Useless Facts

"I don't know where you get you delusions, laser brain!"

-Leia from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Greetings and welcome to my great page of useless and interesting facts that you might not have known. Here you will find facts pertaining to Language, Biology, Money, Popular Cultre, History, and some Miscellaneous trivia. Unless, someone lied to me, these facts are true.
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Language

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is screeched.
Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed using only the left hand.
"Go," is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. "I am." is the second shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tonguetwister in the English language.
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's".
To testify was based on men in Roman court swearing to a statement on their testicles.
If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter "A"? One thousand.
Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.
In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden.... and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.
In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. This spawned the phrase "goodnight, sleep tight".
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month we know today as the honeymoon.
The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
Dreamt is the only English word that ends in -mt.
There are only four English words that end in dous- tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
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Biology

A peanut is neither a pea nor a nut.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
Almonds are members of the peach family.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.
Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.
A rat can last longer without water than a camel and can multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.
A snail can sleep for three years.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear, and a cat's urine glows under a black light.
A shrimp's heart is in its head.
It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand (or attempted to do so - apart from bones).
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
Rats and horses can't vomit.
A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
Sneezes are dangerous! It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, and if you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze your heart stops for a milisecond.
Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
All polar bears are left handed.
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
The male gypsy moth can smell the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.
The average human falls asleep in seven minutes, but in the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.
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Money

On a Canadian two-dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.
Every day more money is printed for monopoly than the US Treasury.
On the back of a five dollar bill, all 50 states are listed at the top of the Lincoln Memorial.
Cost in the USA of raising a medium sized dog to the age of 11: $6,400.
A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
Pound for pound a hamburger costs more than a brand new car.
On a one dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the "1" encased in the shield and a spider hidden in the front upper right-hand corner.
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Pop Culture

If the Barbie doll (the ones before the change) were lifesize, her measurements would be 39-23-33.She would stand seven feet, two inches tall. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
All of the clocks in "Pulp Fiction" were stuck on 4:20.
Mickey Mouse's ears are always turned to the front, no matter which direction his head is pointing.
The only real person to be on a Pez dispenser was Betsy Ross.
In the movie "Dances with Wolves", not one animal was injured during its filming, although there was a horse named "Dutch" who came down with a nasty case of the runs.
The blood depicted in the shower scene of the movie "Psycho" (The Alfred Hitchcock film) was really chocolate syrup.
In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
The Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie were named after Bert, the cop, and Ernie, the cabbie, from Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life".
Paul Reiser sings the theme song on Mad About You, and Kelsey Grammar sings the closing theme to Frasier.
The name for Oz in the books and movies came from Frank Baum, the author, looking at his file cabinets and seeing A-N and O-Z, hence Oz.
Recently deceased television host Mr. Rogers was an ordained minister.
In the movie, Star Wars, during the scene in which Luke gets out of his X-wing fighter after blowing up the Death Star, he accidentally calls Princess Leia 'Carrie' (her real first name).
In the Titanic movie, When Jack walks through the french doors for dinner with Rose and her family, a camera man's reflection can be seen on the glass. Captain Smith is wearing contact lenses. In one scene a man with a yellow shirt and a black moustache falls off the boat and drowns; five minutes later the same exact man is seen playing the violin with two other men. At one point you can see a small hill with a town on it over Jack's shoulder, even though he is supposedly in the middle of the Atlantic.
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:
Spades- King David, Hearts- Charlemagne, Clubs- Alexander, the Great, Diamonds- Julius Caesar. The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.

Some of the chariot racers in 'Ben Hur' were seen to be wearing wristwatches. You can also see tire marks in front of the chariots, and in once scene a red car in the distance.
John Lennon's first girlfriend was named Thelma Pickles.
The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Gary Burgoff (Radar on MASH) always kept his left hand out of the view of the camera, either in his pocket or under a clipboard, because his left had is deformed.
The "T" in Captain James T. Kirk fromStar Trek stands for Tiberius.
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History

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
Between 1937 and 1945, Heinz produced a version of Alphabetti Spaghetti especially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas.
Hitler ordered tanks to be made in Michigan and told the company to not worry about sending them to Germany, he'd pick them up on his way through Detroit.
The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on nearby Breed's hill.
Out of 1500 people, only 6 were saved from the water after the Titanic sank.
George Washington carried a portable sundial.
Ronald Reagan was the only president to have ever worn a Nazi uniform. (He wore it as an actor in a movie).
There were over 300 prophecies about Christ made hundreds of years before his life on earth, and he fulfilled all of them. The odds of fulfilling just 48 of those prophecies are one out of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (1.0 *10^57) Christ was also the only founder of a major religion to claim to be God. Others only claimed to have good teachings.
In 1856 workmen digging a tunnel in France between Nancy and St. Dizier used gunpowder to blow up an enormous stone at Culmont. In doing so they discovered they had disturbed a live creature, which looked like a very large bat with a wingspan of 10 feet, 7 inches. The creature was alive and shook its wings but died soon thereafter. A naturalist well versed in paleontology immediately identified it as a pterodactyl, a creature that supposedly has been extinct for millions of years.
Approximately 50 people associated with ex President Bill Clinton have died in mysterious and suspicious circumstances in the past several years. Many died in apparent suicides and airplane crashes.
Alexander the Great claimed that when he and his army were in India, they saw a 100-foot dragon come out of a cave and make a terrible noise.
Before the first landing on the moon (Apollo 11), NASA calculated the amount of dust falling on the moon each year. Estimating the age of the moon to be 4.5 billion years, it was figured that between 54 feet and 900 feet of dust would be on the moon. The 1st lunar landing module was equipped with huge landing pads to land on all of this soft dust. However, when the astronauts landed they found virtually no dust at all. Niel Armstrong's 1st words after actually stepping on the moon were "It's SOLID!" This indicated that the moon is likely to be much younger than thought, possibly only a few thousand years old.
A photo of John F. Kennedy in the car just seconds before his assassination also in the background shows a man in the crowd in front of the book depository, who looks just like and is dressed just like Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Battle of New Orleans, during the War of 1812, took place after the war had ended.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
One of the fossils the evolutionists presented to the press during the famous "Scopes Monkey Trials" was a tooth they claimed that was evidence of the missing link between man and ape. The link was dubbed "Nebraska Man" and evolutionary theories suggested an entire pre Homo-Sapiens civilization in the Americas. Years after the trial, more diggings were made and it was discovered that the tooth belonged to a pig.
Adolf Hitler was rumored to be demon-possessed. On occasion in a top-secret meeting in a secure room with his generals, he would do somethng like point at an empty corner and exclaim, "How did HE get in here??!"
At U.S. President Andrew Jackson's funeral in 1845 his pet parrot was removed for swearing.
In 1916 Russian Pilots spotted Noahs Ark on Mt. Ararat. The Tsar sent an expedition of over 100 men who took samples, photographs and measurements, but these were lost in the communist revolution. In 1955 Francis Nevarra recovered hand crafted wood from Mt. Ararat which was dated to be approximately 5,000 years old. US satellite and spy plane photos reveal a "large unexplained anomaly" near the top of Mt. Ararat.
The Roman emperor Commodos collected all the dwarves, cripples, and freaks he could find 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 airplane that hit the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001 was originally targeted for the White House. The taller old executive building blocked the flight path so that plan was changed at the last minute. Dick Cheney was in the White House at the time and was whisked quickly to the basement.
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second was William Jefferson Clinton.
The U.S. Interstate Highway system was designed so that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
In the Puluxy River Bed near Glen Rose Texas, large human footprints and also dinosaur prints can be found in the same area. Sometimes the prints even cross each other, and occasionally there is found a human print on a dinosaur print!
The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
The first 5 books in the Bible have not only the Ten Commandments, but a total of 613. No one has ever come close to keeping them. Christ also noted that if you break just one point of the Law you are guilty of breaking them all.
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate ber melted in his pocket.
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Miscellaneous

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.
On average, a human being will have sex more than 3,000 times and spend two weeks kissing over their lifetime.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
One can see the stars during the day from the bottom of a well.
The Silicon Valley hospital in California USA offers free Internet domains and e-mail addresses for newborn babies.
In Fruita, Colorado, the town folk celebrate 'Mike the Headless Chicken Day'. Seems that a farmer named L.A. Olsen cut off Mike's head on September 10, 1945 in anticipation of a chicken dinner - and Mike lived for another 4 years WITHOUT A HEAD. Mike died from choking on a corn kernel.
The potato chips Americans eat each year weigh 6 times as much as the Titanic.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321.
The daily commuter trains arriving or departing Mumbai India every 2 minutes were designed to carry 1700 standing passengers, but are routinely packed with over 7000 passengers in what officials call dense, super dense, and hyper dense crush loads.
Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
Volleyball is the favorite sport at American nudist camps.
Average life span of a major league baseball: seven pitches.
According to the book of Revelation, a world dictator (antichrist) will require everyone to receive the "mark of the beast" on their right hand or forehead in order to buy or sell. The computer microchip implant technology is nearly ready for this and banks want to move to a cashless system.
90% of Canada's population lives within 200 miles of it's border with the United States.
Coca Cola was originally green.
Twenty-three percent of all photocopier failures worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks.
The inside of a McDonald's french fry box is striped yellow and white because it gives the impression that there are more fries in the container than there really are. McDonald's in India doesn't serve beef (only chicken, mutton and fish).
Americans on average eat eighteen acres of pizza every day.
In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
In September 1994, Skydiving student Sharon McClelland amazingly survived a 10,000-foot plunge in Ontario, by falling into a marsh when her parachute malfunctioned. She struggled to her feet and rushed to her instructor Kevin Killin - to apologize - because she had not followed procedures to open her backup chute.
Maine is the only monosyllablic state name.
Most lipstick contains fish scales.
The longest place name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukokaiwenuakitanatahu, a New Zealand hill.
Los Angeles' full name is "El pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula", which can be shortened to 3.63% of its size-L.A.
In most advertisements, including newspapers, the displayed time is 10:10.
The Ramses brand condom is named after the pharoah Ramses II (the Great), who fathered over 160 children.
When the University of Nebraska Cornhukers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.
If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16, 1969, make it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles?
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