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Did anyone know that the NBA's New York Knicks are named after pants? Knickerbockers
is another word for pants. I feel so ashamed that my team is the New York Pants!!
Did anyone realize that "stressed"
spelled backwards is "desserts"?
If you are a WWF fan, and you know who Tori is, have you realized that her name spelled
backwards is "I rot"?
At age 47, the Rolling Stones' bassist, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with 13-year old Mandy
Smith, with her mother's blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after,
Bill's 30-year-old son, Stephen, married Mandy's mother, age 46.
That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother.
If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father's father-in-law and his own grandpa.
Unlike
the myth perpetuated in Hollywood movies, Romans didn't give the thumbs up or thumbs down sign as an indication of whether
they wanted a gladiator to live or die. If they wanted someone killed, they would extend
their thumb with fist clenched.
If they wanted to spare someone, they clenched their thumbs in their fists, not showing them at all.
Many believe
the chopstick is a more primitive way of eating than the practice of using silverware. Actually, the Chinese once used metal
utensils, specifically the knife, but felt using chopsticks "elevated man to a more civilized plane."
Where did the
expression "son of a gun" originate?
"Son of a gun" has its origins with sailors. When a ship was in port for an extended
period of time, wives and other women were permitted to live on board with the ship's crew. Occasionally, children would be
born on board and a convenient place for the birth to happen was between guns on the gun deck. If the child's father
was unknown, the child was entered in the ship's log as "Son of a gun."
Why do we say a computer or computer program
has a "bug" in it when it malfunctions?
Because once the problem really WAS a bug. In 1945, a computer at Harvard
malfunctioned and a woman investigated and found a moth in one of the circuits. She removed it. Ever since, when something
goes wrong with a computer, it is said to have a bug in it.
Once I did not know how to spell the word "together,"
and now I will never forget because I wrote from three smaller words: "to get her."
The term break a leg is referring
to the curtains on the side of the stage, which are behind the main curtain. These are the "legs" so breaking a leg means
to make it successfully out on to the stage, and then giving a good performance. It has nothing to do with actual legs or
stomping instead of clapping.
How much wood is used to make a book?
To produce 1,000 copies of an average-sized
book, you need about one cord of wood. A cord is equal to a stack of logs measuring about 75-100 cubic feet. For just a single
book, you would need a small block of wood slightly bigger than the size of the book itself.
Who is "Bells Nichols"?
According to Pennsylvania Dutch and French tradition, "Bells Nichols" is Santa Claus's brother. He is said to visit
every home on New Year's Eve and fill empty plates with cakes and cookies. Guess he's making up for all those sweets Santa
took on Christmas Eve.
What toy did the Pentagon ban?
The Furby. In 1999, when the toys were a huge hit and
even adults were taking them to work, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency banned them. The fear was that the toys,
which talked and were said to "learn" English, could be used to collect top-secret information. In fact, the toys do not record
or mimic voices and are not spies!
Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It
came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.
The
longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
Richard Milhouse Nixon was the first U.S. president whose
name contains all the letters from the word "criminal". The second? William Jefferson Clinton. Go Bubba!
Carnivorous
animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike.
In many states in the U.S. it is illegal
to commit suicide. Huh?
When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer
terror.
It is illegal to go barefoot in Austin, TX without a $5 permit.
In Korea, if you get into an accident,
even if it was in no way your fault, you are responsible for paying 20% of the damages to BOTH vehicles. Even if the other
guy was drunk!
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
The largest recorded foot size was found on a person with a
genetic disorder causing gigantic and often times disproportionate growth of the human body. They wore a size fifty-four shoe.
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.
The
last person hanged for witchcraft in the American colonies was executed on September 22, 1692.
Donald Duck comics
were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
The average life span of a major league baseball is 4 to 7
pitches.
In Disney's Fantasia, the Sorcerer's name is Yensid, which is Disney spelled backward.
The first
toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It to Beaver."
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads
for dating are already married.
The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.
After cats eat,
they always immediately bathe themselves. This is because their instinct tells them to get the food scent off of them so that
predators will not smell the food and come after them.
The average American visits a fast food restaurant six times
a month.
The first drive-through window at a restaurant was at the McDonald's in Sierra Vista, AZ. It was put in so
that the soldiers from Ft. Huachuca could get food since the base had a regulation that prohibited anyone in uniform from
entering a business establishment.
Thomas Edison had 1,097 patents, but only invented one thing on his own, the phonograph.
The rest were aquired by him under the contracts he had with his workers.
The largest living thing on earth is a tree
named The General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park. It is 275 feet tall, and 37 feet wide at the widest part of the base.
Marble Bar in Western Australia recorded 160 consecutive days where the temperature rose to 38 C (100 F) or higher
between the dates of Oct 31, 1923 and April 7, 1924.
The five most stolen items in a drugstore are batteries, cosmetics,
film, sunglasses, and, get this, Preparation H.
In Kentucky, it is illegal to marry your wife's grandmother.
The
longest word in the English language is
"pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis", which is a lung disease caused
by breathing in volcanic particles.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
Oysters can change from
male to female and back again.
More people are killed by donkeys than plane crashes.
We have about 5,000,000,000
years of sunlight left.
A magazine survey has found one in 12 women would be prepared to lose a limb in return for
an otherwise perfect body. While 61% say they would give up chocolate forever, 30% would give up all their life savings 4%
would leave their partner for the body of their dreams.
American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one
olive from each salad served in first-class.
In Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger lickin' good" comes
out as "eat your fingers off".
No president of the United States was an only child.
Only one person in two
billion will live to be 116 or older.
In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all
the world's nuclear
weapons combined.
When Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle, it travels at a rate of 25 miles per year.
A duck's
quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It to Beaver".
It
takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather
for a year's supply of footballs.
A person afflicted with
hexadectylism has six fingers or six toes on one or both hands and feet.
America's first nudist organization was founded
in 1929, by 3 men.
Men commit suicide three times more frequently than women do. But women attempt suicide two to
three times more often than men.
The New York phone book had 22 Hitlers listed before World War II ... and none after.
The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
Sound travels
15 times faster through steel than through the air.
In Brazil, a traffic jam was created when a couple kissing in
a car got their dentures stuck together.
One sign of rain that farmers once searched for was for their pigs to pick
up sticks and walk around with them in their mouths.
Strange-but-real organizations that you might want to leave off
of your resume:
The Institute of Totally Useless Skills
The International Association of Sand Castle Builders
National
Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Mushrooms
Cookie Cutter Collectors Club
International Correspondence Of Corkscrew
Addicts
The term "bouquet" comes from the French word "bosquet", meaning thicket. And yes that was one of the practices
used before running water and daily baths.
It is for the same reason that flowers were used at funerals. Before the
days of modern air conditioning and refrigeration, when the body of the loved one that passed was laid out, usually in the
home (before funeral homes), flowers were brought in to disguise the smell of the body
decaying.
Neon was the
first word spelled out in the first neon sign. The small bright red sign was crated by Dr. Perley G. Nutting, a government
scientist, and exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. The sign's debut occurred 15 years before
neon became widely used commercially.
The corrugator muscle is the muscle in your forehead that, when contracted,
pulls together the eyebrows and creates that central, frowning wrinkle above your nose.
The Rubik's Cube can be twisted
and turned into over 43 quintillion configurations in the attempt to line up the solid colors on all six sides. The exact
number is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.
The smell of Crayola crayons is so familiar that it is one of the 20 most recognizable
scents to American adults (right up there with coffee and peanut butter) and so soothing that sniffing crayons has been shown
to lower blood pressure.
In the TV show "Mork and Mindy," how far from Earth was Ork, Mork's home planet, was approximately
60 "bleems," Morkian for about 60 billion light-years. You know, though, that Mork was not really an extraterrestrial visiting
Earth, that Ork isn't really a planet or a place and that TV sitcoms are fantasy? Just checking.
Britain's present
royal family was originally named Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The name was changed in 1917, during WW1 because of German connotations.
The name Windsor was suggested by one of the staff. At the same time the Battenberg family name of the cousins to the Windsors
was
changed into Mountbatten.
In 1888, an estimated 300,000 mummified cats were found at Beni Hassan, Egypt. They
were sold at $18.43 per ton, and shipped to England to be ground up and used for fertilizer.
You're more likely to
be a target for mosquitoes if you consume bananas.
At Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida, on June 26, 1985,
organist Wilbur Snapp played "Three Blind Mice" following a call by umpire Keith O'Connor. The umpire was not amused, and
saw to it that Mr. Snapp was ejected from the game.
Lightning is three times hotter than the surface of the sun: 30,000
degrees F compared to 10,000 F.
Each second, there are 50 to 100 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes worldwide.
Most
lightning strikes average two to three miles long and carry a current of 10,000 amps at 100 million volts.
The typical
width of a lightning bolt is between a quarter and a half-dollar. It appears wider because the light is so bright.
1,500
-- Estimated number of "well-documented" sightings of Bigfoot since 1958
5:13 -- Ratio of Playboy Playmates who "most
admire" Albert Einstein to those who claim to feel this way about Sammy Davis Jr.
2 -- Factor by which Frank Sinatra's
birth weight in 1915 exceeds the average weight of a baby born in New Jersey today
23 -- Age, in years, of the oldest
frozen turkey about which Butterball's hotline has ever fielded a "freshness" question
Trick-or-treating is an Irish
tradition, based on a custom where the wealthy would give food to the poor people of the village on Halloween night. They
believed that the spirits would see this act of kindness and leave them alone. It was around the 1800s when this custom came
to the United States.
By the time you are 75 years old, you will have spent, on average, 23 years sleeping.
On
average, food travels 30 feet, beginning to end, through the digestive tract.
In an average lifetime (74 years), a
person takes approximately 600 million breaths and his heart beats 3 billion times.
The world's record for the longest
sneezing attack is 978 days; for the longest hiccuping attack: 69.5 years.
A cockroach can live up to 27 days with
its head cut off; it dies from starvation.
More than 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.
No
piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half.
The average glass of London tap water has passed
through nine other people.
15 people are known to have been crushed to death tilting soda machines towards them in
order to receive free soda.
Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive.
Clinophobia is the fear of beds.
A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
Recycling one glass jar, saves enough energy to watch T.V.
for 3 hours!
There are more plastic flamingos in the U.S, than real ones.
The Blarney Stone is a stone set
in the wall of the Blarney Castle tower in the Irish village of Blarney. Kissing the stone is supposed to bring the kisser
the gift of persuasive eloquence (blarney.)
If you say good-bye to a friend on a bridge, you will never see each other
again.
If someone is sweeping the floor and sweeps over your feet, you'll never get married.
If a clock which
has not been working suddenly chimes, there will be a death in the family.
Cows lifting their tails is a sure sign
that rain is coming.
A running man typically burns 600 calories in an hour; a woman 420 calories. Standing still for
an hour consumes 120 calories in a man, 100 in a woman. An hour's worth of sleep eats up 65 calories in a male, 55 in a female.
The power output of a man who talks for three hours a day through an average life span is sufficient to heat up a
cup of tea to the temperature it is usually drunk.
If a speaker's food consumption is 3,000 kilocalories per day,
his or her speechifying will be about the energy equivalent of a couple of slices of bread and butter.
Men are 6 times
more likely to be struck by lightning than women.
It is estimated that millions of trees in the world are accidentally
planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.
A toothpick is the object most often choked
on by Americans.
Bulls are colorblind, therefore will usually charge at a matador's waving cape no matter what color
it is: be it red or neon yellow!
Dogs and cats, like humans, are either right or left-handed... or is that paws?!
The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows.
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
Owls are one of the only birds who can see the color blue!
In Victorian England, turkeys were popular for Christmas dinners. Some of the birds were raised in Norfolk, and taken
to market in London. To get them to London, the turkeys were supplied with boots made of sacking or leather. The turkeys were
walked to market. The boots protected their feet from the frozen mud of the road. Boots were not used for geese: instead,
their feet were protected with a covering of tar.
SANTA CLAUS
[In the United States and Canada, his name is
Santa Claus.
In China, he is called Shengdan Laoren.
In England, his name is Father Christmas, where he has
a longer coat and a longer beard.
In France, he's known as Pere Noel.
In Germany, children get presents from
Christindl, the Christ Child.
In Morocco he is known as Black Peter.
In Italy he is called Babbo Natale, which
means Father Christmas.
In Japan, Santa Claus is called Santa Claus or just "Santa". Children often call him "Santa
no ojisan," which means "Uncle Santa."
Actually the old "cult" of Santa Claus incorporates many traditions: Christian
and Pagan, Old Catholic, Scandinavian, Dutch, German and English.
In the Netherlands, he is called Kerstman.
In
Sweden Jultomten visits the evening before Christmas day, pulling a big bag of julklappar (Christmas presents) in the deep
snow.
Sinter Klaas in Dutch. He rides a white horse, leaving gifts in wooden shoes.
In Scandinavia and Germany,
Santa comes on the 24th of December, knocking on the door like normal people.]
The first couple to be shown in bed
together on prime time television
were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.
Men
can read smaller print than women; women can hear better.
City with the most Rolls Royce's per capita: Hong Kong
State
with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
In Brazil, a traffic jam was created when a couple
kissing in a car got their dentures stuck together.
Someone within 200 miles of your town claims to have had direct
contact with a monster, ghost or other unexplainable being.
The duration record for a face-slapping contest was set
in Kiev, U.S.S.R., in 1931 when a draw was declared between Bezbordny and Goniusch after 30 hours.
The largest school
in the world is a K-12 school in the Phillipines, with an enrollment of 25,000.
There are eight different sizes of
champagne bottles and the largest is called a Nebuchadnezzar (after the biblical king who put Daniel's three friends into
the oven).
There is an army general in Liberia who use to lead his army into battle naked. His name was General Butt
Naked. He is now an evangelical preacher.
Baby opossums - upon birth when they move to the mother's pouch - are
smaller than honeybees. An entire litter can
fit in a teaspoon.
Jim Morrison found the name "The Doors" for his rock band in the title
of Aldous Huxley's book
"The Doors of Perception, which extolls the use
of hallucinogenic drugs.
In Pennsylvania, Ministers are forbidden
from performing marriages when
either the bride or groom is drunk.
If the Nile River were stretched across the United
States, it would run just about from New York to Los Angeles.
Woodbury Soap was the first product to show a nude woman
in its
advertisements. The year was 1936. Edward Steichen's photograph showed
a rear, full-length view of a woman sunbathing
wearing only sandals.
A Swiss study found that a majority of women unconsciously choose mates
with a body odor that differs from their own
natural scents, which, as
a result, ensures better immune protection for their children. "Longevity" magazine reported
that the genes that battle disease-provoking substances also influence body odor.
A space vehicle must move at a rate
of at least 7 miles per second to escape Earth's gravitational pull. This is equivalent to going from New York to Philadelphia
in about 20 seconds.
President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other, simultaneously.
Leonardo da Vinci could draw with one hand and write with the other, also simultaneously.
In the spring of 2000, it
was reported that a 25-year-old Tehran transsexual, who had just undergone extensive surgery to become a woman, said
he wanted to change back to a man after realizing just how poorly women are treated in Iran.
From the 1850s to the
1880s, the most common cause of death among
cowboys in the American West was being dragged by a horse while caught in the
stirrups.
Studies have confirmed that men who are exposed to a lot of toxic chemicals, high heat, unusual pressures (jet pilots,
deep-sea divers) are more prone to father girls than boys.
In 1996, The Associated Press reported that during a robbery
at Super Jims grocery in Chicago, store employee Vincente Arriaga was shot by the robber. The bullet barely broke Arriagas
skin because it was slowed as it passed through an 8-ounce box of Tuna Helper he was holding.
The U.S. produces 19
percent of the world's trash. The annual contribution includes 20 billion disposable diapers, 2 billion razors, and 1.7 billion
pens.
Tokyo's expressways, built on a radial pattern dating from the eighteenth century, are so overloaded that traffic
often grinds to a halt for 30 to 40 miles outside the city.
In the Middle Ages, chicken soup was believed to be an aphrodisiac.
A beautiful mirage called the Fata Morgana
appears in the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy. It is an image of a town in the sky, but it seems more like a
fairy landscape than a real town. It is believed to be a mirage of a fishing village situated along the coast.
The average person's hand flexes its finger joints 25 million times during a lifetime.
Forty percent of child
psychologists advise parents of preschoolers to "confirm Santa's existence."
It is estimated that a healthy individual
releases 3.5 oz. of gas in a single flatulent emission, or about 17 oz. in a day.
Wood frogs are freeze-tolerant and
spend winters frozen on land, only to thaw in the spring and begin their breeding process in vernal ponds.
Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales were greeted by bad reviews: "quite unsuitable for childrenpositively harmful for
the mind"
A study by researcher Frank Hu and the Harvard School of Public Health
found that women who snore are
at an increased risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
Octopi and squid have three hearts. Their main
systemic heart pumps blood throughout the circulatory system, and two branchial hearts provide some additional push at each
of the paired gills.
Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.
Nutmeg
is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.
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."
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.
The average human body contains enough fat to make seven bars of soap.
The blow of a whale has a strong, foul odor. It apparently smells like
a
combination of spoiled fish and old oil.
Because whales have such
terrible breath, sailors believed at one time that a whiff of it could
cause brain disorders.
A river in the northern hemisphere scour their right-hand banks more severely than their left-hand banks.
This effect is due to the rotation of the Earth.
Water is so scarce in the arid regions of China that, in the grasslands,
the people never take baths, and sometimes must wash their faces in yak's milk.
In 1995, a National Aeronautics and
Space Administration employee bought six plastic owls at Wal-Mart to protect the space shuttle from woodpeckers.
According
to a 1997 poll, the average person in the U.S. has felt compelled to see the movie Star Wars an astonishing 6.7 times since
its 1977 release, either in theaters or on TV.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
You are more likely to be killed by a champagne
cork than by a poisonous
spider.
The human brain holds between 1 and 7 terabytes (1 and 7 million megabytes)
of data.
When pressured for grazing space, kangaroos have been known to kill competing sheep.
It takes 42
muscles in your face to frown. It only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and smack someone upside the head.
A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court!
The
venom in a Daddy Long-Legs spider is more poisonous than a Black Widow's or a Brown Recluse, but they cannot bite humans because
their jaws won't open wide enough.
If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never
end because of the rate of reproduction.
The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember
the word you want.
The pop you get when you crack your knuckles is actually a bubble of gas bursting.
The average human eats 8 mosquitoes in their lifetime at night.
Babies are born without knee caps. They
don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today is because cottongrowers
in the 1930s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition.
A mother hen turns over her egg about
fifty times per day (so the yolk won't stick to the sides of the shell)
When a piece of glass cracks, the crack travels
faster than 3,000 miles per hour.
Gloucestershire airport in England used to blast Tina Turner songs on the runways to scare birds away.
There
was a molasses flood in Boston on January 15, 1919 that killed 21 people and injured 150 people.
Bird droppings
are chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
A baby in Florida was named Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny.
His middle name is George James.
Paranormal experts say people reach the peak of their ability to see ghosts
when they're 7 years old.
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.
There is a sea squirt (found in the seas near Japan) that digests its own brain. When the sea squirt is mature it permanently
attaches itself to a rock. At this point it does not need to move anymore and has no need for a brain.
A blue whale's
testicles are as large as a Volkswagen beetle, and a small child could crawl through their major arteries.
The bonobo
monkeys use sex (and/or sexual favors) to placate members of their social group instead of grooming. They are one of the few
species of animals (humans being another) that have sex out of season and for fun.
Southern Indian drug addicts get
high by having venomous snakes bite their tongues. This can give addicts a 16 hour high, but can be very deadly.
Sharks
are capable of surviving on average six weeks without eating. The record observed in an aquarium is fifteen months by a species
of shark known as the "swell shark."
The magic word 'Abracadabra'
was originally intended for the specific purpose of curing hay fever.
The word ""maverick"" came into use after Samuel
Maverick, a Texan, refused to brand his cattle. Eventually any unbranded calf became known as a Maverick.
A hydrodaktulpsychicharmonica
is a variety of musical glasses.
Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
Scatologists are experts who study poop (a.k.a. crap, dung, dookie, dumps, feces, excrement, etc...)
A dragonfly's penis is shovel-shaped at the end, to scoop a rival male's
sperm out of the female it's impregnating.
The only flying saucer launch pad in the world is located in St. Paul,
Alberta, Canada.
In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.
Hawaii's
Mount Waialeale is the wettest place in the world - it rains throughout the year and about 460 inches per annum.
Among
the Buganda people of Uganda, the widows of a deceased king have the honor of drinking beer in which the dead king's entrails
have been cleaned.
50,000 of the cells in your body will die and be replaced with new cells all while you have
been reading this sentence.
A 5ft 5 inch tall 27-year old woman weighing 374 pounds outflabbed 1,000 competitors to
win the title of fattest woman in China. Her prize - a supply of diet food.
An average adult produces about half a
litre of flatulent gas per day, resulting in an average of about fourteen occurrences of flatulence a day.
Boys who
have unusual first names are more likely to have mental problems than boys with conventional names. Girls don't seem to have
this problem.
Although modern images of India often show
poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th
Century.
Ancient Egyptians used to used the spice Thyme to preserve mummies.
An estimated 10,000 kidneys of
executed Chinese prisoners have been sold since 1990.
According to psychologists, the shoe and the foot are the most
common sources of sexual fetishism in Western society.
In 1969, Iowa State College conducted a survey indicating that
a parent's stress level at the time of conception is a major factor in determining the child's sex. The child is usually the
same sex as the less stressed parent.
Of all the words Dr. Suess made up in his storybooks, only one has stuck in the English vocabulary: grinch, which is refers
to a killjoy -- and it took more than 20 years.
The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.
A Canadian Tour company offers a two-day course in igloo building.
In 1982, a cactus in Phoenix, Arizona killed a man. David Grundman fired two shotgun blasts at a giant saguaro cactus that
ended up falling on top of him.
In the 17th century, Sawney Beane, his wife, eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters,
who were all born in incest, were a family of cannibals that lived in caves in Scotland. They murdered hundreds of men, women
and children and then ate them. The entire family was executed in Edinburgh without a trial.
A 200 year old piece of Tibetan cheese was auctioned off for
$1,513 in 1993.
Ancient Romans at one time used human urine as an ingredient in their toothpaste.
The Chinese
ideogram for 'trouble' depicts two women living under one roof.
Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose
name meant plenty of excrement.
During the 16th century, newly married couples in France had to stand naked outdoors
while the groom kissed the bride's left foot and big toe as part of traditional customs.
Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
Chinese Crested dogs can get
acne.
A baby eel is called an elver, a baby oyster is called a spat.
A Flemish artist is responsible for the
world's smallest paintings in history. It is a picture of a miller and his mill, and it was painted onto a grain of corn.
A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.
Between 1902 and 1907, the same tiger killed 434 people in India.
According to British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged
for trying.
A surfer once sued another surfer for ""stealing his wave."" The case was thrown out because the court was unable to put
a price on ""pain and suffering"" endured by the surfer watching someone else ride ""his"" wave.
Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
In Texas, it is illegal to put graffiti on someone else's cow.
38% of all people that are either married, or in long term relationships, use the Internet as an avenue to cheat on their
lovers by way of cyber sex! And 50% of these people have had phone contact, or actual physical contact with the people they
have had cyber sex with!
21% of all men, married or not, who have an Internet connection spend 30% of their
time online looking at porn!
It is reported that 41% of all children aged 11 - 17 who have an Internet connection
surf for porn sites at some time during their online session!
There are only a few downloadable software products
that allow you to monitor what others do on your family computer. These software products allow you to read what others do
online, from what they write in email conversations, to what sites they have visited. They even monitor what they type on
instant messengers, and in chat rooms!
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