Fascinating Facts ~Page 19~

People: Karl Marx once served a s a reporter on the New York "Herald Tribune" (the paper was then known as the New York "Tribune"). In 1848 he worked in the London office of the "Tribune," and his boss, the managing editor, was Richard Henry Dana, who himself became world-famous as author of "Two Years Before the Mast."

Food & Drink: A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continually from the bottom of the glass to the top.

Energy: Ten cords of wood stacked 4 feet wide by 4 feet high by 80 feet long have the same heating potential as 1,400 gallons of oil.

Death: When a crusader died, his corpse was chopped up and the flesh boiled away. This was done so that the skeleton could be conveniently returned to Europe for a Christian burial.

Gambling: On a bingo card of ninety numbers there are approximately 44 million possible ways to make bingo.

Sports: In the 1905 football season, eighteen men were killed in college games in the United States and 159 were permanently injured. At that time, football players wore only light equipment. Punching, linking arms, gouging, and kicking were all part of the action, and the entire team was allowed to line up on the scrimmage line. At least a quarter of all games, reports tell us, ended in mob brawls. In 1905 the Reverend David Buel of Georgetown University reported that one unidentified team had been taught to "strike their opponents in certain delicate parts of the body so as to render them helpless." The large number of deaths and injuries that year prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to establish the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which instituted regulations designed to make college football a less lethal sport.

Miscellaneous: The chance of two typewriters of the same make typing characters that are identical in terms of alignment and defects is 1 in 3 trillion.

Architecture and Construction: Japanese farmers, after removing the hulls from their rice crop and sorting out the white kernels, take the hulls from the leftover rice, mix them into a kind of paste, mold the substance intro brick-shaped blocked, and build houses with them. Such buildings are known in Japan as "houses of rice skin."

Names: Montezuma, ruler of the Aztecs and adversary of the Spanish explorer Cortez, had a nephew named Cuitlahac. Translated, Cuitlahac's name means "plenty of excrement."

Laws: Cattle branding in the United States did not originate in the West. It began in Connecticut in the mid-nineteenth century, when farmers were required by law to mark all their pigs.

Wine, Beer, and Spirits: Runlet, tierce, puncheon, pipe, gill, tun, and firkin are all terms used by winemakers in the weighing and measuring of wine.

Comic Strips & Cartoons: Mickey Mouse has only four fingers. Early Mickey Mouses can be distinguished from later ones by the fact that the originals have a pie-shaped section of white in their eyes while the later ones do not.

The Body: Human eyes are so sensitive that on a clear night when there is no moon, a person sitting on a mountain peak can see a match struck 50 miles away.

Music & Musicians: The oboe is considered the most difficult of all woodwind instruments to play correctly.

Books: Johannes Gutenberg was not the first man to produce a book printed with movable type. Printed books were made in China five hundred years before their appearance in Europe. The books were set in movable type made with metal or porcelain characters, were printed on paper (which also was invented in China centuries before it reached the West), and were bound in a manner much like contemporary volumes, complete with title page and cover.

Animals: Though the giraffe's neck is about 7 feet long, it contains the same number of vertebrae as a mouse's---seven. The giraffe's tongue is 18 inches long. It can open and close its nostrils at will, can run faster than a horse, and makes almost no sound whatsoever. The first giraffe ever seen in the West was brought to Rome about 46 B.C. by no less a personage than Julius Caesar.

Royalty: The Pekingese dog was considered sacred among Chinese royalty. At the court of Li Hsui, one of the last Manchu queens, all court Pekingese had human wet nurses. Each dog had its own eunuch to protect it from other dogs; some even had private palaces, complete with servants.

Safety: If a car is moving at 55 miles per hour, it will travel 56 feet before the driver can shift his foot from the accelerator to the brake.

Religion: The Roman Catholic population of the world is larger than that of all other Christian sects combined.

Birds: When attacked, the petrel, a giant bird of the Antarctic, repels its enemies either by regurgitating food in their faces or by squirting a jet of viscous oil from its nostrils with a force great enough to knock down a person.

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