BIOLOGY AND ANATOMY
* The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
* Most lipstick contains fish scales.
* The average ear of corn has eight hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows.
* A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
* A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.
* Almonds are members of the peach family.
* Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedo-ing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
* The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
* Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age
* Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
* Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
* If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
* When asked to whirl around, most people in the northern hemisphere go clockwise, and in the southern hemisphere, counterclockwise.
* Chocolate kills dogs. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.
* Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
* Lake Nicaragua boasts the only fresh-water sharks in the entire world.
* The outdoor temperature can be estimated to within several degrees by timing the chirps of a cricket. It is done this way: count the number of chirps in a 15-second period, and add 37 to the total. The result will be very close to the actual Fahrenheit temperature. This formula, however, only works in warm weather. (Try it!)
* If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
* A cat has four rows of whiskers.
* A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
* Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles (jaws) into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem, and, with legs dangling, fall asleep.
* The way to get more mules is to mate a male donkey with a female horse.
* When a giraffe's baby is born it falls from a height of six feet, normally without being hurt.
TECHNOLOGY
* The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.'
* A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
* The word "modem" is a contraction of the words "modulate, demodulate."
* Moon was Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name.
* Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
* The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
* Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
POLITICS
* The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
* George Washington's false teeth were made of whale bone.
* In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
* Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
* The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is 'Live Free or Die'. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
* 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 Swiss flag is square.
ON LANGUAGE
* The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
* The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
* There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet.
* The two longest one-syllable words in the English language are "screeched" and "strengths."
* The word "queueing" is the only English word with five consecutive vowels.
* Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
* "Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with "und"
* The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language (though not uniquely so).
* There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
* Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
* The shortest French word with all five vowels is "oiseau" (bird).
* TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard
* Upper and lower case letters are named "upper" and "lower" because in the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the upper case letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the lower case letters.
* The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
* Alma mater means bountiful mother.
* The "ZIP" in Zip Code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."
* Marijuana is Spanish for 'Mary Jane.'
* The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
* There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple, and silver.
* The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan. There was never a recorded Wendy before.
* Sheriff came from Shire Reeve. During early years of feudal rule in England, each shire had a reeve who was the law for that shire.
* The continents names all end with the same letter with which they start.
* 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 term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the 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, it got "the whole 9 yards."
MOVIES, MUSIC, TV
* During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur", a small red car can be seen in the distance.
* The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life"
* Deborah Winger did the voice of E.T.
* The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz." Dorothy's last name is Gail. It is shown on the mailbox. (jf-And it is in the script!)
* In Disney's "Fantasia", the Sorcerer's name is "Yensid" (Disney backwards).
* Boris Karloff is the narrator of the seasonal television special "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."
* 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 is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck. The Professor's real name was Roy Hinkley, Mary Ann's last name was Summers.
* Warren Beatty and Shirley McLaine are brother and sister. (jf-and Ned Beaty--and his is the real spelling of the Beaty name.)
* Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
* Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
* Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman.
* The tune for the "A-B-C" song is the same as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
* The dial tone of a normal phone is in the key of F
* Don MacLean's song "American Pie" was written about Buddy Holly. (jf- and the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.)
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
* At the first Thanksgiving dinner, lobster was one of the entrees.
* Daniel Boone detested coonskin caps.
* Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.
* John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son.
* 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 very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
* The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
* Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. 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.
* The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
* Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
LITERATURE
* Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants. Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
* Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
* Dr. Seuss is actually pronounced Seuss such that it sounds like Sue-ice.
* The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries
* Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
* It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear. (jf-he also was supposedly born on April 23 and died on April 23.)
* Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into view. When He died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again.
* Samuel Clemens's pseudonym "Mark Twain" was the nickname of a riverboat pilot about whom Clemens wrote a needless nasty satirical piece. Apparently, Clemens felt guilt later and adopted the name as a nom de plume as some sort of expiation. The phrase does not mean measuring the depth of the river; it means a specific depth, to wit, two fathoms (twelve feet.)
* 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 than 100 years before either moon was discovered.
COMMERCIAL LIFE
* American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in First Class.
* The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.
* The A&W of root beer fame stands for Allen and Wright.
* 40% of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.
* The "spot" on the 7-Up comes from its inventor who had red eyes. He was an albino.
* Canola oil is actually rapeseed oil but the name was changed in Canada for marketing reasons.
* In the United States, a pound of potato chips cost two hundred times more than a pound of potatoes.
* The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had. (jf-and that's where you hit it to get the sauce out!)
* Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as medicine.
* The word denim comes from 'de Nimes', or from Nimes, a place in France.
* The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation.
* A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge. A dime has 118 ridges.
* There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
* The only real person to be a Pez head was Betsy Ross.
* "Evian" spelled backwards is naive.
MOTLEY ASSORTMENT
* A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened.
* The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.
* In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run.
* The silhouette on the NBA logo is Jerry West.
* When the Modern Olympics were revived in 1896, first-place winners received silver medals. Strangely, gold was considered inferior to silver. Eight years later, at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, gold replaced silver for first place
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