Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Everything

(really, how do we know this stuff?)

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry Adams

---

Warning! This site may be addictive, and that is the only useful information I will give you. Enjoy!

---

My URL: http://bounce.to/adamsplace

I got it for free at http://come.to

did you know...

• Coca-Cola was originally green.
• Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.
• It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.
• Smartest dogs: 1) Scottish border collie; 2) Poodle; 3) Golden retriever.
• Dumbest: Afghan hound.
• The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.
• Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear better.
• Amount American Airlines saved in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served first class: $40,000
• City with the most Rolls Royce's per capita: Hong Kong
• State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
• Percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% Percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
• Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33
• Average number of days a West German goes without washing his underwear: 7
• Percentage of American men who say they would marry the same woman if they had it to do all over again: 80%
• Percentage of American women who say they'd marry the same man: 50%
• Cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400
• Average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000.
• Percentage of Americans who have visited Disneyland/Disney World: 70%
• Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
• Only President to win a Pulitzer: John F. Kennedy for Profiles in Courage
• Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
• The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
• The youngest pope was 11 years old.
• Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation.
• First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
• A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
• In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not renumber the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1.
• The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments
• The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
• "Hang On Sloopy" is the official rock song of Ohio.
• There are coffee flavored PEZ.
• The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
• The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)
• When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror.
• The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
• Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
• If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down; hence the expression "to get fired."
• Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.
• "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
• The term "the whole 9 yards" came from W.W.II 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."
• Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
• 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.
• An ostrich's eye is bigger that it's brain.
• The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
• 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.
• In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
• The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
• The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
• The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
• Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
• 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.
• No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl.
• The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver".
• 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 all-stars Game.
• Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
• The longest English word consisting entirely of consonants (and not including "y" as a vowel) is the word "crwth" which is from the fourteenth century and means crowd.
• Ice Cube's real name is O'Shea Jackson.
• The smallest fish in the world is the Trimattum Nanus the Chagos Archipelago. It measures 0.33 inches.
• According to the London for Visitors website, the area known as Soho used to be part of King Henry VIII's hunting grounds. When a hunter spied a deer, he yelled "Tally-Ho!", but when he found a smaller prey, the cry became "So-Ho!" As the area was developed, the name stuck.
• There is now an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has a winter population of 200.
• The only marsupial with a pouch on its back is the bandicoot.
• 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 a ship.
• The speed of a computer mouse, i.e., the distance the cursor moves across the screen, as it relates to the movement of the mouse across the mouse pad, is officially rated in mickeys.
• The popular Fiesta Ware line of dishes sold well in the 1930s, except for the orange-colored sets. The reason? The paint used on the orange Fiesta Ware was radioactive.
• A large amount of boulders that have fallen off a cliff is known as talus, whereas they would be known as moraine had they been left there by a glacier.
• The Sitka spruce is Britain's most commonly planted tree.
• The Philip Morris Tobacco Company's crest has on it Caesar's famous saying "Veni, Vidi, Vici."
• There are more 100 dollar bills in Russia currently than there are in the United States.
• The extras in the the battle scenes in the movie Braveheart were reserves in the Irish army.
• The famous Citgo sign near Fenway Park in Boston is maintained not by Citgo, but by Boston's historical society.
• Roger Ebert won the 1959 Illinois High School Association State Speech competition in Radio.
• The main export of Jamaica is bauxite, which used in making aluminum.
• Will Clark hit a homerun in his first at-bat in college, the Olympics, and the Major Leagues.
• An ounce of platinum can be stretched to 10,000 feet.
• The original Guiness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland has a six thousand year lease.
• The loudest sound that could be made in 1600 was that of a pipe organ.
• The Q in Q-Tip stands for "Quick Clean Up."
• South Africa used to have two official languages. Now it has eleven.
• In 1848, Niagara Falls stopped flowing for 30 hours because of an ice jam blocking the Niagara River.
• America's largest rosary is located at the Fatima Shrine in Holliston, Massachusetts.
• The first product to have a UPC bar code on its packaging was Wrigley's gum.
• In Italy, it is illegal to make coffins out of anything except nutshells or wood.
• Tourism, tourist, come from the first people who ever mass travelled for pleasure, being British citizens who visited the Chateaux de la Loire in France, the capital city of which is Tours.
• A railroad tanker car carrying propane traveled over 3,000 feet when it exploded during a train wreck in Illinois, sheering off a steel tower in it's path. It's the longest flight on record for a propane explosion.
• It takes eighteen minutes to cool hot chocolate into a Hershey's Kiss.
• The football huddle originated at Gallaudet University (the world's only accredited four-year liberal arts college for the deaf) in the 19th century when the football team found that opposing teams were reading their signed messages and intercepting plays.
• The way you can tell whether a chicken will lay white eggs or dark eggs: If the chicken has white ear lobes, she will lay white eggs. If the chicken has red ear lobes she will lay brown eggs.
• The words for the numbers "eleven" and "twelve" in English derive from the Anglo-Saxon for "one left" and "two left", respectively. "Aend-lefene" and "Twa-lefene" describe the process of counting, from left to right, your fingers and then going back one or two.
• The shortest British monarch was Charles I, who was 4'9" and that was before he lost his head!
• The South American Electric Eel can produce almost 1 Amp of current
• The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond
• Ferrets sleep for about 20 hours a day.
• The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator.
• The opening to the cave in which a bear hibernates is always on the north slope.
• Only six times in history have Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated had the same entity on the cover in the same week. They are Joe Namath, Reggie Jackson, Secretariat, the 1980 U.S. Ice Hockey team, Mary Lou Retton and O.J. Simpson.
• Of all the trains in the New York subway system, only one never enters the island of Manhattan. It's the "G" train, the Brooklyn-Queens crosstown local.
• The first national park, Yellowstone, was proclaimed a national park in 1872 however there was no National Park Service until 1916. Until then, the parks were administered by the U.S. Army. When the Park Service was formed they got their first uniforms from the Army, hence the ranger (campaign) hats.
• Since World War II, every American president to address the Canadian House of Commons in their first term of office have all been reelected to a second term. Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton have all had the honor, while Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, and Bush did not address the parliament.
• In 1920 Ray Chapman a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, is the only player ever killed as a result of a major league baseball game. He was hit in the temple with a pitch and died the next day.
• Hong Kong has the world's largest double-decker tram fleet in the world.
• Bulgaria was the only soccer team in the 1994 World Cup in which all 11 players' last names ended with the letters "OV."
• Of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all named after artists and/or sculptors, Donatello does not occur in the same time period as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
• Abdul Kassem Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persian the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went.The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels which were trained to walk in alphabetical order.
• The country with the biggest percentage of heads of household being women is Botswana.
• In every deck of cards the King of Hearts is sticking his sword through his head. That's why he's often called the "Suicide King"
• In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value.
• Quebec and Newfoundland are the only two Canadian provinces which do not allow personalized license plates.
• With a population of fewer than nine thousand people, Montpelier, Vermont is the smallest state capital in the U.S.
• The actor who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2 (Robert Patrick) and the lead singer of Filter are brothers.
• Pittsburgh is the only city where all major sports teams have the same colors: Black and gold.
• Pluto, the astrological sign for death, was directly above Dallas, Texas when JFK was born.
• In the theme song from "The Flintstones", the line after "Let's ride with the family down the street" is "Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet."
• The proceedings in the British Parliament are meant to be in private (even though they are televised). So, if the MPs want to have a secret session, one of them points to the gallery from which the public watch, and calls "I spy strangers!", whereupon the House votes "that the strangers do withdraw."
• Ambassadors to the United Kingdom are not called that officially, but rather "Ambassadors to the Court of St. James's" - the palace which was the residence of the monarch before Buckingham Palace was built.
• Liverpool Street station in London is the departure point for trains to East Anglia, but not to Liverpool.
• If Brooklyn, New York became independent of New York City, it would be the third largest city in the United States, after the remainder of New York and Los Angeles.
• The Yellowstone River is the longest undammed river west of the Mississippi.
• 2/3 of the dry mass of your feces is bacteria.
• During a lion's mating season, they will mate every 25 minutes for three days straight.
• The most attractive proportion of women's waist to hips is 0.7
• About the sewing machine, Gandhi once said, "One of the few useful things ever invented".
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
• Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
• Women's hearts beat faster than men's.
• Pollsters say that 40% of dog and cat owners carry pictures of the pets in their wallets.
• Bubble gum contains rubber.
• Only 55% of all Americans know that the sun is a star.
• The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello.
• Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks.

This page has enlightened people since 10/6/98.

Get ahold of me immediately with: