Facts, facts, facts #2
· Des Moines has the highest per capita Jello consumption in the U.S.
· Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
· The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."
· All porcupines float in water.
· Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
· A-1 Steak Sauce contains both orange peel and raisins.
· A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened.
· The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
· Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
· A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
· The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
· There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
· Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
· In Kentucky, 50 percent of the people who get married for the first time are teenagers.
· Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during W.W.I.
· Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
· In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.
· About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they're still sitting on it.
· You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any other weather.
· An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
· Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas.
· Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
· The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at night.
· A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 600 m.p.h.
· The condom -- made originally of linen -- was invented in the early 1500's.
· The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C.
· A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
· The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is.
· Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
· The average bank teller loses about $250 every year.
· In 1980, there was only one country in the world with no telephones -- Bhutan.
· Every person has a unique tongue print.
· Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
· Women's hearts beat faster than men's.
· Pollsters say that 40 percent of dog and cat owners carry pictures of the pets in their wallets.
· Bubble gum contains rubber.
· You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog.
· Only 55 percent of all Americans know that the sun is a star.
· The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello.
· Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks.
· Most American car horns honk in the key of F.
· The world population of chickens is about equal to the number of people.
· Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head.
· In 75% of American households, women manage the money and pay the bills.
· A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
· About 70 percent of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money.
· It's against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
· Some toothpaste's contain antifreeze.
· Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.
· Millie the White House dog earned more than 4 times as much as President Bush in 1991.
· Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
· There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones.
· Most lipstick contains fish scales.
· Lee Harvey Oswald's cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992.
· Mosquitoes have teeth.
· Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
· Hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego.
· The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
· When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.
· Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
· 27 percent of U.S. male college students believe life is "a meaningless existential hell."
· In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.
· Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant "plenty of excrement."
· Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark.
· "Kemo Sabe" means "soggy shrub" in Navajo.
· Queen Elizabeth I had black teeth and lice.
· Hamlet is the longest Shakespearian role.
· There is no upper age limit for MP's.
· Every time it is hit by a sizeable object, the moon makes a strange, and so far unexplained, ringing noise.
· In 1600 a pair of silk stockings cost ú1.25.
· The last London smog occurred in 1962.
· Finland had the first female MPs.
· The worst plane crash in the world happened on the ground.
· Henry VIII wore skirts.
· The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876.
· In France in 1740, a cow was found guilty of sorcery and hanged.
· The first special Christmas stamp was printed by the Canadians in 1898.
· Peruvian Indians wash their babies in llama urine to ward off evil spirits
· There are probably more than a million species of insects on earth.
· The Romans invented the bikini.
· Though scientists talk confidently about black holes, no one has ever seen one.
· The first British pavements were laid in Edinburgh in 1688.
· Heroin addiction causes constipation.
· Baby whales are born tail first.
· Lewis Carroll wrote his books while standing up.
· Attila the Hun is said to have died while making love.
· When the bearded vulture is hungry and can't find any dead prey, it knocks suitable victims off cliffs.
· Blood is only slightly thicker than water.
· James Cagney never uttered the immortal line, 'You dirty rat', in any of his screen roles.
· The original Tories were a band of Irish outlaws.
· Saffron is made from the stamen of the crocus.
· Alexander the Great's body was kept preserved in a jar of honey.
· St George is the patron saint of Portugal as well as England.
· 845 dialects are spoken in India.
· Statistics indicate that more murderers come from Yorkshire than any other English county.
· In 1808 two Frenchmen fought a pistol duel - in hot air balloons suspended over Paris. One man missed his shot but the other was
more accurate and watched his opponent plummet more than a thousand feet to his death.
· Mae West wrote a play simply entitled "Sex".
· There are 4,000 wax glands in the ear.
· On average, we lose between 30 and 60 hairs a day.
· Blue eyes get lighter with age.
· There are more Italians in New York than in Rome - and more Irish than in Dublin
· The Chubb lock was invented in 1818.
· To keep her secrets safe, the Queen uses black blotting paper.
· The Princess of Wales' middle name is Frances.
· George II died after falling off the loo.
· Buckingham Palace is linked to Heathrow airport by a Tube line.
· Gandhi, Napolleon and Sigmund Freud all suffered from constipation.
· The Incas were the world's first dentists.
· Starfish can turn their stomachs inside out.
· King James I was a passenger in the first submarine.
· When an octopus becomes upset, it may eat itself.
· Eskimos use refrigerators to prevent their food from freezing.
· The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
· Eau de Cologne was invented as protection against the plague.
· The avocado pear is the most fattening fruit.
· The Queen's first corgi was called Susan.
· The ballpoint pen was invented by the Biro brothers.
· The full name for Bangkok, capital of Thailand, contains 169 letters.
· Crocodiles kill about 2,000 people each year.
· In Wales in the sixteenth century, 43 clergymen were listed as having concubines
· The Russian for God is Bog.
· The head of the Roman Catholic church in the Philippines is Cardinal Sin.
· In Hawaii, the age of consent for homosexuals is fourteen.
· Edith Piaf found it difficult to resist a man with blue eyes.
· The Marquis de Sade's mother was a nun.
· Dolphins have been used to guide stranded whales back to sea.
· The word 'robot' is from the Slav word meaning 'work'.
· Pognophobia is the fear of beards.
· In the state of Minnesota, it is against the law to hang male and female underwear together on the same washing line.
· Belgium has never exercised censorship over adult films, the only country never to do so.
· In 1890, 180,000 mummified Egyptian cats were sold to a company to be made into fertilizer.
· In 1925, the Niagra Falls completely froze over.
· The game of chess originated in India.
· At the outbreak of World War I, there were only 50 men in the US Air Force
· The last Roman soldier left Britain in AD407.
· After James Dean's death in a crash, teenagers paid to sit behind the wheel of the smashed car.
· The last man to speak the Mohican language died in 1933.
· Thirty-one percent of British marriages involve a divorced partner.
· 76% of American men would be willing to have sex with a total stranger for a million dollars.
· 20% of all road accidents in Sweden involve a moose.
· Plants are 90% water.
· Human beings have been around for only 0.0002% of the earth's history.
· According to insurance brokers astronauts have the most dangerous job in the world.
· There are as many rats in Britain as there are people.
· The only animal with four knees is the elephant.
· Crickets hear things through their knees.
· Fried mice were once used to cure smallpox in Britain.
· In California, it is illegal to kill or threaten a butterfly.
· There are no clocks in the casinos at Las Vegas.
· A mosquito has forty-seven teeth.
· Your nose continues to grow throughout your life.
· The Basque word for God is 'Jingo'.
· The Niagara Falss are switched off at night.
· Over three quarters of a potato is water.
· For three years the explorer Marco Polo was mayor of a city in China.
· King Edward II was killed by a homosexual lover who shoved a red-hot poker into his anus.
· Honey is used to fill the centres of golf balls.
· Holland is the most densely populated country in the world, with over a thousand people per square mile.
· The Pacific Ocean fills nearly half the globe.
· John D. Rockefeller gave away over five hundred million dollars during his lifetime.
· Turkeys often look up at the sky during a rainstorm. Unfortunately many drown as a result.
· Henry III of France used to hang a basket of small dogs around his neck.
· Adolf Hilter's cook was Jewish.
· Horses can sleep standing up.
· No rain has ever been recorded in the Atacama desert in Chile.
· A chimpanzee fooled the art world when his paintings were not only displayed in galleries and bought by collectors, but became
the subject of learned critical argument.
· There are something like 100,000 cats on the payroll of the British Civil service.
· Penguins can leap over six feet in the air.
· Snails only mate once in their entire life, but it can take up to tweleve hours for them to complete.
· The largest muscle in the human body is the buttock muscle.
· There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.
· Bagpipes can enter America tax-free.
· You can hold an aligators mouth shut with one hand.
· Only humans cry.
· During the American Civil War, maggots were used to eat away the dead tissue around wounds.
· The banana cannot reproduce itself without the help of man.
· The glass cat-fish is almost totally transparent.
· A pound of lemons contains more sugar than a pound of strawberries.
· There are over three times as many countries north of the equator as there are south of it.
· The Western hero, Buffalo Bill, didn't hunt buffalo, he hunted bison.
· The largest eggs in the world are laid by sharks.
· Bombay duck is made from dried fish.
· None of Socrates' writings actually survive.
· Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar decreed that if any of her subjects appeared in her dreams, they would be killed.
· The female ants are the ones who do all the work.
· One of the most effective ways of cleaning your teeth, is to chew on a stick.
· You breathe nearly two gallons of air a minute.
· The original name given to a butterfly was the 'flutterby'.
· In Iceland, the telephone directories list people according to their first names.
· Chinese rulers used to use giant clams' shells as baths.
· The Duke of Wellington suggested that the Houses of Parliament be built on the banks of the River Thames, so that it could never
be surrounded by an angry mob.
· It is illegal to be prostitute in Siena, Italy, if your first name is Mary
· In Ancient Peru, when a woman found an ugly potato in the ground, it was the custom to push it into the face of the nearest man.
· In many juke-boxes you can actually buy recorded silence.
· Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
· The study of stupidity is morology.
· The eye of a giant squid is larger than a person's head.
· The two highest IQs ever recorded (on a standard test) both belonged to women.
· The ordinary house-fly beats its wings nearly two hundred times a second.
· In The Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.
· Nutmeg, if injected intravenously, is fatal.
· Cats have no facility for tasting sugar.
· The Dutch Army is unionized.
· Your body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight
· A chicken in New Zealand once laid three hundred and sixty-one eggs in the space of one calendar year.
· In 1979 snow fell on the Sahara Desert for the first time in living memory
· The writer, Rudyard Kipling, only ever used black ink.
· Hummingbirds can't walk.
· The practice of numbering houses only begun in London in 1764.
· Moths have neither mouths nor stomachs.
· Oliver Cromwell's real name was Oliver Williams.
· Iraq supplies three-quarters of the world's dates.
· Rubber is an important ingredient in the manufacture of bubble-gum.
· Human adults breathe about 23,000 times a day.
· The Arctic tern flies to the Antarctic and back every year.
· The Incas and the Aztecs were able to function without the wheel.
· In terms of physical effort, a watch-repairer probably uses twice as much energy dressing in the morning than he does in his normal
working hours.
· Cardinal Mezzofanti managed to master one hundred and fourteen different languages during his lifetime, as well as seventy-two
dialects.
· Only ten words make up twenty percent of everything we say.
· More than half the babies born every day arrive before breakfast.
· A butterfly has 12,000 eyes.
· The most common disease in the world is tooth decay.
· Every continent in the world has a city called Rome.
· Carotts are used as a substitue for coffee in Germany.
· The male silkworm moth can smell a female over a distance of up to five miles.
· The word 'girl' appears only once in the Bible.
· Dirty snow melts quicker than clean snow.
· Admiral Lord Nelson was only five feet two inches tall.
· Paper was invented early in the second century by a Chinese eunuch.
· Much more money is spent on cigarettes and alcohol in Britain, than on life insurance.
· The Anglo-Saxons believed Friday to be such an unlucky day that they ritually slaughtered any child unfortunate to be born on it.
· In parts of Malays, the women keep harems of men.
· Quenn Elizabeth I passed a law which forced everyone except the rich to wear a flat cap on Sundays.
· Everytime you stop forward, you use fifty-four muscles.
· On average, one lead pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long.
· Indian ink comes from China.
· The world at the moment is in the middle of an ice age.
· Using radar, scientists have discovered moutains and lakes buried beneath the ice of the Antactic.
· La Paz in Bolivia is so high above sea level that the air has barely enough oxygen to support life.
· There are over ten thousand golf courses in the US.
· About one hundred people die every minute, but over two hundred are born.
· Sir Walter Raleigh's widow carried his embalmed head around in a bag until her death.
· Anyone stupid enough to refer to Czar Paul I's baldness was immediately flogged to death.
