Facts, facts, facts #3
· Camel-hunting is illegal in Arizon.
· Over two thousand pints of beer are drunk in the House of Commons every week.
· Australian earthworms can grow up to ten feet in length.
· Only female mosquitoes bite.
· The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than the Niagara Falls.
· The phrase 'The Three Rs', standing for 'reading, writing and arithmetic', was coined by Sir William Curtis, who was illerate.
· Turtles, as a species, are about 275 million years old.
· The Forth railway bridge in Scotland is a metre longer in the summer than in nthe winter.
· Judy Garland's original name was the distinctly unglamorous Frances Gumm.
· Since the turn of the century, every elected President of America has been taller than his rival for the White House.
· A group of toads is called a 'knot'.
· Fillings in people's teeth have been known to pick up radio waves.
· Queen Victoria never spoke English perfectly. Her mother tongue was German
· The smallest trees in the world are the dwarf willows of Greenland. They are about two inches tall.
· The lance ceased to be an official battle weapon in the British Army in 1927.
· Every day, the streets and parks of London are doused with over one hundred gallons of urine.
· There is a worm which lives under the eyelid of the hippopotamus, and feeds off the animals 'tears'.
· Over half the men in Corfu are called Spiro.
· The only wild camels in the world are to be found in Australia.
· Transporting the corpses off the battlefield for proper burial was a major problem for the medieval Crusaders. They solved their
problem by taking with them to the Holy Wars huge cauldrons for boiling the bodies. Bones were much lighter and easier to carry.
· One gallon of fuel moves the QE2 six inches.
· Two minor earthquakes occur every minute somewhere in the world.
· The perilous journey undertaken by the human sperm prior to conception, could be compared to someone swimming in treacle the
distance across the Atlantic Ocean.
· The average British family uses two miles of toilet paper a year.
· An octopus has three hearts.
· Fifty-pence coins have a life expectancy of around fifty years.
· Half of the world's area of land waters is in Canada.
· April Fool's Day is referred to as Boob Day in Spain.
· The stripes of a zebra are white, not black.
· Rye grass can put out roots measuring hundreds of miles.
· About half of the pianos in Britain are thought to be out of tune.
· On average, elephants sleep for about two hours a day.
· Before the Second World War, it was considered a sacrilege even to touch an Emperor of Japan.
· The richest ten per cent of the French people are approximately fifty times better off than the poorest ten per cent.
· John Paul Getty, once the richest man in the world, had a payphone in his huge mansion.
· George Washington grew marijuana in his garden.
· Chop-suey is not a native Chinese dish. It was invented by Chinese immigrants in California.
· The average human brain weighs three pounds.
· The Hundred Year's War lasted 116 years.
· An elephant has the world's largest penis. It weighs on average sixty pounds.
· Albert Einstein was once offered the Presidency of Israel. He refused saying he had no head for problems.
· The correct name for a group of crows is a 'murder'.
· France gave women the vote only in 1944.
· There are more bacteria in a hospital operating theatre than there are in an ordinary living-room.
· A Korean child called Kim could speak four languages and do advanced calculus by the time he was five years old.
· In the original story, Cinderella's slippers were made of fur. The idea that they were glass arose from a mistake in translation.
· During World War Two, W.C. Fields kept US$50,000 in Hitler's Germany "in case the little bastard wins".
· The average person has fewer than two legs.
· The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about nine thousand lead pencils.
· Turkey has put a ban on people kissing in films.
· Handel wrote the score to his Messiah in just over three weeks.
· It was the custom in Ancient Rome for the men to place their right hand on their testicles when taking an oath. The modern word
'testimony' is derived from this old tradition.
· The background radiation in Aberdeen is twice that if the rest of Great Britain.
· The Spanish Inquisition once condemned the whole of The Netherlands to death for heresy.
· Adolf Hitler was a pioneer animal-rights fighter. Not only was he a genuine vegetarian, but in 1933 he passed a law for the
protection of animals.
· 37% of American college graduates would like to be King of England, but not if it meant marrying the Queen.
· 87% of Americans would hate to be British, but wouldn't mind having a British accent.
· The warrior tribes of Ethiopia used to hang the testicles of those they killed in battle on the ends of their spears.
· The chaffinch cannot sing anything original, it can only imitate the songs of other birds.
· The hydrochloric acid in the human digestive system is strong enough to dissolve a nail.
· Robert the Bruce, the heroic Scottish King was a leper.
· There are five different types of yoga.
· The sun's mass decreases by four million tons per second.
· 300,000 Israeli cows have been issued with identity cards.
· The minute hand first appeared on watches in 1670.
· The song which is sung the most often in the world - 'Happy Birthday To You' - is still under copyright. It runs out in 2010.
· The surface of one human lung is equal to that of a tennis court.
· The first public lottery was introduced in Germany in 1494.
· It seems that goldfish actually get seasick every now and again.
· We shed out entire skin once every four weeks.
· In 1994 there were more Barbie dolls in the world than there were Canadians.
· 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
· If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one
front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the
person died of natural causes.
· No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
· Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the
expression "to get fired."
· Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
· There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
· Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on
August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.
· "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
· The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the
.50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their
ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
· The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
· The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
· The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
· Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.
· Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm.
All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up
in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.
· The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
· Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
· In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
· Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
· More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
· The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was,
"No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke someone's eye out.
· A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
· The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
· Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
· Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.
· Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
· The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider
than your thumb.
· An ostrich's eye is bigger that it's brain.
· The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds
