Fun Facts and Trivia

Fun fact: ‘Meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat.
 
Fathers tend to determine the height of their children, and mothers tend to determine their weight.
 
The sari or saree, the traditional dress of women on the Indian subcontinent, has been used continuously and relatively unchanged for thousands of years.
 
The world’s record for continuous pogo stick jumping is 41 hours.
 
The Antpitta avis canis Ridgley is a species of bird that barks like dog.
 
The word ‘trivia’ comes from the Latin word ‘trivium,’ meaning a place where three roads meet. At such places, just as at public squares, people would gather and talk about all sorts of matters, most of which were ‘trivial.’
 
The English Channel between England and France grows about 300 millimeters wider each year. Perhaps the British are on their way to visit their relatives in America?
 
Instead of a birthday cake, many children in Russia are given a birthday pie.
 
There are more ducks swimming in water than there are fish flying in the sky.
 
Fried chicken is the most popular meal ordered in full-service, or sit-down, restaurants in the United States of America. The next in popularity are roast beef, spaghetti, turkey, baked ham, and fried shrimp.
 
“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.” -Bertrand Russell (Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872 - 1970)): “In Praise of Idleness” (1932)
 
Boston College is in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts . . . much to the consternation of people who arrive in Boston, expecting to find it there.
 
The very first computer ‘mouse’ was made in 1964 by a man named Doug Engelbert. The mouse was made of wood.
 
Mike Hayes, a man from Rochelle, Illinois, funded his education by asking 2.8 million people for one penny each. This happened in 1987, so if someone wanted to pay for his or her college education the same way today, that person would have to ask more than ten million people.
 
Worcestershire sauce is really just anchovy ketchup.

There is no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger, and neither apple nor pine in pineapple. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads are meat - and not at all sweet.
 
Jamaica has 120 rivers.
 
Why do the wires on telephone poles hum? Well, it is not the electricity or people’s phone conversations that produce the hum. The hum you sometimes hear is caused by the wind passing through the wires and making them vibrate to make a sound, which varies in pitch depending upon the speed of the wind and the tightness of the wire.
 
Maurice: What is a ‘camel’s hair’ brush made of?
Maureen: Squirrel fur!
 
The coins thrown into the Trevi Fountain in Italy are collected for charity.
 
The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
 
The average person will consume 45,424 liters (12,000 gallons) of water in his or her lifetime.
 
The most common time for wakeup calls at hotels is 7:00 a.m.
 
Van Camp’s Pork and Beans were a staple food for Union soldiers during the American Civil War.
 
The expression ‘three dog night’ originated with the Eskimos and means a very cold night - so cold that a person would have to bed down with three dogs to keep warm.
 
Aphesis is when unstressed vowels are skipped. Examples: Because - ’cause, amid - ’mid, especially - ’specially.
 
The United States Federal Aviation Administration once did a study that found the average airline stewardess (flight attendant) has a nose that is 5.5372 centimeters (2.18 inches) long. Does knowing this help stewardesses move around in the narrow spaces inside airplanes, or does it help to keep the aircraft weight low to conserve fuel and increase flight distance?
 
While she never lived further west than Ohio, Annie Oakley (pseudonym of Phoebe Anne Moses) was famous as an expert shotgun and rifle marksman in ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.’
 
The world’s largest human-made hole is in Kimberly, South Africa. It has a circumference, or distance around its outer edge, of 1.6 kilometers, and a depth of 800 meters. Digging was started on it in 1871, to find buried diamonds.
 
The letter combination ‘ough’ can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains all of them: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
 
‘Moon trees’ were grown from seeds taken to the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission in early 1971. NASA and USFS wanted to see if being in space or in the Moon’s orbit caused the seeds to grow differently.
 
Why is it that when people are in the public eye they are said to be ‘in the limelight’? Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime in an oxyhydrogen flame to produce a brilliant light. In the theatre, performers on stage ‘in the limelight’ were seen by the audience as the center of attention.
 
Abdul Kassem Ismael, the Grand Vizier of Persia in the 10th century, could not bear to part with his 177,000-volume library when he traveled, and so he had the books carried by a caravan of 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
 
Phonetic ABC’s: A system used by the military and others when people need to spell out words to be precise in spoken communications. Usually this is done to avoid confusion when words or letters have similar sounds. Words are substituted for letters of the alphabet, commonly: Alpha for a, Bravo for b, Charlie for c, Delta for d, Echo for e, Foxtrot for f, Golf for g, Hotel for h, India for i, Juliet for j, Kilo for k, Lima for l, Mike for m, November for n, Oscar for o, Papa for p, Quebec for q, Romeo for r, Sierra for s, Tango for t, Uniform for u, Victor for v, Whiskey for w, X-ray for x, Yankee for y, and Zulu for z.
 
The sticks of ‘chalk’ used to write on chalkboards are not actually made of chalk, but are instead made of plaster of Paris. Now we’re starting to wonder if anything is really what it is said to be . . .
 
Real chalk is made from tiny plankton fossils.
 
Cartoon character Sylvester the Cat’s full name is Sylvester J. Pussycat.
 
The oldest business in the United States of America is the cymbal company Zildjian, which was originally founded in Constantinople in 1623, according to “American Heritage of Invention & Technology” (Winter 2000)
 
Question: If you were to spell out each number, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter ‘a’?
Answer: One thousand.
 
Intelligent people are said to have more zinc and copper in their hair. 
 
A car traveling at 80 kilometers (50 miles) per hour burns half of its fuel just to overcome wind resistance. What a drag . . . on your wallet.
 
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words.
The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains 266 words.
A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.
 
American car horns beep in the tone of F.
 
China is believed to be the world’s oldest continuously existing human civilization. That is, if we consider humans to be civilized.
 
An average person consumes more than a ton of food and drink each year.
 
The car in the foreground on the back of an American $10 bill is a 1925 Hupmobile.
 
The real name of the horse in the television show “Mister Ed” was Bamboo Harvester.
 
Bali, an island of Indonesia, has the world’s largest variety of flora, or plant life.
 
All the people on Earth could fit into a 1-kilometer cube, if done so in the manner that groups of people once stuffed themselves into telephone booths or crowds of clowns stuff all of themselves into tiny cars
 
Cars were first started with ignition keys in 1949.
 
What is ‘dry ice’? Dry ice is compressed carbon dioxide gas. It is compressed until it is liquefied; after liquefaction, it is frozen. Dry ice is used as a refrigerant, as it is a solid that changes back to a gas without ever becoming a liquid. It remains in a solid state for a longer time, and at cooler temperatures, than ordinary ice.
 
Most of the vitamin C in fruits is in the skin.
 
William Moulton Marston was the creator of the fictional superhero Wonder Woman. He also invented the polygraph machine, widely known as the lie detector.
 
England’s first great industry was wool.
 
The world record for a photographic memory feat is held by a man in Burma who recited 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts from memory.
 
Every year, one ton of cement is poured for each man, woman, and child on Earth. What are you going to do with yours?
 
Dreamt is the only English word that ends in ‘mt.’
 
Half of all crimes are committed by people under the age of 18. That is the second important reason children should be encouraged to stay in school.
 
During a total solar eclipse, the temperature can drop by 6 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit).
 
A wire clothes hanger is about 112 centimeters (44 inches) long when straightened.
 
Halley’s Comet passes the Earth every 76 years, and the next time it will return will be 2062.
 
An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
 
Jack is the most common name in nursery rhymes.
 
About 45 percent of the world’s human population lives in China and India.
 
The first comic strip was, “The Yellow Kid,” published in the “New York World” newspaper starting in 1896. The cartoonist was named Richard Felton Outcault.
 
Someone has said that it takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
 
Two of the words in the English language that have all five vowels in alphabetical order are ‘abstemious’ and ‘facetious.’ Even more amazing is that no one really knows what these words mean.
 
1,100 watts of electricity are needed to power a toaster.
 
The Sea of Tranquility on the Moon is deeper than the highest mountain on Earth.
 
‘Sheik’ means ‘old man’ in Arabic.
 
The symbol # is known as a pound sign, a hashtag, an octothorpe, and by other names. Octo means eight, and it does appear to have 8 legs. It also resembles the grid used in the game tic-tac-toe. Fascinating.
 
More than 500 meteorites, or rocks from outer space, hit the Earth each year.
 
Rubber bands last longer when kept refrigerated.
 
The Tower of Independence clock on the back of a U.S. $100 dollar bill shows the time as 4:10.
 
The first rugby club was formed in 1843.
 
The typical wave height from a Pacific tsunami is between 6 and 9 meters (20 and 30 feet).
 
Ninety percent or more of an iceberg is under water.
 
In 1872, Yellowstone Park in the United States of America became the world’s first national park.
 
The dishwasher was invented in 1889.
 
The largest island in the Mediterranean Sea is Sicily.
 
An average person consumes 100 tons of food in a lifetime.
 
The supersonic Concorde jet made its first trial flight on 1 January 1969.
 
The oldest word in the English language is ‘town.’
 
The average person has 10,000 taste buds.
 
The Pyramid of Giza, one of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, is made of 2.5 million blocks of stone.
 
The longest one-syllable word in the English language is ‘screeched.’
 
Yahoo was originally called ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.’
 
At a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conference in 1972, Roxcy Bolton proposed naming hurricanes after Senators instead of women. She also preferred “him-i-canes.”
 
Hurricanes are storms that form over seas or oceans and last for up to ten days.
 
Classical music composer Ludwig van Beethoven was once told by a music teacher that he had no talent for music.
 
A purple finch is a type of bird. Despite its name, it is crimson, which is a shade of red, in color.
 
Chinese gooseberries originate in New Zealand.
 
Before jets and jet lag, there were boats and boat lag.
 
The world’s knowledge is growing so fast that ninety percent of what we will know in 50 years’ time will be discovered in those 50 years.
 
The doorbell was invented in 1831.
 
‘Karoke’ means ‘empty orchestra’ in Japanese.
 
The United States Army’s jeep was not always called by that name. It was initially called a general purpose vehicle. It was then shortened to GP (jeep), and the manufacturer started to manufacture the general purposes vehicles under the name “Jeep.”
 
In 1972, a Swedish man balanced on one foot for over five hours, using nothing for support.
 
Castor oil is used as a lubricant in jet airplanes.
 
The three most common languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English.
 
Clark Gable’s middle name was Clark, and his first name was William.
 
Possibly, every person is afraid of something, and some people are said to be afraid of everything. Panophobia is a fear of everything, and nihilophobia is a fear of absolutely nothing . . . also known as being foolhardy.
 
‘Almost’ is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
 
The largest living structure on Earth is the 2,000 kilometer (1,243 mile) long Great Barrier Reef on Australia’s coast.
 
“Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine equipped to work efficiently if narrowly and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.” -Robertson Davies (William Robertson Davies (1913 - 1995))
 
This is MFOL! . . . where there is no such thing as an unimportant fact . . . more follows . . . with some fun . . .