Did you know

[madnuts]

* Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
* The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S (U.S.)
* Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
* The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet thick.
* Race car is a palindrome.
* We will have four consecutive full moons making two blue moons in 1999 (January 2 and 31, March 2 and 31.) The only other time it happened this century was in 1915 (January 1 and 31, March 1 and 31.)
* The Basset Horn, a kind of alto clarinet, was named after its inventor -- a man named Horn. "Basset" is from "Basetto," or "little bass" in Italian.
* There are more bald eagles in the province of British Columbia then there are in the whole United States.
* Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
* The "second unit" films movie shots that do not require the presence of actors.
* Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5 million going to actor's salaries.
* The world's second largest pipe organ is located at the Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
* Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented fiberglass.
* One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition. It is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.
* Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to have exactly fourteen feathers
* The music group Simply Red is named because of its love for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home strip.
* In case you ever find yourself piloting a dogsled, shout "Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!" to go right.
* Richard Nixon left instructions for "California, Here I Come" to be the last piece of music played at his funeral ("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
* The earliest document in Latin in a woman's handwriting (it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a birthday party.
* Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats.
* Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.
* Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world, at 0.08988 g/cc
* Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in the world, at 70.6 g/cc
* The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop, California...
* The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in the city of Paris, Texas, shorty after its box office release.
* The 'y' in signs reading "ye olde.." is properly pronounced with a 'th' sound, not 'y'. The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y".
* Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
* The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
* Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man, woman, and child in the world.
* At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies instead of cherry ones.
* The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
* The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
* The international telphone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
* A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A nibble is half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
* A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
* Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
* If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
* The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's highest airport.
* The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
* The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
* Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de Janeiro.
* Original copy of the Declaration of Independence is lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a holograph. That is a term for a handmade copy of a document and is not the same as a laser produced hologram.
* Singpore is the only country with one train station.
* The little bags of netting for gas lanterns (called 'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of an alarm at a nuclear reactor.
* When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the height of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch). 'Pitch' is a horizontal measurement of the number of letters which can be printed in an inch.
* The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with exactly one endpoint is P.
* In the movie "the Right Stuff" there is a scene where a government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program (played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake, California. His partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to badmouth Yeager claiming they need someone who went to college. During the conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who is standing behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General Yeager is listed low in the movie credits as 'Fred.'
* "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"
* Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
* There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
* Nauru is the only country in the world with no official capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren
* District, but there's no official capital.)
* South Africa is the only country with three official capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
* Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
* Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
* The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
* If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon wil be about three statute miles away.
* The one-hundred eleventh element is known as "unnilenilenium"
* The longest muscle name is the "levator labii superioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.
* The longest time someone has typed on a typewriter continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
* The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225 different ways.
* There was once a town named "6" in West Virginia.
* Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
* A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
* An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
* The oldest word in the English language is "town"
* The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
* Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
* Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all crimes of treason.
* The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
* There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.
* After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
* Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently
* Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
* A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if not held on by skin.
* Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
* Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
* The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
* Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
* Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
* A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
* Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
* It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
* Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
* If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
* The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
* There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
* The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.
* According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
* In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
* Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
* Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
* The "heat" of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.
* 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 *this* was the day of the changeover.
* In left hand drive countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car. Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
* Japan is the third most densely populated country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
* Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
* The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
* Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
* Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
* The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name was Temujin.
* Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherd.
* The type specimen for the human species is the skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American paleontologist of the late 1800's. A type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
* The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
* The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
* Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
* The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"
* Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards
* All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
* The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York are an engineering feat. The air circulators in the tunnels circulate fresh air completely every ninety seconds.
* The dirt road that General Washington and his soldiers took to fight off General Clinton during the Battle of Monmouth was called the Burlington Path.
* The only social fraternity founded during the Civil War was Theta Xi fraternity, at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1864.
* The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
* Several buildings in Manhattan have their own zip code! The World Trade Center has several.
* Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means
* "adversary", devil means "liar".
* A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
* Geller and Huchra have made three-dimensional maps of the distrubution of galaxies. In each layer of the map some galaxies are grouped together in such a way that they resemble a human being.
* Avocado is derived from the Spanish word 'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning *beep*.
* The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.
* Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.
* Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
* Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
* The smallest port in Canada is Port Williams, Nova Scotia.
* The Canadian province of Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is half an hour behind Atlantic standard time.
* Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.
* The second longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".
* Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese. Big Ben was slowed five minutes one day when a passing group of starlings decided to take a rest on the minute hand of the clock.
* The Velvet Underground was named after a book on the S&M culture.
* The Velvet Underground's first manager was Andy Warhol, who also produced their first album and designed the cover artwork. The cover artwork for the album (called "The Velvet Underground and Nico") featured a bright yellow banana that could be peeled off to reveal a bright pink banana underneath, with the label "Peel Slowly and See." "Peel Slowly and See" is the title of the Velvet Underground comprehensive boxed set, which is the only currently-available Velvet Underground recording to feature a peelable banana. The peelable banana caused substantial delays in the production of the VU's first album and contributed to Lou Reed's firing Andy Warhol as the group's manager.
* The "wild" horses of western North America are actually feral, not wild.
* Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish much more easily than they learn English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish much more easily than they learn Japanese.
* New Zealand kiwis lay the largest eggs with respect to their body size of any bird.
* Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
* When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
* Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.
* Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.
* The topknot that quails have is called a hmuh.
* Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth ... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
* The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
* The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint -- no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
* There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
* New Zealand is also the only country that contains every type of climate in the world.
* *beep*' favorite food is the glue on envelopes and on the back of postage stamps
* In 1969, the last Corvair was painted gold.
* Ralph Kramden made 62 dollars a week.
* The only way to stop the pain of the flathead fish's sting is by rubbing the same fish's slime on the wound it gave you.
* Betsy Ross was born with a fully formed set of teeth.
* Betsy Ross's other contribution to the American Revolution, beside sewing the first American flag, was running a munitions factory in her basement.
* Devo's original name was going to be De-evolution. They shortened it to Devo.
* Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book 'The Naked Lunch'.

[kniever]

lmao did you sit there and type all that or copy and paste?

[ari666]

* Race car is a palindrome.

ummm, racecar is, race car isnt.

didnt bother reading the rest, the fail was too early.

[madnuts]

copy and paste

[Rusty]

ummm, racecar is, race car isnt.

didnt bother reading the rest, the fail was too early.

Failed even earlier!

* The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S (U.S.)???

[FstStig]

When I have nothing better to do with my life, i might read this! FAIL!

[jonesy-88]

ummm, racecar is, race car isnt.

didnt bother reading the rest, the fail was too early.

racecar is racecar spelt backwards and forwards.

[naf33n]

racecar is racecar spelt backwards and forwards.

thats what he said, but 'race car' is 'rac ecar' as it was typed in the first post,
looking into this way too much

[STEEV888]

wayyy too much reading.. got to the eagles one..