Fascinating Facts ~Page 16~

Theater: James O'Neill, father of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, acted in the play "The Count of Monte Cristo" no less than 5,352 times---an average of one performance a day every day for fourteen years. "I believe," O'Neill once said, "that I should have lost my memory and mind altogether had I continued to keep up the strain."

Death: The body of Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century, was embalmed with special herbs after his death and preserved in the cathedral in the main square of Lima. His body can still be viewed today, displayed in a glass casket.

The Universe: The star Zeta Thauri, a supernova, was so bright when it exploded in 1054 that it could be seen during the day.

Babies & Birth: Midgets and dwarfs almost always have normal-sized children, even if both parents are midgets or dwarfs.

Geography: In the Northern Hemisphere water goes down drains counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere it goes down clockwise.

People: Rudyard Kipling would only write when he had black ink in his pen. Beethoven poured ice water over his head when he sat down to create music, believing it stimulated his brain. Dickens wrote (and slept) facing north, aligning himself with the poles of the earth. Rossini covered himself with blankets when he composed. Proust worked in bed, and only in a soundproof room.

Agriculture: Almost all our breakfast cereals are made of grass. Oats, barley, corn, and wheat are all different varieties of grass and are all descended from the same botanical species. Moreover, most of the sugar we eat also comes from grass (sugar cane), as do most of our alcoholic beverages.

Presidents: U.S. President Grover Cleveland was a draft dodger. He hired someone to enter the service in his place, for which he was ridiculed by his political opponent, James G. Blaine. It was soon discovered, however, that Blaine had done the same thing himself.

China: In the early fifteenth century, scholars in China compiled an encyclopedia consisting of 11,095 volumes.

Animals: Cows have four stomachs. Often when a calf is born the farmer will make it swallow a magnet. This is to attract the various nails, staples, tacks, bits of wire, and so on that the cow may ingest while grazing. (This odd hunger is known to farmers as "hardware disease.") When the animal is slaughtered, the butcher will remove the magnet along with the metallic debris and sell the mass of iron and steel for scrap.

Wine, Beer, and Spirits: Beer was not sold in bottles until 1850. Before then, if a person wished to buy beer, he went to the neighborhood tavern with a bucket or pot made especially for holding beer, had it filled, and brought the brew home.

Minerals & Precious Metals: Most precious gems are actually colorless. Their color comes from impurities in the stone that act as pigmenting agents.

Physics: A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball made of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.

Fashion: The shoestring was invented in England in 1790. Prior to this time all shoes were fastened with buckles.

Diseases: There is a strange and terrible disease known as bulimia in which the victim develops a ravenous, insatiable appetite. A woman observed in St. Bartholomew's Hospital in nineteenth-century London is recorded to have consumed three loaves of bread every day, along with three pounds of steak, large quantities of vegetables, a pound of cereal, and twenty glasses of water. An American doctor named Smith, reporting in the "Medical and Surgical Reporter" in Philadelphia, U.S.A., mentioned an even stranger case, that of a boy who ate continuously for fifteen hours every day and who had eight or nine bowel movements each evening. In one year this boy's weight increased from 105 to 284 pounds, and it was steadily increasing by about a half-pound a day. Despite his prodigious intake of food, the boy constantly complained of hunger. Another unpleasant ailment akin to this one is polydipsia, or constant thirst. Medical records mention a three-year-old child who drank two pailfuls of water every day. Sir M. MacKenzie, a British doctor, cited the case of a woman who drank four pailfuls of water a day and who once, appearing before a scientific commission, drank 14 quarts of water in ten hours, passed 10 quarts of urine, and continued to complain of thirst.

Manners & Customs: The champagne used to christen a ship is a substitute for human blood. In bygone times the Vikings and various South Sea tribes sacrificed human beings on the prows of their ships so that the spirits of the murdered victims would guard the craft. Later wine was substituted for blood, and, in our day, champagne for wine.

Physics: If hot water is suddenly poured into a glass the glass is more apt to break if it is thick than if it is thin. This is why test tubes are made of thin glass.

Mathematics and Numbers: Oscar Verhaeghe of Uccle, Belgium, can multiply four-digit numbers by two-digit numbers in fifteen seconds without pencil and paper. Verhaeghe can give square roots, cube enormous numbers, and square large sums in less than half a minute. Once, under test conditions, he calculated the square of 888,888,888,888,888 in forty seconds (the answer is 790,123,426,790,121,876,543,209,876,544). Except for his mathematical ability, Verhaeghe, now well on in years, has the mental capacity of a child.

Sports: The game of lacrosse was invented by Native American Indians.

Flowers, Plants, & Trees: The sequoias and redwoods of the American West Coast are "not" the oldest living trees in the world. The honor belongs to the macrozamia trees of Australia, which live 5,000 to 7,000 years and, some claim, may even reach 15,000 years.

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