Fascinating Facts ~Page 11~

Human Oddities: William Evans, a giant in the retinue of Charles I of England who was reputed to have been over 8 feet tall, carried a dwarf in his pocket whenever he came to court. The combination of giant and dwarf, it is recorded, amused the king.

The Body: A person's nose and ears continue to grow throughout his or her life.

Presidents: U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe all died on July 4th. Jefferson and Adams died at practically the same minute of the same day.

Animals: Every 9.6 years there is a peak in Canada's wildlife population, especially among muskrats, red fox, skunks, mink, lynx, and rabbits. The population of grasshoppers in the world tends to rise and fall rhythmically in 9.2-year cycles.

Drugs: In the Andes Mountains of Peru, where porters can work with superhuman endurance for days with little or no food by chewing the leaves of the coca plant (from which cocaine is extracted), distances are measured in "cocadas" rather than miles. A "cocada" is the span of road that can be traveled after chewing one portion of coca leaves.

Psychology: The short-term memory capacity for most people is between five and nine items or digits. This is one reason that phone numbers are seven digits long.

Sports: In 1866 the world record for the mile run was 4 minutes 12 3/4 seconds, set by W. G. George in London on August 23. Today that time would be considered a pretty good achievement for a high-school runner.

Death: Obsidian balls, or occasionally brass balls, were place in the eye sockets of Egyptian mummies. The bandaging of a mummy often took from six to eight months and required a collection of special tools, including a long metal hook that was used to draw the dead person's brains out through his nose.

The Earth: The earth weighs 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

Music & Musicians: Mozart wrote the opera "Don Giovanni" at one sitting. It was played without rehearsal the day after it was written.

The weather: During the heating months of winter, the relative humidity of the average American home is only 13 percent, nearly twice as dry as the Sahara Desert.

People: Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was an ophthalmologist by profession.

Fashion: During the Renaissance, fashionable aristocratic Italian women shaved their hair several inches back from their natural hairlines.

Fallacies: Saint Joan of Arc was not French. She was born in 1412 in Domrémy, which at the time was an autonomous state outside the jurisdiction of the French monarchy. Neither was she a heroine in France until the nineteenth century. Having fallen into oblivion shortly after her death, Joan was at best a minor figure in French legend. On coming to power at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Napoleon needed a hero symbol to help promote nationalism in France, and he hit upon Joan of Arc. She was not actually canonized until the twentieth century.

The Classical World: The Colosseum of ancient Rome was occasionally filled with water and an entire naval battle was staged there, complete with armed vessels and fights to the death.

Food & Drink: Diamond Jim Brady's average breakfast as recorded by a New York, U.S.A. restauranteur: a gallon of orange juice, three eggs, a quarter of a lof of corn bread, sirloin steak with fried potatoes, hominy grits and bacon, two muffins, and several pancakes. For dinner Diamond Jim might eat three dozen oysters, two bowls of turtle soup, and six crabs as an appetizer. Restaurant owners referred to him as the best twenty-five customers they ever had.

Media: According to the Television Code of Decency, a beer advertisement can never show a person actually "drinking" beer. Next time you see such an advertisement on television, notice that while the beer itself is prominently displayed, the subject always stops short of imbibing it.

First: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. It was typed on a Remington in 1875 by Mark Twain himself. Twain, however, wished to withhold the fact. He did not want to write testimonials, he said, or answer questions concerning the operation of the "newfangled thing."

Aviation: Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly the Atlantic. He was the sixty-seventh. The first sixty-six made the crossing in dirigibles and twin-engine mail planes. Lindbergh was the first to make the dangerous flight "alone".

Fish: The teeth of the tiger shark rest on a spring. When the shark's mouth is closed, the teeth are pressed back firmly against the gums. When the mouth is opened, the teeth spring out, ready for action.

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