Did You Know? (04/10)
From
Bruno Barbiere@1:2320/100 to
All on Wed May 4 22:57:46 2005
has a deformed left thumb. If you watch closely you will see
that he never shows his left hand.
· Only two states' names begin with double consonants:
Florida and Rhode Island.
· The volume of the Earth's moon is the same as the volume
of the Pacific Ocean
· Ingrown toenails are hereditary.
· The Cincinnati Reds baseball team name was officially
changed to the Redlegs during the anti-communist movement.
· Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a
dance.
· "Xmas" does not begin with the Roman letter X. It begins
with the Greek letter "chi," which was used in medieval
manuscripts as an abbreviation for the word "Christ" (xus =
christus, etc.)
· The ampersand (&) is actually a stylised version of the
Latin word "et," meaning and."
· The largest city in the United States with a one
syllable name is Flint, Michigan.
· The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
· Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than
all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
· On the cartoon show 'The Jetsons', Jane is 33 years old
and her daughter Judy is 15.
· In Mel Brooks' 'Silent Movie,' mime Marcel Marceau is
the only person who has a speaking role.
· Only humans and horses have hymens.
· No NFL team which plays it's home games in a domed
stadium has ever won a Superbowl. (Texas Stadium, home of the
Cowboys, is not a dome, there is a large hole in the roof.)
· The word "set" has more definitions than any other word
in the English language.
· The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave
It To Beaver". Wally and Beaver had a baby alligator which
they kept in the toilet.
· In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was
burnt down but only 6 people were injured
· The most eastern part of the western world is located in
Ilomantsi, Finland.
· "Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese
word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."
· The term the "Boogey Man will get you" comes from the
Boogey people,who still inhabit an area of Indonesia. These
people still act as pirates today and attack ships that pass.
Thus the term spread "if you don't watch out the Boogey man
will get you."
· The Saturn V moon rocket consumed 15 tons of fuel per
second.
· The state with the longest coastline in the US is
Michigan.
· Race car is a palindrome.
· We will have four consecutive full moons making two blue
moons in 1999 (January 2 and 31, March 2 and 31.) The only
other time it happened this century was in 1915 (January 1
and 31, March 1 and 31.)
· The Basset Horn, a kind of alto clarinet, was named
after its inventor -- a man named Horn. "Basset" is from
"Basetto," or "little bass" in Italian.
· There are more bald eagles in the province of British
Columbia then there are in the whole United States.
· Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
· The "second unit" films movie shots that do not require
the presence of actors.
· Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5 million going
to actor's salaries.
· The world's second largest pipe organ is located at the
Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
· Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented fiberglass.
· One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because
cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers --
they saw it as competition. It is not chemically addictive as
is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.
· Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to have
exactly fourteen feathers
· The music group Simply Red is named because of its love
for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home
strip.
· In case you ever find yourself piloting a dogsled, shout
"Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!" to go right.
· Richard Nixon left instructions for "California, Here I
Come" to be the last piece of music played at his funeral
("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
· The earliest document in Latin in a woman's handwriting
(it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a
birthday party.
· Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was
played by six different cats.
· Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.
· Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world,
at 0.08988 g/cc
· Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in the world,
at 70.6 g/cc
· The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in Cape
Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in
Bishop, California...
· The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in the city of
Paris, Texas, shorty after its box office release.
· 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 use 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".
· Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
· The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars (20th
Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
· Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each
man, woman, and child in the world.
· At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies
instead of cherry ones.
· The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
· 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 Baseball All-Star
Game.
· The international telphone dialing code for Antarctica
is 672.
· A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A nibble is
half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
· A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop
goes to the production of Guinness beer.
· Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
· If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads
5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs
more, so it ends up on the bottom.
· The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's highest
airport.
· The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
· The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
· Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de Janeiro.
· Original copy of the Declaration of Independence is
lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a
holograph. That is a term for a handmade copy of a document
and is not the same as a laser produced hologram.
· Singpore is the only country with one train station.
· The little bags of netting for gas lanterns (called
'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of
an alarm at a nuclear reactor.
· When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the height
of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch).
'Pitch' is a horizontal measurement of the number of letters
which can be printed in an inch.
· The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with
exactly one endpoint is P.
· In the movie "the Right Stuff" there is a scene where a
government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program
(played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake,
California. His partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good
astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to badmouth Yeager
claiming they need someone who went to college. During the
conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who
is standing behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General
Yeager is listed low in the movie credits as 'Fred.'
· "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil
and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about
the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when
your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak
of the Devil"
· 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.
· Nauru is the only country in the world with no official
capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren
· District, but there's no official capital.)
· South Africa is the only country with three official
capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
· Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
· Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
· The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than
that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
· If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the
ocean, the horizon wil be about three statute miles away.
· The one-hundred eleventh element is known as
"unnilenilenium"
· The longest muscle name is the "levator labii superioris
alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.
· The longest time someone has typed on a typewriter
continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
· The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225
different ways.
· There was once a town named "6" in West Virginia.
· Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or
older
· A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
· An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
· The oldest word in the English language is "town"
· The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more
poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
· Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
· Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all
crimes of treason.
· The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in
the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
· There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the
Paramount Pictures logo.
· After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the
head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came
head to toe.
· Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a
foreign language; commonly German but more recently
· Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
· A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It
would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a
mask if not held on by skin.
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