User:Penubag/page 2

This is a huge list of random bits of useless knowledge I have compiled over the years from many different sources. I make no guarantee of accuracy. Please go ahead and edit it if you see something wrong.

• The word trivia comes from the Latin tri- + via, which means three streets.
• Pinocchio is Italian for ‘pine eyes.’
• The word Nazi is an abbreviation. The full name is Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
• The actor who played Wedge in the original Star Wars, Denis Lawson, has a famous nephew, Ewan McGregor, who plays Obi-Wan in the new Star Wars movies.
• Vader, (as in Darth Vader) means father in Dutch.
• Moon was Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name.
• Elvis had a twin brother named Garon, who died at birth.
• Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who discovered radium, died on July 4, 1934 of radiation poisoning, being the first person ever to do so.
• Albert Einstein never learned how to drive a car.
• When Albert Einstein died, his final words died with him. The nurse at his side didn't understand German.
• Mary Todd Lincoln was the first presidential wife to be referred to as the First Lady.
• Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz.
• Laser stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
• A person weighing 150 pounds on Earth would weigh about two tons on the sun.
• The average person's eyes will be closed about 30 minutes a day while awake due to blinking.
• There are 293 different ways to make change for a U.S. dollar.
• The act of snapping one's fingers is called a fillip.
• Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.
• The smallest frog in the world is the Eleutherodactylus Iberia. It measures 3/8 of an inch.
• Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown very slightly farther if it is thrown west.
• The shortest ology (study of) word is oology, the study of eggs.
• Every U.S. President that has had a beard was a Republican.
• Oprah Winfrey’s first name was the result of a typo. Her parents wanted to use the biblical name Orpah, but the midwife couldn't spell, so it became Oprah.
• Hitler was a vegetarian.
• Hitler’s army had about 1,200 Jews, many of which were generals and sergeants that led 1,000 soldiers.
• In a recent WhitePages.com search, 14 separate Hitlers were living in the US.
• Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
• Hitler was Time's man of the year in 1938.
• Hitler's favorite movie was ‘’King Kong‘’.
• A puff of smoke, as that produced when someone smokes a pipe, is called a lunt.
• Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor for lack of imagination.
• Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to the famous Disney logo.
• Benjamin Franklin first suggested the idea of Daylight Savings Timein his 1784 essay, ‘An Economical Project,’ although somewhat humorously.
• Benjamin Franklin invented swim fins.
• Limousines originally got their name because of the similar shape of hood people would wear in the Limousin region of France.
• A jiffy is one hundredth of a second. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. A picosecond is one trillionth of a second. A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second, and a yoctosecond is one septillionth of a second, or 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 second.
• There are 2,598,960 five-card hands possible in a 52-card deck.
• The Hula Hoop is illegal in Finland.
• The metal instrument used in shoe stores to measure feet is called the Brannock device.
• Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts. Her ex-boyfriend, Ken's, last name is Carson.
• Toto was paid $125 a week during the filming of the Wizard of Oz.
• The dog that played Toto was named Terry.
• Obdormition is what you call it when your foot falls asleep.
• The thing that casts a shadow on a sundial is called a gnomon.
• The medical term for earwax is cerumen.
• Stomach growling should be called borborygmus.
• Another word for burping is eructation.
• Yawning and stretching after waking up is called pandiculation.
• The big word for a hiccup is singultus.
• Another word for sneezing is sternutation.
• The technical term for goosebumps is horripilation.
• When your sweat smells terrible, is called bromidrosis.
• The medical condition epistaxis is a nosebleed.
• Ephelis is a freckle.
• Strengths is the longest English word with only one vowel.
• The A&W of root beer stands for Allen and Wright.
• Los Angeles's full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, which means The Village of our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River.
• The YKK on zippers stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushibibaisha.
• The L.L. in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.
• According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. The punishment was hanging.
• The name Jeep came from the military abbreviation GP, short for the army's General Purpose Vehicle.
• When two words are combined to form a single word (breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a portmanteau.
• The Constitution was stored in various cities until 1952, when it was placed in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. During the daytime, pages one and four of the document are displayed in a bulletproof case. The case contains helium and water vapor to preserve the paper's quality. At night, the pages are lowered into a vault, behind five-ton doors that are designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. The entire Constitution is displayed only one day a year, September 17, the anniversary of the day the framers signed the document.
• The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
• The longest word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is ‘uncopyrightable.’
• 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.
• Assuming Rudolph was in front, there are 40,320 ways to arrange the other eight reindeer.
• According to the company, the name ‘Yahoo’ stands for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.’
• The word ‘Checkmate’ in chess comes from the Persian phrase ‘shah mat,’ which means, ‘the king is dead.’
• The Canary Islands were so named because of the many wild dogs, which roamed it when the Romans landed there. (‘Dog’ in Latin was canis...so they called the islands canaria insula—‘the island of dogs.’)
• The canary is actually named after the Canary Islands, meaning a bird is named after dogs.
• On an American one-dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the 1 encased in the shield.
• The Bureau of Engraving and Printing] produces 37 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $696 million.
• The Malaysian government decided to solve their disease-carrying mosquito problem by spraying the infested areas with DDT. This worked, but the cockroaches then devoured the dead mosquitoes. This was followed by the region's gecko lizards consuming the roaches. The geckos did not die from the residual poison (surprisingly), but their central nervous systems were greatly affected, causing the lizards to slow down. Moving up the food chain, the cats ate the slow-moving lizards and started to die off in large quantities. Of course, fewer cats mean more rats, and the country's rat population soared. As a result, the World Health Organization was forced to step in and ban the DDT. In an effort to restore the ecological balance, they flew in planeloads of cats to kill the rats.
• Did you ever wonder what the WD in WD-40 stands for? In 1953, inventor, Norm Larson was trying to concoct an anti-corrosion formula, which worked on the basic principle of displacing water. On his 40th try, Larsen finally got it right. It literally means Water Displacer, 40th try. *Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word consisting entirely of alternating vowels and consonants and also the longest word used by Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare was the first to use certain words that are now common, including hurry, bump, eyeball, assassination, and anchovy.
• There are no living relatives to Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln.
• All the moons and planets of the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman mythology, except the moons of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters, and Earth.
• Shakespeare died on his birthday in 1616.
• Shakespeare’s theater was destroyed by fire when a cannon used in Henry VIII set fire to the roof.
• Häagen-Dazs (the ice cream brand) means nothing in any language. The inventor thought it promoted quality in a foreign way.
• Franklin W. Dixon, the author of the ‘’Hardy Boys’’ series, and Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mysteries, are both pseudonyms of Edward Stratemeyer and his ghostwriters.
• Daredevil Evel Knievel spent a total of three years in the hospital.
• The winged hat worn by the ancient Greek god Hermes was called a ‘petasos.’
• PEZ comes from pfefferminz, German for peppermint.
• The Ringling Brothers's parents last name was originally Rungeling.
• Robert LeRoy Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! once got 2 million pieces of fan mail in only three weeks in May 1932.
• According to the inventors, Trivial Pursuit was created in 35 minutes.
• Nintendo 64 is a 64 because it's a 64-bit unit.
• Mr. Potato Head was created in 1952. Originally he was just a kit of eyes, ears, a mouth, a pipe, and noses, you had to have a real potato! You didn’t get a body until 1964.
• In 1985, four people voted for Mr. Potato Head to be mayor of Boise.
• Civil War general John Sedgwick’s last words were, "I'm ashamed of you, dodging that way [At the enemy bullets]. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."
• The last words of Roman Emperor Caligula were "I’m still alive!"
• During the day, only 50% of the water in Niagara River goes over the falls. At night only 25% goes over. The rest goes to a power plant.
• At the rate of 1 foot eroding away every 10 years, Niagara Falls will last 22,800 more years until it disappears into Lake Erie.
• 7 of the 10 buildings on Alcatraz were made from the rock itself.
• More people visit Alcatraz in one day than the total number of inmates it held during its 29 years of being a federal penitentiary—1,545.
• If the nucleus of an atom were the size of the period at the end of this sentence, the electrons would be 40 yards away.
• Many pencils carry the slogan: 'Too Cool to Do Drugs.' But someone noticed that when the pencils are sharpened; the message turns into 'Cool to Do Drugs then simply 'Do Drugs...' (Note: they did fix it.)
• There are 49 different kinds of food mentioned in the Bible.
• 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.
• The shortest verse in the KJV of the Bible is "Jesus wept." (John 11:35) In the NIV, it's "Job said," (Job 3:2)
• John was the only one of the 12 Apostles to die a natural death.
• Nowhere in the Bible says angels have wings or halos.
• The real name of Jesus was Yeshua—Jesus is the Greek version of the name.
• There are no proper names in the KJV beginning with W or Y.
• There were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus.
• There were two windows on Noah's ark.
• The only animals in the bible to speak to humans are the snake in Eden and Balaam's donkey.
• The word ‘and’ is in the Bible 46,227 times.
• There are 3,037 male names in the Bible, but only 181 female names.
• Seven suicides are recorded in the Bible.
• The Bible devotes some 500 verses on prayer, less than 500 verses on faith, but over 2000 verses on money and possessions.
• The longest name in the Bible is Maher-shalal-hash-baz (Isaiah 8:1).
• The largest number in the bible is a thousand thousands, or a million. (2 Chronicles 14:9)
• Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek.
• Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer (more commonly known as Satan) are the only angels to be named in the bible.
• Noah may have been an albino.
• The only domestic animal that wasn’t mentioned in the bible is a cat.
• The audio book version of the King James Bible is 84½ hours long.
• The Bible never says what the forbidden fruit was.
• Adam may have been born in 4004 B.C.
• There are over 30 people named Zachariah in the Bible.
• 3 billion body cells die every minute.
• Taste bud cells only live for a week.
• The British currency is called the pound because it was worth the same as a pound of silver.
• The Nestlé Company is named after Henry Nestlé.
• M&M’s is named after the initials of its inventors, Bruce Murrie (son of the head of the Hershey Company at the time) and Forrest Mars.
• The ty brand of beanie babies is named after Ty Warner.
• Tupperware is named after Earl Tupper.
• The x-ray is so named because the man who discovered it had no idea how it worked.
• In the dark ages, an Italian who kissed a woman in public had to marry them.
• A lightning bolt lasts 45-55 microseconds.
• A Pony Express job ad read, "Wanted: young skinny wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred."
• Although the Pony Express was one of the most famous chapters in U.S. history, it only lasted 18 months, from 1860-61.
• Someone wrote to Uncle Milton (the inventor of the ant farm) complained the ants weren’t wearing top hats like on the box.
• An ant can detect a movement through 5 centimeters of earth.
• The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight, and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
• The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its size is the ant.
• Ants can live submerged underwater for up to 2 days.
• Ants don't sleep.
• Ants make up 1/10 of the total world animal tissue.
• The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.
• The technical name for an ant habitat is a formicarium.
• In 1895, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union wanted to boycott Hire’s Root Beer because they thought it had a lot of alcohol. It turned out it only had as much as a half-loaf of bread.
• The world record for the most Girl Scout cookies sold is Markita Andrews, who sold 60,000 boxes of cookies in her 12 years of scouting.
• Today, if you went to Atlantic City to see Monopoly places, you won’t see a lot. St. Charles Place is now a Parking lot, Pacific Ave. has a lot of hookers, all of the railroads are out of business, there is no free parking, and a derelict on Oriental Ave. when told it was $100 in Monopoly, said "Dang, it ain’t worth that much."
• The combination 'ough' can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
• The longest one-syllable word in the English language with one vowel is "strengths."
• Because Antarctica is in many time zones, it always has New Zealand time.
• Antarctica's area code is 672.
• In the four major US professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), there are only seven teams whose names do not end with an S. Basketball: the Miami Heat, the Utah Jazz, And the Orlando Magic. Baseball: the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox. Hockey: the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning. Football: None.
• Harry Houdini's motto was "Secure knots secure not Houdini."
• The word dinosaur wasn’t invented until 1841 by Richard Owen.
• The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a percolator.
• The rate of quadruplets is 1 set in every 490,000 births.
• If 80% of the human liver was removed, it could still function and would eventually restore itself to its original size.
• Technically speaking, the liver is a gland, not an organ.
• The liver has about 500 functions.
• Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung is German for speed limit.
• King Richard II died aged 33 in 1400. A hole was left in the side of his tomb so people could touch his head, but 376 years later some took advantage of this and stole his jawbone.
• Louis IV of France had a stomach the size of two regular stomachs.
• Only 1 child in 20 are born on the day predicted by the doctor.
• Two hundred and twenty six soldiers lost their lives back in 1850 when they crossed a suspension bridge that spanned the Maine at Angers, France. It turns out that they were all marching in step and had caused an increased resonance (vibration) to the bridge. Ever since, troops are ordered to rout step (march out of step) when crossing a bridge.
• Marijuana was not illegal in the United States until October 1, 1937, when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. Total debate time on the House of Representatives floor concerning this issue: 90 seconds. This act did not actually ban the substance - it simply said that one could not sell marijuana without a license. Of course, Congress refused to issue any licenses. Congress finally banned marijuana outright in 1970.
• Nose-picking should really be referred to as rhinotillexomania (rhino=nose, tillexis=habit of picking at something, mania=obsession with something).
• The tune for the Alphabet song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Baa Baa Black Sheep all have the same tune, a French song called Ah! Vous Diraije Maman.
• If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it measures 63 feet long.
• The pupil of an octopus's eye and a goat's eye is rectangular.
• Scuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.
• The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
• Dracula has been in 155 movies.
• Mustard gas was invented in the McKinley Building on the American University campus. Additionally, preliminary work on the Manhattan Project was done in that building. The government used the McKinley Building because of its unusual architecture. If there would be any type of large explosion inside the building, the building would implode onto itself, containing any lethal gas or nuclear material. The building now houses the Physics Department.
• Isaac Asimov has written a book in nine of the ten Dewey-decimal categories, the most.
• If the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT were a golf ball, to be the proportional size to hit it, you'd be two miles tall.
• When measuring fonts, 'point size' refers to the height of capital letters. One point is 1/72 inch.
• It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
• If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning before you would die of oxygen deprivation.
• Diastema is having a gap between your front teeth.
• Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax, and correct itself.
• Ambidextrous, which means, ‘able to use both hands equally,’ really translates as ‘having two right hands.’
• Of the five people that designed the Macintosh computer, four were left-handed.
• Over 2500 left handed people are killed each year from using products made for right handed people.
• In the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, the road signs that Belle’s father encounters in the forest show the names of two California cities: one points to Anaheim, while the other points down a dark, sinister-looking path to Valencia. Anaheim is the site of Disneyland, while the rival Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement theme park is in the city of Valencia.
• Ann Turner Cook is the name of the baby on the Gerber baby food jars.
• The longest word in English is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which has 45 letters and 19 syllables and is a lung disease caused by the inhalation of extremely small silicon volcano dust.
• The Gettysburg address is 269 words, the Declaration of Independence is 1,337 words, and the Holy Bible is only 773,000 words. However, the tax law has grown from 11,400 words in 1913, to over 7 million words today.
• The IRS employs 114,000 people; that's twice as many as the CIA and five times more than the FBI.
• Here's how Aspirin got its name. The ‘a’ came from the first letter of the product's scientific name, acetylsalicylic acid. The ‘spir’ came from Spiraea ulmaria, the meadowsweet plant which was the original source of the compound. The ‘in’ was a common suffix for medications in the late nineteenth century, when aspirin was first marketed.
• A novel was written in 1939 completely without the letter ‘E,’ called Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. The book has 267 pages and about 50,000 words.
• 1 in 200 men are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.
• By the number of genes a human has, there are about 70 trillion human designs possible.
• Columbus’s Santa Maria weighed less than the Titanic’s rudder.
• We pay 37 cents for first-class mail. The German pay an equivalent to 64 cents and the Japanese pay 80 cents.
• In the 70s, Johnny Carson said, "You know what’s disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper. There’s an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States." The next day most of the 20 million viewers bought all the toilet paper they could find. Most stores were out. On his next show Carson said it was a joke and Scott showed a video showing their plants in full production. But it still didn’t help. It took 3 weeks to get stores restocked. It was the only shortage in American History caused by the customer.
• Big Ben is so named because the bell inside was originally named after the commissioner of works, Sir Benjamin Hall.
• A misuse of the letter R is called Rhotacism.
• A tribal chief in Ghana, when listening to the Apollo 11 landing, was worried the astronauts would fall off the moon and was amazed they fit on it at all.
• You're just as likely to die by falling out of bed as you are to get struck by lightning; each is a 1 in 2,000,000 chance. You have a 1 in 3,000,000 chance of being killed by a snake.
• The odds against a person being struck by a meteorite are 10 trillion to one.
• The only recorded animal to have been killed by a meteorite was an Egyptian dog in 1922.
• The odds against hitting the jackpot on a slot machine are 889 to 1.
• A hairbreadth away is 1/48 of an inch.
• In 1912 when Mark Twain ran for president, his position was, "I am in favor of anything and everything anyone in favor of."
• The cheetah may be the fastest land animal, but the saluki breed of dog can beat anyone in a three mile race.
• The little circle of paper left over when making a hole punch is called a chad.
• Mr. Ed the talking horse’s real name is Bamboo harvester.
• Pound for pound, grasshopper is 3 times more nutritious as beef.
• The space between your eyebrows and above the nose is called the glabella.
• Something that smells like a goat is hircine.
• Something that resembles a caterpillar or larvae is erucifrom
• A snollygoster is a politician with no interest in issues or principals.
• If you go bankrupt, creditors can’t take your wedding ring.
• In 1950, the radio show Truth or Consequences offered publicity and prizes to a town that changed its name, and Hot Springs, New Mexico volunteered and not only became Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the park in the center became the game show host’s name, Ralph Edwards Park.
• There were once gelatin flavors of celery, cola, mixed vegetable, and salad.
• Shirley Temple became a republican at age 10 after the Democrat mayor of Boston accidentally slammed a car door on her fingers.
• There’s a town in Texas called Who’d Thought It and a town in Virginia called Goose Pimple Junction.
• The R. L. in R. L. Stine stands for Ralph Lawrence.
• One punishment for an adulterous wife in medieval France was to make her chase a chicken through town naked.
• Studies have confirmed that men who are exposed to a lot of toxic chemicals, high heat, and unusual pressures, such as jet pilots and deep-sea divers, are more prone to father girls than boys.
• The Contemporary Resort Hotel at Walt Disney World was built in a very unique way. The frame was built first, and then in order to save time and money, each room was constructed on the ground to include all the bedroom items (i.e., chairs, beds, etc.). The finished rooms were then hoisted by crane and inserted into the framework.
• The Roman emperor Commodus had all of the dwarfs, cripples, and freaks collected in the city of Rome and had them brought to the Colosseum, where they were ordered to fight each other to the death with meat cleavers.
• The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
• The state of Texas is the only state in the nation that has been under six flags, which includes the flags of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States.
• Sam Houston was the first president of independent Texas.
• Queen Liliuokalani of the Hawaiian Islands was America's only queen.
• Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the world’s first woman prime minister on July 20, 1960.
• One of the flags on a U.S. space shuttle is always backward. This is because the blue field of stars should always be attached to the pole, and the front of the shuttle acts as the pole.
• Stairs are five times more dangerous than elevators.
• A baby oyster is called a spat.
• Blood is one of the most nutritious things in the world.
• There is a statue of Winnie-the-poop in Lima, Peru.
• Sand melts at 3,100 degrees F (1700 degrees C).
• Buculets are the little bumps on the bottom of a toilet seat.
• A goldfish has once lived 49 years.
• In Switzerland, you get eggs from the Easter Cuckoo.
• When you are dying, sight is the first sense to go, hearing is the last.
• In 1992, 30,000 people signed a petition to change Maui's name to Gilligan's Island.
• Gilligan's Island was inspired by the book Robinson Crusoe.
• The kid on the Cracker Jack box is named Robert; the dog is Bingo.
• The world's unused frequent flyer miles equal 7,998,000,000,000 miles, or 42,000 round trips to the sun. Too bad NASA won't take them.
• A zoonose is an animal disease that a person can get.
• 90% of the wildlife in Madagascar can be found nowhere else.
• Penguins have an organ in their forehead that desalinates water.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt once owned a Christmas tree farm.
• The squiggly line over the n in ñ is called a tilde.
• There are 132 Hawaiian islands.
• At least 1,013 buildings have a sign that says, 'George Washington slept here.'
• A certain type of fern has 630 pairs of chromosomes; a human only has 21 pairs. The Escherichia coli bacterium has only 1 pair.
• George Washington was named after King George of England.
• Harry Houdini was only 5 ft 1 in (1.55 m) tall.
• Mosquito eggs con still hatch after 5 years when dried up.
• There are no turkeys in Turkey.
• Thomas Jefferson invented the coat hanger.
• Thomas Jefferson invented the talking doll.
• Bugs Bunny was named after Warner Bros. animator Bugs Hardaway.
• Spain's name means 'land of rabbits'.
• A cat once caught 12,480 rats between 1927 and 1933.
• The triangle on the bottom of a horse's hoof is called a frog.
• To tattoo your whole body, it would cost $30,000 to $50,000.
• ESPN stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
• Fisher-Price is named after the founders, Herman Fisher and Irving Price
• Henry Ford also invented the charcoal briquette.
• In 1986 the National Park Service bought some land near Washington for $230,000, but two years later they realized that they already owned the land.
• It takes a week to make a jellybean.
• A person from Cairo is called a Cairene.
• Whoopi Goldberg's real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson.
• The word Caribbean comes from the same root as cannibal.
• The term for a cannibal is an anthropopagist.
• Almost every mammal that eats meat has at least four toes per foot.
• Tom's, in Tom and Jerry, original name was Jasper.
• The largest bell in the world is the Tsar Kolokol in Moscow. It weighs 222 pounds and has never been rung.
• Charles de Gaulle's last words were "It hurts."
• McDonald's sells McSpaghetti in the Philippines and McLak in Norway.
• Two towns in North Carolina are called Democrat and Republican.
• Gasoline won't freeze, below –180 F (-120 C) it turns gummy.
• The painting American Gothic, by Grant Wood, isn't of a couple; the models were Wood's sister and dentist.
• The word pumpernickel means Devil's fart in German.
• Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland when she was six days old.
• A trash collector once found a game piece to a Wendy's contest that won him $200,000.
• The woman who played E. T.'s voice, Patricia Welsh, wasn't even listed in the credits.
• The Liberty Bell cracked in 1835, probably when some small boys, Emmanuel Rauch and some friends, accidentally pulled too hard on the rope.
• ‘Fan’ is an abbreviation for the word ‘fanatic.’ Toward the turn of the 19th century, various media referred to football enthusiasts first as ‘football fanatics,’ and later as a ‘football fan.’
• A ‘syzygy’ occurs when 3 planets line up or an eclipse occurs.
• Lycanthropy is a disease in which a man thinks he's a wolf. It is the scientific name for ‘wolf man’ or werewolf.
• ‘Aegilops' is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
• ‘I am’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
• Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.
• A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.
• ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared in 1946. The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, and had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and 50,000 times faster.
• The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, or the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.
• If you had one trillion dollars, and spent $100,000 every day, it would take a little more than 27,379 years to spend it all.
• The first man-made item to exceed the speed of sound is the bull whip, our leather whip. When the whip is snapped, the knotted end makes a ‘crack’ or popping noise. It is actually causing a mini sonic boom as it exceeds the speed of sound.
• The opposite of a vacuum is a plenum.
• In 1980, Namco released PAC-MAN, the most popular video game (or arcade game) of all time. The original name was going to be PUCK MAN, but executives saw the potential for vandals to scratch out part of the P in the game's marquee and labeling.
• A fulgurite is fossilized lightning. It forms when a powerful lightning bolt melts the soil into a glass-like state.
• If you stand in the bottom of a well, you would be able to see the stars in the daytime.
• The fastest moon in our solar system circles Jupiter once every seven hours - traveling at 70,400 miles per hour, it takes 28.5 days for the moon to circle Earth.
• The first portable calculator placed on sale by Texas Instruments weighed only 2½ pounds and cost a mere $150. (1971)
• Carolyn Shoemaker has discovered 32 comets and approximately 800 asteroids.
• A cosmic year lasts 225 million Earth years. That’s the amount of time it takes the sun to make one revolution around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
• The sun is estimated to be between 20 and 21 cosmic years old.
• There are 3 golf balls sitting on the moon.
• The dent in the bottom of a wine bottle is called a kick.
• In skywriting, one letter is about 2 miles high.
• Jackie Robinson wasn't the first black baseball player, Moses Walker of the Toledo Mudhens and his brother were the first.
• A woman shaves about 412 square inches on their body. A man shaves about 48.
• The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head like a human.
• Technically, there are 46 states in the U. S. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are all commonwealths.
• Approximately 4 million broken bones are treated each year.
• Altogether, congress has proposed 10,679 amendments to the constitution. Only 27 have made it.
• Ears of corn always have an even number of rows of kernels because of the genetic formula which divides the cells.
• The caterpillar has 2,000 muscles in its body; the human has about 650.
• In 6,000 B.C. there were at least six types of beer.
• There is a book called New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People. There is another called Children are Like Wet Cement. (Whatever falls on them makes an impression.)
• There was a food called 'I Hate Peas' that was made for kids that didn't like peas. Peas were mashed up and put into a French fry shape, but it was a flop because it still tasted like peas. As one kid put it, "A pea is a pea is a pea…I don’t like peas. In fact, I hate peas, even if they're in the shape of French fries." I Hate Beans also flopped.
• Lake Nicaragua is the only fresh water lake with sharks.
• The black mamba is the only known poisonous snake to stalk humans.
• King Louis XV only took 3 bathes in his lifetime.
• On just one square inch of skin, there are 20 million microscopic organisms.
• There are at least 15 Frankenstein movies, including Frankenstein's Great-Aunt Tillie.
• The longest recorded interval between the birth of twins is 136 days.
• 1 appears on the United States one-dollar bill 16 times.
• 90% of all animal species in the history of Earth are now extinct.
• Hummingbirds can fly 500 miles without stopping.
• Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip are 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th cousins.
• Julius Caesar was epileptic.
• Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were seventh cousins once removed.
• Sloths take two weeks to digest their food.
• Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that don't get cancer. Scientists believe this has something to do with the fact that they don't have bones, but cartilage.
• There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos.
• A British medical journal has determined that bird watching can be hazardous to one's health. They have officially designated bird watching a hazardous activity, using the example of the death of a bird watcher who became so wrapped up in watching a particular bird that he failed to notice his potentially dangerous surroundings and was eaten by a crocodile.
• All shrimp are born male, but slowly grow into females as they mature.
• The mako shark and great white shark are two of the few species of shark that are warm blooded.
• Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms per day.
• The giant crab of Japan can be as large as 12 feet across.
• The East Alligator River in Australia's Northern Territory was misnamed. It contains crocodiles not alligators.
• Leonardo da Vinci was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk reveals its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicates the annual moisture.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
• The parachute was invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1515.
• Shoe sizes in the U. S. are measured in barleycorns. An increase of one size increases the length of the shoe by 1/3 inch.
• A fancy way of saying half a cup is a gill.
• Only three countries' flags have no incorporation of red, white, or blue: Jamaica, Libya, and Mauritania.
• Red is the color in the most flags.
• The rhinoceros beetle can carry 850 times its own body weight, which is an equivalent of a human carrying 70 tons.
• The animal with the highest blood pressure is the giraffe with a 280 over 180; this is because the blood must travel up its long neck. It is two to three times that of a human.
• The sea cucumber breathes through its butt.
• The countries of Indonesia and Monaco have the exact same flags; Poland's is the same, but upside-down.
• The first animated Disney movie to be shown on TV was Alice in Wonderland.
• The first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture was Beauty and the Beast.
• The first animated sequel was The Rescuers Down Under.
• The first Disney animated movie to have a PG rating was The Black Hole.
• The first Disney movie to have a PG-13 rating was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
• The Disney movie with the most deaths either shown or implied is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The animated movie with this record is The Incredibles.
• The reason The Rescuers isn't very easy to find is that it was recalled after two inappropriate images were found.
• Pocahontas is the only animated Disney movie inspired by a true story.
• According to the film's animators, you'll see 6,469,952 black spots every time you watch 101 Dalmatians.
• EPCOT stands for ‘Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.’
• Bambi was the first Disney movie to have a character die in it.
• More than half the bones in your body are located in your hands and feet.
• There is enough iron in the human body to make one small nail.
• Women blink almost twice as much as men.
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
• An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
• Beards are the fastest growing hair. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it could grow to 30 feet over the course of his lifetime.
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
• Fingernails grow faster than toenails and your middle fingernail is the quickest one to grow. It takes about 150 days to grow out a full length fingernail.
• Your brain continues to send out electrical wave signals approximately 37 hours after death.
• The nervous system transmits messages to the brain at speeds of 180 miles per hour.
• The human nose can remember 50,000 different smells.
• Your brain stops growing when you are about 15 years old.
• Laughing and coughing put more pressure on the spine than walking or standing.
• Your stomach produces a new lining every 3 days in order to avoid digesting itself in its own production of acid.
• About every seven years, your body replaces the equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
• The spinal cord is less than two feet in length and is the same diameter as your index finger, yet it contains over 10 billion nerve cells.
• Most people know the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb, the plane that dropped the second was called Bockscar.
• All American Express credit card numbers start with a 3, Visas start with a 4, MasterCard begin with a 5, and Discover cards start with a 6011.
• Statfjord B is the heaviest man-made object; it weighs 824,000 tons and is an oil platform off Norway.
• The largest man-made object is the Great Wall of China.
• The fastest speed a human has ever traveled is 39,896 km/h by Apollo 10 astronauts Gene Cernan, John W. Young, and Thomas Stafford.
• The human body contains enough iron to make a three-inch nail and enough lead to make 600 pencils.
• The eyes can determine up to 10,000 different colors.
• The tongue has 10,000 taste buds that allow us to differentiate up to 500 tastes.
• Hydrochloric acid in your stomach is strong enough to eat a hole in a sidewalk.
• Fresh urine is cleaner than spit or even the skin on your face; healthy urine is not home to bacteria.
• More than 100,000,000 micro-creatures live in your mouth at any one time.
• The face on Mars is actually 1.5 kilometers long (.93 miles)
• During the average lifetime, about 40 pounds of dead skin is shed.
• Cockroaches have been around for more than 400 million years.
• There are 20000 species of bees and only 4 of them make honey.
• Some worms have ten hearts.
• The correct name for a turtle’s shell is a carapace.
• Elephants are the only mammals that can't jump.
• The elephant is the only mammal that has four knees.
• A rhinoceros's horn is made of the same stuff found in human hair and fingernails which is called keratin.
• The city farthest from the sea is Urumqi, China.
• The world's most common name is Mohamed, and the most common surname is Li, which has 87 million entries in the Chinese phonebook alone. That's 7.9% of its population.
• South Africa has 11 official languages.
• In December 2001, Argentina had 5 presidents within a three week period.
• America is the only country that uses electrocution for capitol punishment.
• Queen Elizabeth II's head is on the coins of at least 35 countries and territories.
• In Quedlingburg, Germany in 1589, 133 witches were burned in one day.
• Pope Benedict IX was only 11 when he became pope in 1032.
• Monogamously, a man has married 29 women and has an estimate of 41 kids.
• Charlie Chaplin once got 73,000 fan letters in three days.
• Charlie Chaplin once got third place in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. 'You look like me more than I look like me.'
• Since the United Nations was founded in 1945, there have been 140 wars.
• There are over 3,000 species of lice.
• Eighty percent of millionaires drive secondhand cars.
• Every hamster in the U.S. today comes from a single litter captured in Syria in 1930.
• In an early draft of Star Wars, the character of Luke Skywalker was called Dirk Starkiller.
• Of the 17,000 poems Emily Dickinson wrote, only seven were published during her lifetime.
• Alexander the Great was epileptic.
• Two hundred million atoms placed in a row would measure one inch.
• Since Neptune was discovered in 1846, it has made about three-quarters of one revolution around the Sun.
• The set of glasses filled with different levels of water used to make different musical tones is called a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica.
• The hyoid bone, in your throat, is the only bone in the body not attached to another bone.
• Rabbits are immune to the venom of black widow spiders.
• The base salary for a NASA astronaut is $50,000 per year.
• During the 5,000 years of recorded human history, polygamy has been much more common than monogamy.
• The chair was invented in about 2,500 B.C.
• About one in every 3,000 births results in a baby with both male and female genitalia.
• All cheerleaders were male in 1898. Now, about three percent are.
• The depression between your mouth and nose is called the philtrum.
• In Great Britain, garage sales are called jumble sales.
• The back of the human hand is the opisthenar.
• The name for a teddy bear collector is arctophilist.
• A labeorphilist is a beer bottle collector.
• In Sweden, it's against the law to train a seal to balance a ball on its nose.
• The real name of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz books was Nick Chopper.
• Tokyo was once known as Edo.
• Among other things, ninjas were trained to tell what time it was by looking into a cat's eye.
• There are currently more than seven million millionaires in the world.
• The average person will grow 590 miles of hair during their lifetime.
• Ian Fleming based James Bond on Dr. John Dee, the first British secret agent.
• James Bond was named after the author of a book Fleming was reading, Birds of the West Indies.
• In James Bond movies, the armorer who supplies Bond with all his gadgets is referred to as Q. The Q stands for Quartermaster.
• In his seven appearances as Bond, Sean Connery says "shaken, not stirred" only once, in Goldfinger.
• The longest James Bond film was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, at 140 minutes.
• George Lazenby, who starred in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was the only one who played James Bond once.
• A nefarious enemy of Bond is an organization called SMERSH. It's a Russian acronym for SMERt SHpionam, meaning ‘Death to Spies.’
• Moonraker is the only Roger Moore Bond film where he does not draw his Walther PPK.
• Roger Moore's contract demanded that he be provided an unlimited supply of hand-rolled Monte Cristo cigars.
• The practice of using a disclaimer in movies stating "No animals were mistreated during production" got its start in Never Say Never Again. The disclaimer was the result of controversy over a horse jumping off a cliff in the film.
• Pierce Brosnan's contract for Goldeneye specified that he could not appear in any other film wearing a tuxedo.
• The double 0 in 007 means he has a license to kill.
• Thomas Jefferson died of chronic diarrhea.
• Ancient Egyptians could be put to death for mistreating a cat.
• Fidel Castro once worked as a Hollywood extra.
• Pain travels through your body at 350 feet per second.
• Hawaii has three interstate highways.
• If a rhino has two horns, it's from India. If it has one horn, it's from Africa.
• The world's termites outweigh humans 10 to 1.
• The two most common surgeries are biopsies and cesarean sections.
• The world's shortest river, the D River in Oregon, is just 121 feet long.
• A group of ferrets is called a business.
• Myomancy is the practice of predicting the future based upon the movements of mice.
• The decibel was named after Alexander Graham Bell.
• At the Montreal summer Olympics, in 1976, Canada won no gold medals.
• Denver was chosen to hold the 1976 Winter Olympics, but refused.
• Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics.
• Liechtenstein is the only country to win a medal in a winter Olympics, but not one in the summer.
• In the very first modern Olympics, in 1896, America won the first gold medal.
• The cancelled 1940 summer Olympics were to be held in Tokyo.
• The tallest Olympic flame was in Torino, in 2006.
• The first Olympic games to be televised were the 1936 games in Berlin.
• Half of the winter Olympics have been in The Alps.
• The five Olympic rings represent the five continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Every nation's flag has at least one of the rings' colors in it.
• Switzerland and England are the only countries to attend every winter Olympics.
• Vancouver 2010 will be the warmest city ever to host the winter Olympics.
• In World War II, Italy declared war on both Germany and the Allies.
• Buddha has the most monuments erected with his image on it.
• The first thing ever made from aluminum was a rattle for Napoleon's son.
• The L in L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books, stood for Lyman.
• Salt is the only rock humans can eat.
• About 4000 workers spent 40 years on the Great Pyramid of Giza, using today's technology; it would only take 400 people 6 years.
• An egg cell is the body's largest single cell and is 90,000 times larger than a sperm cell.
• The world's biggest single-person residence is St. Peter's Basilica.
• The most common non-contagious disease is tooth decay.
• The mammal living at the highest altitude is the yak.
• The country that has been the site of the most European battles is Belgium.
• Mosquitoes have teeth.
• VCR stands for Video Cassette Recorder.
• Frank Sinatra once gave Marilyn Monroe a poodle named Mafia.
• The Galapagos Islands are actually named after the Galapagos tortoises living there, not the other way around.
• In the credits of the Star Wars movies, Jabba the Hutt is played by himself.
• The moon is half an inch farther from Earth every year.
• Sputnik is Russian for 'fellow traveler.'
• A person from Tangier, Morocco is called a Tangerine.
• Lewis Carroll invented Humpty Dumpty in the book, Through the Looking Glass.
• Who is buried in Grant's tomb? President and Mrs. Ulysses Grant.
• An autophobe is scared of himself.
• Charlie Chaplin signed Hollywood's first million-dollar contract.
• When your foot falls asleep, you have Taresthesia.
• The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want. Lethonoma is the same but with names.
• If you sleep in a cold room, you are more likely to have a bad dream.
• The Roman Catholic Church did not acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun until the mid 1990s.
• Sir Isaac Newton's cat was named Spithead.
• If you told someone that they were one in a million, you'd be saying there were about 6,000 of them.
• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
• Clyde Barrow, the famous gangster, wrote a thank you note to Ford for producing fine getaway cars.
• The Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought at neighboring Breed's Hill.
• Armadillos have four babies at a time, always all the same sex. They are perfect quadruplets, the fertilized cell split into quarters, resulting in four identical armadillos.
• Cleopatra's last name was Ptolemy, and she was Greek rather than Egyptian.
• 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 Star Wars planet of Tatooine came from the town of Tataouine in Tunisia where the movie was filmed.
• The biggest commercially available jigsaw puzzles are 18,000 pieces, and are of four ancient world maps and of rainforest scenes, and each cost $170.
• The shortest ever flash of light was 500 attoseconds long.
• Pi has been calculated to 1,241,100,000,000 digits.
• Sherlock Holmes has been in 193 films.
• The last dodo bird died in 1681.
• Voodoo originated in Haiti.
• All of the 30 highest mountains on Earth are in the Himalayas or the Karakoram.
• The biggest bacterium ever was the size of a period and was 750 times larger than the average bacteria.
• A human has 40,000 genes; an organism living in the human's genital tract has only 480.
• Zorro has been in 69 movies.
• The most extras ever used in a movie were 300,000, for the film Gandhi, in 1981.
• A grain of sand is 1500 times larger than a grain of clay.
• Minnesota brags about its 10,000 lakes, but Wisconsin has over 14,000, and Alaska has more than three million lakes!
• By area, Juneau, Alaska is the biggest city in the US, with over 3,100 square miles.
• Alaska's borders make it the farthest state east, west, and north in the U.S. Its Aleutian Islands extends across the 180th meridian, which puts the island chain's end in the eastern hemisphere.
• There are 3,043 counties in the US. Delaware has only three, and Texas has 254. The largest is San Bernardino in California with 20,000 square miles; the smallest is Kalawao County, Hawaii, with 13 square miles.
• The suffix 'stan' (as in Tajikistan) means nation or land. 7 countries end in 'stan'.
• In 1999, scientists created the smallest ice crystal composed of only 6 water molecules.
• The name Saudi Arabia comes from the name of its royal family, the Al-Saud family. They have been in power since 1932.
• The country of Equatorial Guinea isn't on the equator; its southernmost point is still one degree north of it.
• The most painted, photographed, and climbed mountain in the world is Japan's Mt. Fuji.
• The world's southernmost city is Ushuaia, Argentina.
• Russian for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (CCCP).
• The world's highest mountain that isn't part of a range is Mt. Kilimanjaro.
• The Dutch airline, KLM, stands for Koninklikje Luchtvaart Maatschappij, which means ‘queen's own aviation company.’
• The Australian airline Qantas stands for QUeensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services.
• Someone from Moscow is called a Muscovite.
• Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France.
• The T. S. in T. S. Eliot is short for Thomas Stearns.
• Paul Revere made George Washington's false teeth.
• Aesop, the fable writer, was a Greek slave.
• TNT is short for trinitrotoluene.
• You can't catch a cold in Antarctica or the North Pole because it is so cold that the microbes couldn't exist.
• The Statue of Liberty is 20 times larger than life size.
• Someone who sleepwalks is a somnambulist.
• The dumbest domesticated animal is the turkey.
• Every human death was caused by hypoxemia, or not enough oxygen to the brain.
• A human eyeball weighs about an ounce.
• The flag of Mozambique has an AK-47 assault rifle on it.
• About 1 in 14,000 people are born with dwarfism.
• There is a bacterium that can withstand 10,000 times the radium that will kill a human.
• There have been 31 assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle.
• The US organization with the most members is the AAA, the American Automobile Association, with over 46 million.
• The world's chickens lay around 400,000,000,000 eggs each year.
• The common mousetrap was invented by the same guy who invented the machine gun—Hiram Maxim.
• The rhesus monkey is the only animal that can be taught to hum a tune.
• Frogs use their eyeballs to push food down their throat.
• Buckingham Palace has more than 600 rooms.
• Alaska could hold the 21 smallest U.S. states.
• A rhinoceros produces up to 60 pounds of droppings in the course of a day.
• The Pentagon has 284 restrooms.
• There are over 2 million cockroaches in the Pentagon.
• During growth spurts, a blue whale can gain 10 pounds an hour.
• Sweden once fined a couple for trying to name their child an unpronounceable, 43 letter name, Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116.
• Gary Larson, The Far Side cartoonist, has three insect species named after him. It is a parasitic louse only found in owls.
• Japan was never invaded by enemies from 1275 to 1944.
• Women couldn't vote in Liechtenstein until 1984.
• Only male fireflies fly and only female mosquitoes bite.
• Mosquitoes stay away from citronella candles because it irritates their feet.
• One in 500 people have different colored eyes.
• Right before he stepped on the moon, Buzz Aldrin wet his pants.
• If a child comparatively ate as much food a baby bird, than they would eat 3 lambs and a calf a day.
• A referee's bad soccer call once started a war between El Salvador and Honduras, the 1969 Football War.
• Paris gives guided tours of their sewers.
• In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock never says "Elementary, my dear Watson." And no one in Star Trek ever says "Beam me up, Scotty."
• Pigs have no sweat glands, so they play in the mud to beat the heat.
• In 9 years, a cat could have 14 million descendants.
• Babe was played by 40 different pigs.
• In 1931, When Thomas Edison died; Henry Ford captured his last dying breath in a bottle.
• The word anagram has no anagrams.
• The Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great loved his horse. When his horse drowned in a river, Cyrus sentenced the river to death.
• According to U.S. law, a beer commercial can never actually show a person drinking beer.
• Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a cantata about coffee, the Coffee Cantata.
• The three main characters in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are named after the dogs of the movie's makers.
• On a 3 number, 3 letter license plate, there are 17,576,000 possible combinations.
• "Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, La Allah Il Allah, La Allah Il Allah U Mohammed Rassul Allah" is heard by more people than any other sound of the human voice. This is the prayer recited by muezzins from each of the four corners of the prayer tower as Muslims all over the world face toward Mecca and kneel at sunset. It means "God is great. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God."
• Tautonyms are scientific names for which the genus and species are the same, such as the Gorilla Gorilla.
• 90% of bird species are monogamous; only 3% of animals altogether are.
• 315 entries in Webster's 1996 dictionary were misspelled.
• A 2 by 4 is really 1 1/2 by 3 1/2.
• A chef's hat is tall and has balloons at the top so as to counteract the intense heat in the kitchen. The unique shape allows air to circulate around the scalp, keeping the head cool.
• A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. A quarter has 119.
• A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.
• A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it has been decapitated.
• A chicken who just lost its head can run the length of a football field before dropping dead.
• A five and a half year old weighing 250 pounds (110 kg) was exhibited at a meeting of the Physical Society of Vienna on December 4, 1894. She ate a normal diet and was otherwise in good health. The problem: she wasn't able to sweat.
• A pangram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. For example: Pack my red box with five dozen quality jugs. Another is The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
• A Hexadactylous person has six fingers or six toes on one or both hands and feet.
• The pig and human are the only animals than can get sunburned.
• A scientist who weighed people immediately before and after death concluded that the human soul weighs 21 grams.
• A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.
• A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about 110 million tons, but a Red Giant (a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on Earth.
• A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites.
• A typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two miles long.
• A whole library floor of books can be stored on 50 Gigabytes.
• A woodchuck only breathes 10 times during hibernation.
• Over 16,000,000 people have the same birthday as you.
• All 17 children of Queen Anne died before her.
• According to National Geographic, Mt. Everest grows about 4 millimeters a year: the two tectonic plates of Asia and India, which collided millions of years ago to form the Himalayas, continue to press against each other, causing the Himalayan peaks to grow slightly each year.
• Adjusting for inflation, War and Peace, 1963, is the most expensive movie ever made to date (2006). Its budget of over $100 million is equivalent to over 500 million 2005 dollars.
• After his death in 896, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up and tried for various crimes.
• Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis sativa (marijuana) on their plantations.
• All of Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs.
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
• An area of the Sun's surface the size of a postage stamp shines with the power of 1,500,000 candles.
• Aphids are born pregnant and can give birth 10 days after being born themselves.
• Assuming that all the offspring survived, 190,000,000,000,000,000,000 flies could be produced in four months by the offspring of a single pair of flies.
• At one time, Venus de Milo did have arms.
• At the height of its power (400 BC) the Greek city of Sparta had 500,000 slaves and only 25,000 citizens.
• Bart Simpson's voice on The Simpsons is actually done by a woman, Nancy Cartwright.
• Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the western Pacific.
• Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide.
• In Germany, there is a political party called the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany that was founded by two 17 year-olds. It believes police should be abolished, a youth pension should be given instead of a retirement one, you can be unemployed with a full salary, and all drugs should be legal. In the 1998 Bundestag election, The APPG received 35,000 votes! (There is also an Anarchist Pogo Party of the United States.) Other frivolous partys are Canada's Absolutely Absurd Party, which wants the voting age to be 14 and the candidate with the least votes win. The Ezenhemmer Plastic Bags and Child Rearing Utensils Party of Sweden is trying to make politics more fun and cheerful. And the craziest of all is Canada's Rhinocerous Party, which promises to repeal the law of gravity, reduce the speed of light, turn Manitoba into the world's largest parking lot, give higher education by building taller schools, adding illiteracy to Canada's official languages, and declaring war on Belgium because a cartoon character once killed a rhinoceros in a cartoon. From 1965-1988, the Rhino Party received 330,919 votes.
• 911 days separated the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain.
• The winning numbers in a New York state lottery drawing on 11 September 2002 were 9-1-1.
• The smartest invertebrate is the octopus.
• The Christmas song "Do You Hear What I Hear" was written by Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne.
• In the year 14000, Vega will be the north star.
• The color of the little plastic clip that closes a bag of bread tells what day it was delivered to the store. . . .Monday-Blue. . . .Tuesday-Green. . . .Thursday-Red
  Friday-White. . . .Saturday – Yellow
• Michelangelo's full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.
• Only 14 of America’s 43 presidents have served at least two terms.
• The beaver can cut down an average of two hundred trees a year.
• The flag of the Philippines is the only national flag that is flown differently during times of peace or war. A portion of the flag is blue, while the other is red. The blue portion is flown on top in time of peace and the red portion is flown in war time.
• The symbol on the ‘pound’ key, or the number symbol, (#) is called an octothorpe.
• The world's largest alphabet is the Khmer script of Cambodia, with 74 letters.
• The Celsius temperature scale was originally backward, freezing was 100° and boiling was 0°.
• The first animal to be cloned wasn’t Dolly the sheep, but a frog in 1970, 24 years earlier.
• An old, healthy oak tree has approximately 250,000 leaves.
• Houston, Texas is the city with the most trees, with 956,700.
• In the United States, two 14- leafed clovers have been found.
• The animal with the longest gestation period is the Alpine salamander, being up to 38 months.
• Bears in zoos do not hibernate.
• By raising the rural highway speed limit up by 10 mph (16 kph), there was a 40% raise in serious injuries.
• Humans have 4 blood groups, each with an Rh factor. The pig has 16 groups, which is the most of any animal. The cat only has two.
• A tropical species of spider can weave a web up to 6 feet in diameter.
• The rarest type of blood is Bombay blood, found only in a Czechoslovakian nurse and a brother and sister in Massachusetts.
• Centipedes always have and odd number of pairs of legs, up to 171 pairs.
• There is an antelope with 4 horns.
• The fattest man ever weighed a recorded 976 lbs and had a previous estimated weight of 1,387 lbs. At one time he gained almost 200 lbs in a week.
• There have only been about 500 cases of conjoined twins. (Siamese)
• When you shut your eyes tightly, the lights you see are phosphenes.
• The sand that appears in our eyes when we sleep is dried mucus.
• If a large blood vessel is cut, you can bleed to death in a minute.
• The Heimlich maneuver was named after Henry J. Heimlich.
• The berries of mistletoe are poisonous.
• The length of a meter was originally 1/10,000,000 (one ten millionth) of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Because of an error, it is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
• The only countries not officially using the metric system are the US, Myanmar, and Liberia.
• The monkey wrench got its name from its inventor, Charles Moncky; the name was eventually changed into monkey.
• The reason fire hydrants are different colors are to show the water flow available. Red ones have a flow of less than 500 gallons per minute, orange- 500-999 gpm, green- 1000-1499 gpm, and light blue is over 1500 gpm.
• The odds against a successful triple play in a game of baseball are 1,400 to 1.
• The first man to circumnavigate the globe was Juan Sebastian Elcano in 1522.
• When Julius Caesar said "Veni, Vidi, Vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered.), he had conquered Pharnaces II over a kingdom in Asia Minor, near present day Zela, Turkey, in 47 B.C.
• Some sea jellies can grow to be 7 feet across and have tentacles 125 feet long.
• The number of deaths due to shark attack is less than 50.
• The Tony awards for musicals are named after a woman, Antoinette Perry.
• X-ray technology has shown there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.
• Rio de Janeiro translates to ' River of January'.
• Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
• Sahara means 'desert' in Arabic.
• The Future's Museum in Sweden contains a scale model of the solar system. The sun is 105 meters in diameter and the planets range from 3.5 mm to 6 km from the sun. This particular model also contains the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, still to scale situated in the Museum of Victoria ... in Australia.
• Cyanide is present in apple pips.
• The Kiwi is the only bird with nostrils at the end of its bill.
• A soccer ball has 32 panels.
• In 1982, Englishman William Hall committed suicide by drilling holes into his head with a power drill . . . it took 8 holes.
• There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.
• Sliced bread was patented by a jeweler, Otto Rohwedder, in 1928. He had been working on it for 16 years, having started in 1912.
• The Nobel Prize resulted from a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence - he invented dynamite.
• Ralph and Carolyn Cummins had 5 children between 1952 and 1966; all were born on February 20.
• The initial S in the middle of Harry S Truman’s name doesn't mean anything. Both his grandfathers had names beginning with 'S', and so Truman's mother didn't want to disappoint either of them.
• Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with the occult and the supernatural.
• A proton has a mass of 1.67 x 10-27 kilograms.
• 'Scraunched' is the longest monosyllabic word in current usage.
• The national flag with the most colors is South Africa’s, with 6.
• The world’s longest nose was 7½ inches long.
• Nutmeg, if injected intravenously, is fatal.
• During the Chinese New Year, when many people travel to China, there is a 50% increase in adult diaper sales due to limited toilet access on trains.
• In 1960, an estimated 4,000 people were over 100 years old in the U.S. By 1995 the number had jumped to 55,000.
• Floccinaucinihilipilification, the act or habit of declaring an item being useless or trivial, is the longest non-medical term in the English language.
• The longest word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops, a grass genus.
• 'Twyndyllyngs' is the longest word without any of the common vowel letters a, e, i, o, or u. The longest common word is 'rhythm.'
• 'Euouae', at six letters long, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels.
• A popular joke answer to the longest word question is the word 'smiles', credited as the longest word because there is a mile between each the first and last letters. Of course, by this reckoning, the word 'beleaguered', which contains a league, is even longer.
• Goddessship is the only word in the English language with a triple letter.
• There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple, silver, and month.
• Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands when typing.
• Dr. Seuss coined the word 'nerd' in his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo.
• David Prouse (the man inside the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars) spoke all of his lines in the first movie. He did not know that his voice was being dubbed over with that of James Earl Jones until he saw the finished movie.
• A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes.
• A bowling pin only needs to tilt 7.5 degrees to fall down.
• The ostrich yolk is the largest single cell in the world.
• The Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust.
• At 90° below zero, your breath will freeze in mid-air and fall to the ground.
• There wasn’t a single pony in the Pony Express, just horses.
• A person would die if the toxic ingredients of one cigarette were directly injected into the bloodstream.
• A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
• Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to watch TV for 3 hours.
• The World Trade Center towers in New York City had two zip codes, 10047 and 10048, one for each building.
• Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual.
• The Mona Lisa was androgynous.
• Gargoyles are named after the gurgling sound they make when it rains.
• The Pope has to be 65 years old to be elected.
• Only 10% of the Sahara desert is sand dune.
• Madonna's last name is Ciccone.
• Raphael's last name was Santi.
• San Marino is the world's oldest republic, created in 30 A.D.
• Tina Turner's real name is Anna Mae Bullock.
• Every catholic church in Rome is property of the Vatican.
• The 100 most common English words make up half of all written material.
• A contranym is a word where it is an antonym of itself. An example is cleave; to split or adhere.
• The only acceptable Scrabble words with a Q and not a U are qi, qat, qaid, qoph, qanat, tranq, faqir, sheqel, qabala, qabalah, qindar, qintar, qindarka, mbaqanga, and qwerty, along with their plurals.
• The last official case of exorcism in the United States was in 1949.
• A car airbag inflates in 50 milliseconds.
• The phrase "the sky's the limit" came from Cervantes's Don Quixote.
• Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 hit "Girls just want to have fun" was written by a man.
• The chances of having more than the average number of arms are nearly 100%. The number of people being born with none or one arm is high enough to take the average just slightly below two.
• The Colombia Pictures logo, a woman wearing a toga holding a torch, was modeled after Evelyn Venable in 1925.
• Eyes change color after death, usually to a greenish-brown.
• A page of paper is about 500,000 atoms thick.
• The first domain name ever registered was www.Symbolics.com.
• You can fit 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a thimble.
• There is no law guaranteeing a phone call when you are arrested.
• The main characters of Veggie Tales, an animated bible video for kids, are Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. Ironically, both tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits, not veggies.
• As of 2004, in Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport there were 15 Starbucks. In all of South Dakota, there were only 6.
• Virginia extends 95 miles further west than West Virginia.
• The last ever February 30 was in 1712 in Sweden.
• North America has about 700 species of butterfly and 8,000 species of moth.
• The term for the thumb is a pollex.
• Killer whales are actually members of the dolphin family.
• Frogs have no ribs.
• The average traffic light is green 22% of the time, yellow 12%, and red 66% of the time.
• All of Japan's highways are toll roads; it costs more than $300 to go cross-country.
• 30% of NBA players have tattoos.
• There is a World Rock Paper Scissors Society that sets official rules, holds an annual tournament, and publishes a strategy magazine.
• Puppies from the same litter can have different fathers.
• The Vietnamese call the Vietnam War the American War.
• U.S. paper currency is fluorescent under UV light.
• There are 7,000 varieties of apple in the United States alone.
• The world’s youngest mother was Lina Medina of Peru who bore a child in 1939 at age 5. She had begun menstruating at 3.
• The cornea is the only body part with no blood supply. It gets oxygen directly through the air.
• At any given time, about one-half of the Earth is covered by clouds.
• The traffic light was invented by Garrett Morgan in 1923. He also invented the gas mask.
• There are approximately 19,300 incorporated cities in the US. 18,000 of them have less than 25,000 people.
• 27 of the 50 U.S. states have land north of Canada’s southernmost point, Middle Island in Lake Erie.
• Martin Van Buren didn’t mention his wife, Hannah, once in his autobiography.
• The Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia disasters all occurred in the same calendar week.
• Only three of the many space-related deaths were actually in space, on the Soviet Soyuz 11 in 1971.
• That spring smell is caused by the higher levels of oxygen in the air when trees grow their leaves back.
• A Rubik’s cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible different positions.
• Any position of a Rubik’s cube can be solved in 29 moves or less.
• The animal with the shortest Latin binomial name is Ia io, the great evening bat.
• If you approximate pi to the 39th digit, you can calculate the area of a circle the entire known universe with accuracy to the width of 1 hydrogen atom.
• Airplane! was filmed in only 34 days, mostly during the month of August 1979.
• As of December 5, 2005, contestants on The Price Is Right have won all six pricing games on a single episode 72 times. On the other hand, as of March 28, 2006, there have been 72 times where all six pricing games on a single episode were lost.
• The five-pointed star is about 4,000 years older than the six-pointed star which was invented around 600 BC.
• The J.R.R. in J.R.R. Tolkien stands for John Ronald Reuel.
• If a rabbit’s front teeth weren’t worn down by eating, they’d grow to be 10 feet long.
• In one year, only five solar eclipses are possible.
• The most destructive earthquake ever was the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake in China, killing over 830,000 people.
• The youngest English letter is J, which were first used around 1630.
• The last area to have the wheel was Peru, which got it in AD 1500.
• The spoked wheel was invented in 1900 BC.
• A dzo is a cross between a cow and a yak.
• Rembrandt painted 62 self-portraits.
• Isaac Newton was born on Christmas.
• The man who fired the first shot at Fort Sumter to start the American Civil War, Edmund Ruffin, was 75 years old.
• The term ‘concentration camp’ was coined during the Second Boer War.
• 42 days after Hiroshima was bombed, a typhoon hit and caused 4,500 casualties.
• All three Apollo 11 astronauts were born in 1930.
• The largest single gold object in the world is Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus.
• Only 6 people died as a direct result of the 1666 Great Fire of London.
• The jaw muscles can work for the longest time without getting tired.
• The best-known statue in Brussels is the Mannekin Pis, a boy peeing in a fountain.
• The human brain is 2% of the body weight, but uses 25% of the oxygen.
• The nose flute is a popular instrument in Polynesia.
• The leaves of a cherry tree are poisonous.
• The only language that was dead but has been resurrected for everyday is Hebrew, which was once dead for 2,300 years.
• Worldwide, 2,500 people a day commit suicide.
• Thomas Jefferson invented the folding bed and swivel chair.
• The oldest ruling family is that of the Imperial House of Japan. Hirohito is 124th in line.
• Queen Victoria was only 5 feet tall.
• The only fish that can hold objects with its tail is the seahorse.
• Only three of the twenty-three Nazi leaders tried at Nürnberg were acquitted.
• Apples and pears originated in Afghanistan.
• La Paz, Bolivia is safe from fire, its high altitude means that there isn’t enough oxygen to support one.
• The word ‘Amen’ is in about 1,200 languages without changing.
• Until 1940, Tibetans would dispose of dead relatives by chopping them up and feeding them to the birds.
• Oberammergau’s famous Passion play, played every 10 years, takes 8½ hours to perform.
• There have been 21 Pope Johns.
• Nowadays, corpses decompose slower than they used to. People are eating more preservatives in their food now.
• Switzerland, with an army of 400,000 has never been to war.
• Every year, 75,000 umbrellas are lost on London’s Underground.
• Between 1600 and 1800, half the girls in England were named Mary, Anne, or Elizabeth.
• Hydroflouric acid will dissolve glass.
• In the 11th century, Norway was ruled by a dog for three years.
• The hottest months on the equator are March and September.
• Mary Shelley was only 19 when she wrote Frankenstein.
• President John Tyler had 14 children.
• 5 mountains over 24,000 feet are unnamed.
• The red sponge can be broken into thousands of pieces, join itself up again, and continue to live.
• The Manx cat has no tail.
• Rats are the animals that can live the longest without water.
• The average adult says 16,800 words a day.
• The last Sunday postal delivery was on June 12, 1921. (At least in Britain)
• Alferd Packer was the only man in the US ever to be convicted of cannibalism.
• 47 of the 163 breeds of dog originated in the British Isles.
• The letter O is in all 66 different alphabets.
• It takes 12½ pounds of lettuce to make up 1000 calories.
• Frenchman Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville was the first person to set foot on Antarctica.
• The location footage for the 1955 movie musical Oklahoma! was shot in Arizona.
• The original siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, married sisters, had 22 kids total, and died within 3 hours of each other, even though they were only conjoined at the sternum.
• Astronauts cannot burp in space.
• In 2000, America didn’t qualify for the America's cup for the first time in 149 years.
• The record for the fastest climbing of Mount Everest is 15 hours and 56 minutes by Babu Chhiri in May 2000.
• In 1999, 9/10 of NBA players were black.
• In 1967, the Procrastinators Club of America protested the War of 1812.
• A squirrel can fall as much as 600 feet to the ground without injuring itself.
• Amish men grow beards after they get married.
• Some crazy holidays: April 28 – National Hairball Awareness Day, Aug. 6 – Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night, Oct. 15 – National Grouch Day, Dec. 26 – National Whiner’s Day.
• ‘Tooth Fairy’ is a registered trademark of Colgate.
• By the time you finish reading this, the Earth will have travelled 100 miles in space.
• Diamonds are 90 times harder than corundum, the next-hardest material.
• The hearing aid was invented way back in 1880.
• If you look into a gecko’s ear, you can see through to the other side.
• In January 1979, factory worker Robert Williams became the first known fatality caused by a robot.
• Polo is the sport played on the largest playing field. (300 x 200 yards)
• The world’s oldest spider was a goliath birdeater named Lucrecia who was 20 years old when she died on August 5 2006.
• California sea lions are the only mammals whose milk does not contain lactose.
• 100,000,000,000 people have ever died.
• 80% of people die in a hospital.
• There are more suicides than homocides in New York City.
• Rabbit show jumping - The official world record in high jump for rabbits is 99.5 cm (39.17 inches). The official world record in long jump is 300 cm (118.11 inches).
• The presidential retreat Camp David is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s grandson. It was previously called Shangri-La.
• The theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteorite wasn’t created until 1980.
• George Bernard Shaw is the only man to win both a Nobel prize and an Oscar.
• California produces 90% of America’s broccoli.
• The four Best Supporting Actress Oscars from 1978 to 1981 all had the initials M.S.
• Winston Churchill coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain.’
• It took 14 years from when Elvis Presley became famous for a single book to be written about him.
• Elwood Edwards is the man who did the voice of ‘You’ve got mail!’
• Texas was the only country in history not to issue coins.
• You inhale 700,000 flakes of dead skin every day.
• Bram Stoker took the name ‘Dracula’ from Vlad III the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, a 15th century Wallachian (now Romanian) prince. ‘Dracul’ was actually the title used as a name of Vlad’s father, Vlad II, as he was member of the Order of the Dragon. The name was then used by Vlad III.
• Dracul means dragon, and also devil, in Romanian. The a at the end made it 'son of.'
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written in 1897. It wasn’t translated into Romanian until 1990.
• The sartorius is the largest muscle in the human body. It is in the thigh.
• Merv Griffin himself composed the Jeopardy! theme.
• The giraffe is the land mammal with the longest tail.
• After kidney transplants, most recipients have three kidneys because their own kidneys are usually left in place.
• William Goebel of Kentucky is the only state governor to be assassinated while in office.
• The same man designed Canada's first postage stamp and devised universal standard time: Sandford Fleming.
• It wasn't until 1939 when a British monarch, George VI, visited Canada or the US.
• Technically, it was lookout Rodrigo de Triana who discovered America, not Columbus. (Though over 400 years after the Vikings).
• Grand Central Terminal is 49 acres in sizes, in one year had 19000 lost and found items, and has 575000 visitors daily, although 125000 commuters.
• Camels are the only land mammals that can survive on salt water.
• The dot over the iis called a tittle.
• 43.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
• The last word in the dictionary is zyzzyvas, the plural for a genus of weevil.

[edit] References

These are only a few of the many sources I have used to find this trivia.

• The many Uncle John's Bathroom Reader books.
• www.dribbleglass.com
• www.snopes.com
• Maureen and Alan Hiron. The Ultimate Trivia Quiz Game Book. 1984. Bloomsbury Books, London.
• Jennings, Ken. Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. 2006. Random House, New York.