][ had a
    capacity of 5 megabytes.

    · South of Tucson, Arizona, all road signs are in the
    Metric System.

    · In many cases, the amount of storage space on a
    recordable CD is measured in minutes. 74 minutes is about 650
    megabytes, 63 minutes is 550 megabytes.

    · The real name of Astro (the dog fromThe Jetsons) is
    "Tralfaz" -- his real owner appeared one day to claim him but
    wound up giving him back to the Jetsons.

    · Charlie Brown's father was a barber.

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

    · Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intraveinously

    · When a film is in production, the last shot of the day
    is the "martini shot", the next to last one is the "Abby
    Singer".

    · Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of
    them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp.) Ohio is
    listed as the 17th state in the U.S., but technically it is
    number 47. Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote on a
    resolution to admit Ohio to the Union.

    · It is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly --
    so says City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California.

    · If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four
    pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of
    money in coins without being able to make change for a
    dollar.

    · Other than fruit, honey is the only natural food that is
    made without destroying any kind of life! What about milk,
    you say? A cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is
    living!

    · When Saigon fell the signal for all Americans to
    evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on
    the radio.

    · The Fort George Point in Belize City was formed by the
    silt runoff of Hurricane Hattie.

    · If you lace your shoes from the inside to the outside
    the fit will be snugger around your big toe.

    · Only 1/3 of the people that can twitch their ears can
    twitch only one at a time.

    · The expression "What in tarnation" comes from the
    original meaning: "What in eternal damnation"

    · Gary Burgough who played Walter Radar O'Reily on M*A*S*H

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