Useless Facts: A collection of stuff you don't need to know, but which will allow you to bore your friends for hours
While both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa's reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen - had to be a girl. We should've known. Only women would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night and not get lost.
Why does Santa wear red underwear? Cos he's a bloke - he did all his laundry in one load.
Laid head to claw, all the KFC chickens consumed worldwide would stretch some 275,000 miles. They would circle the Earth at the equator 11 times.
American trapper and biologist Clarence Birdseye was in the Canadian wilds in 1912 when he noticed that frozen fish and caribou meat tasted pretty good when defrosted. He came up with a quick-freeze system and started his company in 1924. Sixteen years later Birds Eye was launched in the UK. Its most popular product continues to be frozen peas.
Heinz first started making ketchup in 1876. The recipe has apparently remained the same ever since.
Traditionally, there are just 18 letters in the Irish alphabet (abcdefghilmnoprstu). So you're in fierce trouble if your name is something like "Jykx Zwvzq", the Serbo-Croat equivalent of "John Smith".
What's the most expensive meal on the planet? The food that LEAVES the planet. Believe it or not, it costs about 24,000 euro (£15,000) to put one kilogram of astronauts' food into space.
The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about four days. Oh oops, that's Coke the fizzy drink, which has absolutely nothing to do with coke the addictive drug of course, and we apologise to the Coke corporation for that bit slipping in here.
Sigmund Freud wrote a song in praise of cocaine.
Is coke addictive? In one scientific study, monkeys were given a choice of food or cocaine. The monkeys died of starvation.
Have you read the Penguin Book of Quotations? How were we to know that penguins had that much to say?
Gin is spirit alcohol flavoured from juniper berries. The Dutch called it "junever", the French called it "genievre", and the English changed it to "geneva" and then modified to gin.
Put a T-bone steak in a bowl of coke and it'll be gone in two days.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once said: "The main difference for the history of the world, if I had been shot rather than Kennedy, is that Onassis probably wouldn't have married Mrs Khrushchev."
Corrupt MP and writer Jeffrey Archer was once a deckchair attendant, Sylvester Stallone was once a lion cage cleaner, Cyndi Lauper used to clean out dog kennels, and Mick Jagger was once a porter in a mental hospital.
Some asteroids also have other asteroids orbiting them.
The Hughes family had a dairy farm in Rathfarnham in Dublin in the early 1900s with 200 cows. The Hughes Brothers (so that's where the initials HB came from) found they had too much cream and milk, so in 1926 they began making ice cream.
Apparently an MIT student spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and down the field for 10 or 15 minutes throwing birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off the field. At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football team, the ref walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half hour while they got the birds to get off of the field. The bloke wrote his thesis on this, and graduated. True story.
Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people. And "hello" in the most widely spoken language on the planet is "Ni hao" (Nee HaOW). Tip: pronounce "hao" as one syllable, but let your voice drop midway, then raise it again at the end.
Number of "functionally illiterate" people in Britain according to the OECD: 7 million
It takes approximately 42 coffee beans to make an espresso.
Malcolm X's real name wasn't Malcolm the Tenth. It was Malcolm Little.
Scientists with high-speed cameras have apparently discovered that raindrops are not tear shaped after all, but look more like hamburger buns.
Thanks to Gary Larson for this one: "Unbeknownst to most historians, Einstein was a brilliant basketball player before an ankle injury diverted him into science."
Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 am and 9 am.
Sainsburys in the UK sells almost 1 million jars of lemon curd and (a more recent addition) orange curd a year.
An elephant in the wild can eat anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pounds of vegetation in a 16-hour period. Apart from that, elephants can't jump.
Queen Elizabeth and the royal family cost each British taxpayer 58p a year. Last year they cost £35.5 million.
Scientists have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same nice reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but they can't remember what they are.
"Hello" in Russian is "Zdravstvuite" (ZDRAST-vet-yah).
In our "Useful Phrases for Tourists Trespassing in Remote Jungles" department (or: How to say "Oh my God! There's an axe in my head" in various languages), in Russian it's "Bozhe moi! Eto topor v moyei golove!" Handy eh?
What's the difference between a Russian tragedy and a Russian comedy? In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies too. Only they die happy.
An average person's yearly fast-food intake will contain 12 pubic hairs.
During an hour's swim at a municipal swimming bath you will ingest an average of a twelfth of a litre of urine.
Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with over 500 billion cups consumed each year.
A hippo can remain underwater for as long as 25 minutes. However, they can't jump.
There are apparently more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in, um, Canadia.
270 million people in China share just three surnames - Li, Wang and Zhang account for 22.4% of the 1.3 billion population, and 87% of its population share only 100 surnames.
There are some 15.000 heroin users in Dublin (Dec.2004)
How often does a Tupperware demonstration happen somewhere in the world? Every 2.5 seconds.
Bananas are curved because they are not quite straight. Hmmm.
The Bible has been translated into Klingon.
Strawberries are not berries but nuts (cluster nuts).
What's the origin of the "Avon Lady"? American door-to-door book salesman David McConnell started giving away cologne to boost sales. Then he noticed the fragrances were in bigger demand thant the books. So in 1886 he set up the California Perfume Company, appointing women to sell door to door. They renamed the company Avon Products in 1939, and today it has over 3.5 million "reps" across the world.
Over 60% of the world's beer is brewed in the style pioneered in the small town of Pilsen in Bohemia in 1842.
Apparently the US has the highest minimum drinking age in the world. Could that be the reason why the US has the highst rate of prisoners per capita?
There's a French wine label called "Fat Bastard Chardonnay".
In Welsh, the word for beer is "cwrw" (pronounced something like "koo-roo").
Vintage port can take 40 years to reach maturity (slightly longer than your typical urban light rail system)
There are an estimated 49 million bubbles in a bottle of champagne. And a raisin dropped into a glass of champagne will repeatedly bounce up and down between the top and the bottom of the glass. Worth trying.
Beer was not sold in bottles until 1850. It wasn't sold in tinnies until 1935. And as late as the mid-17th century, French wine makers didn't use corks. Instead, they used oil-soaked rags stuffed into the necks of bottles. And the corkscrew was only invented in 1860.
In a properly poured pint of Guinness, how do the bubbles work their way down the glass instead of up? Scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia recently did some computer-simulated fluid dynamics research and found that the largest bubbles are in the centre - where they are hidden - and do rise. Only the smaller bubbles at the edges are pushed to the bottom of the glass.
Ohio state law prohibits getting a fish drunk. "Listen Mr Pike, you've had your limit." And in Fairbanks, Alaska, it's illegal to feed a moose any alcohol beverage. Proper order too.
The Manhattan cocktail (whiskey and sweet vermouth) was invented by Winston Churchill's mum.
In 1596 John Harrington penned an article named "Plan Plots of a Privy of Perfection". It was a bit of a piss-take, in more ways than one, but it described in detail his invention of the first flushing water closet. He built one too, for Queen Elizabeth, and called his device "Ajax" ("a jakes" or, yep, a jacks).
About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they're still sitting on it. OK, who studied this? And why?
The Pentagon has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had racist segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
US patent 6,329,919 is a business-method patent issued in December 2001 to four IBM developers for a system that issues reservations for using the toilet on an airplane.
A five-card poker game has 2,598,960 possible hands.
The Eiffel Tower weighs approximately 9,441 tons.
The longest place name in Britain is in Anglesey in North Wales:
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-Llantysilio-gogogoch".
It's now many years since the last train stopped at its station. But whenever one did, the porter would cry out "Anybody in there for here?" But here's a right clanger: that place (we won't say it again) was inadvertently moved to England in the official 2002 Commonwealth Games souvenir programme.
There are now more mobile phones in Taiwan than people. The ratio of phones to people is 100.7%. Some people carry separate handsets for communicating with different friends or business contacts.
Eighty percent of married men cheat in Norway. The rest cheat some other place around the world.
It's estimated that each year chemical companies produce enough acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin, to make about 90 billion tablets. If all those tablets were stacked on top of each other, they would make a very high stack.
How long is an average metal coat hanger when straightened? 44 inches
Some $31 million was mistakenly paid in social security payments to deceased people in the US in 2000. The amount in Norway was slightly higher.
Over 50 tons of rubbish have been left behind on Mount Everest by mountaineering expeditions
Great put-downs of our time: I don't believe in reincarnation, but what were you when you were alive?
Nobody knows what a kleptomaniac can I take for it?
"According to a recent report, Americans spend more money on pornography than they do on political campaigns. Last year they spent $11 billion on pornography and only $1.2 on politics. That was the great thing about Bill Clinton - with him you got both." - Jay Leno
In medieval times, between 200 and 300 sheepskins or calfskins were needed to produce enough parchment for a large bible.
The last two times Brazil won the World Cup before their victory in 2002 were in 1970 and 1994. Add them two numbers together and you get 3,964. The last times German teams won were in 1974 and 1990. Add them up and you also get 3,964. Coincidence or what? Argentina won in 1978 and 1986. That adds up to 3,964! But Brazil also won in 1962, which added to 2002 makes... 3,964! Blimey!
Earthworms can live for 15 years. They don't have lungs, but breathe through their skin.
It would take a competent barber 19,000 years without sleep or any break to shave the face of every man on the planet.
A fresh egg sinks in water, but a stale one doesn't.
In Japan it's considered rude to blow your nose in public.
The tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. It's also the world's most popular fruit, outselling bananas and oranges
The tomato which looks nice and tast like water you would reject, is a Dutch invention. Why people still buy them, nobody knows. Brandulph doesn't.
The computer mouse was introduced in 1981 on a Xerox computer. Douglas Englebart invented the mouse in 1963 and patented it in 1970
Pearls melt in vinegar. Probably in Coca Cola too.
Among the most prominent early Irish settlers in Argentina were the offspring of one Patrick Lynch from Galway. He settled in Buenos Aires in the 1740s, and his descendants included: Benito and Pastor Lynch (officers during the struggle for independence); the writers Benito and Alberto Benegas Lynch; Cabinet Ministers Matias Frers and Alberto Rodriguez Varela; and revolutionary Che Guevara.
Togo is the country with the world's lowest crime rate, with an average of just 11 reported crimes annually per 100,000 of the population.
There are 42 dots on a pair of dice.
The first official international soccer match was Scotland v England in 1872
In 2001 the average American spent five times as much on their pets as Sub-Saharan Africa received in aid per capita. About time they avail themselves as pets rather than subsaharans.
Singer-songwriter John Denver died when a small plane he was flying crashed at sea in 1997. His real name was Henry John Deuschendorf
The British royal family are actually Germans! Their surname was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but they dropped it in 1917 (a mere three years after the outbreak of WWI), in what modern marketing consultants would call "a rebranding exercise". King George V renounced all the German titles belonging to him and his family, and adopted the name of his castle, Windsor
The average office chair on wheels travels about eight miles per year
Not for the faint-hearted: during a kiss as many as 278 bacteria colonies are exchanged
When was the first e-mail sent? In 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson. It was just a test message to himself, in Massachusetts
The first Apple Macintosh computer went on sale in 1984, for $2,495 (about 2,900 €!)
Austria was the first country to use postcards
Why do whips make a cracking sound? Because the tip moves faster than the speed of sound (760 miles per hour)
The only English word that contains a triple letter is "goddessship"
What does Geronimo say when he jumps out of a plane?
"Emordnilap" is "palindrome" spelled backwards. Hence "pelidrome" is not a "pelidrome".
Socrates, one of the most famous Greek philosophers, never wrote down a single word of his teachings. The only knowledge we have of his thinking today comes from the notes taken by some lick-arse student of his called Plato.
A polar bear's stomach can hold 15 to 20% of its body weight. They can weigh well over 650kg and are at the top of the Arctic food chain, with no natural enemies. When they see you, they see a walking meal. So that's another good reason why they don't make great pets.
A hippo's lips are two feet long. Might be the reason why it can't jump.
A walking polar bear can cover a distance of 30 kilometres a day for several days at a time.
On average, 1,600 glasses of Baileys Irish cream are consumed worldwide every minute of every day.
Why isn't 11 pronounced onety one?
Between 1937 and 1945 Heinz produced a version of Alphabetti Spaghetti specially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas. Allegedly.
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache.
The bit under your nose is called your "feltrum". "Yez are very snotty Jacinta, clean yer feltrum." "Frenulum breve" is under the tip of your pecker.
Rats reproduce so quickly that in 18 months two of them could have over a million descendants
Australia's "paper" currency is made from plastic. They say the special polymer is virtually uncounterfeitable and can be recycled.
The most common cause of death among cowboys in the American Wild West in the 1850s-80s wasn't being shot. Or marijuana either. It was being dragged by a horse while caught in the stirrups.
We're fed up with all those anti dyslexic jokes. In fact, isn't it cruel that "dyslexia" itself is such a hard word to spell? A dyslexic will often write the letters in a word in the wrong order. So, if he or she wants to write about his dyslexia, it might come out as "Ever since I was a child I've had daily sex."
How do they get the deer to cross at that "Deer crossing" road sign?
Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
The winning design for the euro notes (all them windows and bridges) had to be touched up, cos one of the bridges was discovered to be in India. Which isn't in the EU. (Yet).
The new euro notes are smelly, and "Euros" in Greek means urine. They originally wanted to call the euro the "eurofranc", "euromark", "eurolira" etc. But somebody objected and they dropped that idea in 1995. Then the French wanted to call the euro "le ecu", but the Germans objected. They said it sounded too much like their word for cow (Die Kuh).
They've done tests on the Belgian euro coins, and because they're asymmetrical, heads come up far more often. Belgian football will never be the same again.
If you smoke a packet of 20 cigarettes per day for five years, at £4.04 a packet (current Irish prices) you'd spend £7,373. On a gross wage of £20,000, this is roughly equivalent to working half a year just for the fag money. Plus more than a day (£91.25 net) for the matches. That's it - we're giving up.
The average cost per animal of rehabilitating the seals after the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of these expensively saved animals were released back into the wild, amid the onlookers' cheers and applause. Imagine the scene just a minute later, when the cheering stopped and the crowd watched - while both seals were gobbled up by a killer whale.
How come safety was never a big thing when we were growing up? In fact, a seatbelt was just something that got in the way: "Ma, the seat belt is digging into me back." "Arra go on an' stuff it down into the seat. And roll those windows up, you're letting the smoke out."
In Turkish, the word for cannibal is "yam yam," pronounced "yum yum". Apparently.
In Wien they like to eat Frankfurters. In Frankfurt, they eat the same thing, only they call them Wieners.
On his deathbed, Stan Laurel said: "I wish I was skiing." His nurse said: "But you don't ski, Mr Laurel." Stan replies: "I know, but I would still rather be skiing than doing this."
"Put it back in the horse!" were the words of H. Allen Smith, an early 20th century humorist, after drinking his first American beer at a bar.
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
Someone told us in the pub at the weekend that ducks can't fart, and if you feed them baking soda that they'd explode from the pressure. Is it true? Does that make ducks and beans an offensive weapon?
There is no other word for synonym?
Duck-billed platypuses have nipples all over their bodies.
Worms have five "hearts".
It takes about nine minutes for a snowflake to fall to Earth from a height of 1,000 feet.
Fresh apples float because 25% of their volume is air.
Tina Turner's real name is Annie Mae Bullock. Wonder if she's related to Sandra.
Elephants can smell water up to three miles away. Brandulph can smell a pint 30 meters away.
The food parcels being dropped in Afghanistan in October 2001 each weighed 900 grams (2lb). The bright yellow packages had wings and were designed to "flutter". At least a dozen Kurdish refugees were killed in the early 1990s when the Americans dropped food aid.
Scientists at Oxford University estimate that people who eat fresh fruit daily had 24% fewer heart attacks and 32% fewer strokes.
There are more sheep than people in Ireland. The total breeding numbers were 4.12 million in the Republic in mid 2001.
You're just as likely to die by falling out of bed then you are to get struck by lightning; each is a 1 in 2,000,000 chance. You have a 1 in 3,000,000 chance of being killed by a snake.
QEII cruise liner move six inches per gallon of fuel that it burns?
There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
Experts estimate that there are around 10 million landmines scattered across Afghanistan, most of them dating from the Soviet occupation.
How come you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?
Killer whales aren't whales. They are actually dolphins, who generally prey on seals.
The active ingredients in marijuana are fat and alcohol soluble, and when filtered through such substances the active ingredients go into solution, maaaan.
The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000 million tons. Approximately. On Earth that is.
The "Weight Watchers" organisation's answering machine was hacked once, and a new message was inserted which said "Hello, you fat bast*rd!"
What sweet was originally named "Fat Emma" but didn't take off until it was relaunched with a different name? Milky Ways.
A housefly can transport germs 15 miles away from the original source of contamination.
Fingerprints were used for the the first time to solve a criminal case in Argentina in 1892.
Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former US Vice-President Al Gore were roommates at Harvard.
The Earth moves in its 585-million-mile orbit around the Sun about eight times faster than a bullet travels.
When a shrimp is first born, it is male, and it gradually evolves to female as it matures.
With an estimated population of 40 million, there are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia.
When it first appeared on the market in 1886, Coca Cola was billed as an "esteemed brain tonic and intellectual beverage".
The average square inch of skin holds 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels, 60,000 melanocytes (pigment cells), and more than 1,000 nerve endings.
The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury. Parker Brothers prints about 50 billion dollars worth of Monopoly money in one year
The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters. How interesting.
City with the most Rolls Royces per capita: Hong Kong.
State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska.
Only twentyeight percent of Africa is wilderness, while 38% of North America is.
Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33 and she would be 7 feet 2 inches tall.
Cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400
Average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000.
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair. Does that make bald people stupid?
The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
The youngest pope was 11 years old. FTP!
First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
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.
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 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.
The Eisenhower interstate highway system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil.
40% of all people who come to a party snoop in your medicine cabinet.
An apple, onion, and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavor are caused by their smell. To prove this you can pinch your nose and take a bite from each. They will all taste sweet.
The estimated number of M & M's sold each day in the United States is 200.000.000.
Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave. Eggs too! :-)
A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.
Domestic cats hate lemons or other citrus scents.
Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath at least once a year.
203 million dollars is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.
No word in the English language rhymes with "month".
The letter J does not appear anywhere in the periodic table of elements.
In Canada, if a debt is higher than 25 cents, it is illegal to pay it with pennies.
Impotence is grounds for divorce in 24 states in the United States.
Federal law forbids recycling used eyeglasses in the United States
If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in U.S. coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
If you are hedenophobic, you have a fear of pleasure. Sure?
"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom more often.
The longest word that can be typed solely with the left hand is stewardess.
"Bookkeeper" is the only one word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters.
Cleveland spelled backwards is "DNA level C."
The # symbols is often referred to as a "number sign" or "pound sign." Its actual name is an octothorpe.
The letters in the abbreviation e.g. stand for exempli gratia - a Latin term meaning "for example."
Women blink nearly twice as much as men do.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet!
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable"!
A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off - it dies from starvation.
The state of Florida is bigger than England!
Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes. (Airline propaganda?)
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.
The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin. Hence, try to avoid inviting people you don't like
The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that
order.
It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second was William Jefferson Clinton.
Turtles can breathe through their butts. (I've met people who also seem to manage that.)
Butterflies taste with their feet.
In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of the world's nuclear weapons combined.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow. (It didn't work, did it?)
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
·All polar bears
While both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa's reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen - had to be a girl. We should've known. Only women would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night and not get lost.
Why does Santa wear red underwear? Cos he's a bloke - he did all his laundry in one load.
Laid head to claw, all the KFC chickens consumed worldwide would stretch some 275,000 miles. They would circle the Earth at the equator 11 times.
American trapper and biologist Clarence Birdseye was in the Canadian wilds in 1912 when he noticed that frozen fish and caribou meat tasted pretty good when defrosted. He came up with a quick-freeze system and started his company in 1924. Sixteen years later Birds Eye was launched in the UK. Its most popular product continues to be frozen peas.
Heinz first started making ketchup in 1876. The recipe has apparently remained the same ever since.
Traditionally, there are just 18 letters in the Irish alphabet (abcdefghilmnoprstu). So you're in fierce trouble if your name is something like "Jykx Zwvzq", the Serbo-Croat equivalent of "John Smith".
What's the most expensive meal on the planet? The food that LEAVES the planet. Believe it or not, it costs about 24,000 euro (£15,000) to put one kilogram of astronauts' food into space.
The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about four days. Oh oops, that's Coke the fizzy drink, which has absolutely nothing to do with coke the addictive drug of course, and we apologise to the Coke corporation for that bit slipping in here.
Sigmund Freud wrote a song in praise of cocaine.
Is coke addictive? In one scientific study, monkeys were given a choice of food or cocaine. The monkeys died of starvation.
Have you read the Penguin Book of Quotations? How were we to know that penguins had that much to say?
Gin is spirit alcohol flavoured from juniper berries. The Dutch called it "junever", the French called it "genievre", and the English changed it to "geneva" and then modified to gin.
Put a T-bone steak in a bowl of coke and it'll be gone in two days.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once said: "The main difference for the history of the world, if I had been shot rather than Kennedy, is that Onassis probably wouldn't have married Mrs Khrushchev."
Corrupt MP and writer Jeffrey Archer was once a deckchair attendant, Sylvester Stallone was once a lion cage cleaner, Cyndi Lauper used to clean out dog kennels, and Mick Jagger was once a porter in a mental hospital.
Some asteroids also have other asteroids orbiting them.
The Hughes family had a dairy farm in Rathfarnham in Dublin in the early 1900s with 200 cows. The Hughes Brothers (so that's where the initials HB came from) found they had too much cream and milk, so in 1926 they began making ice cream.
Apparently an MIT student spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and down the field for 10 or 15 minutes throwing birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off the field. At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football team, the ref walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half hour while they got the birds to get off of the field. The bloke wrote his thesis on this, and graduated. True story.
Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people. And "hello" in the most widely spoken language on the planet is "Ni hao" (Nee HaOW). Tip: pronounce "hao" as one syllable, but let your voice drop midway, then raise it again at the end.
Number of "functionally illiterate" people in Britain according to the OECD: 7 million
It takes approximately 42 coffee beans to make an espresso.
Malcolm X's real name wasn't Malcolm the Tenth. It was Malcolm Little.
Scientists with high-speed cameras have apparently discovered that raindrops are not tear shaped after all, but look more like hamburger buns.
Thanks to Gary Larson for this one: "Unbeknownst to most historians, Einstein was a brilliant basketball player before an ankle injury diverted him into science."
Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 am and 9 am.
Sainsburys in the UK sells almost 1 million jars of lemon curd and (a more recent addition) orange curd a year.
An elephant in the wild can eat anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pounds of vegetation in a 16-hour period. Apart from that, elephants can't jump.
Queen Elizabeth and the royal family cost each British taxpayer 58p a year. Last year they cost £35.5 million.
Scientists have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same nice reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but they can't remember what they are.
"Hello" in Russian is "Zdravstvuite" (ZDRAST-vet-yah).
In our "Useful Phrases for Tourists Trespassing in Remote Jungles" department (or: How to say "Oh my God! There's an axe in my head" in various languages), in Russian it's "Bozhe moi! Eto topor v moyei golove!" Handy eh?
What's the difference between a Russian tragedy and a Russian comedy? In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies too. Only they die happy.
An average person's yearly fast-food intake will contain 12 pubic hairs.
During an hour's swim at a municipal swimming bath you will ingest an average of a twelfth of a litre of urine.
Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with over 500 billion cups consumed each year.
A hippo can remain underwater for as long as 25 minutes. However, they can't jump.
There are apparently more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in, um, Canadia.
270 million people in China share just three surnames - Li, Wang and Zhang account for 22.4% of the 1.3 billion population, and 87% of its population share only 100 surnames.
There are some 15.000 heroin users in Dublin (Dec.2004)
How often does a Tupperware demonstration happen somewhere in the world? Every 2.5 seconds.
Bananas are curved because they are not quite straight. Hmmm.
The Bible has been translated into Klingon.
Strawberries are not berries but nuts (cluster nuts).
What's the origin of the "Avon Lady"? American door-to-door book salesman David McConnell started giving away cologne to boost sales. Then he noticed the fragrances were in bigger demand thant the books. So in 1886 he set up the California Perfume Company, appointing women to sell door to door. They renamed the company Avon Products in 1939, and today it has over 3.5 million "reps" across the world.
Over 60% of the world's beer is brewed in the style pioneered in the small town of Pilsen in Bohemia in 1842.
Apparently the US has the highest minimum drinking age in the world. Could that be the reason why the US has the highst rate of prisoners per capita?
There's a French wine label called "Fat Bastard Chardonnay".
In Welsh, the word for beer is "cwrw" (pronounced something like "koo-roo").
Vintage port can take 40 years to reach maturity (slightly longer than your typical urban light rail system)
There are an estimated 49 million bubbles in a bottle of champagne. And a raisin dropped into a glass of champagne will repeatedly bounce up and down between the top and the bottom of the glass. Worth trying.
Beer was not sold in bottles until 1850. It wasn't sold in tinnies until 1935. And as late as the mid-17th century, French wine makers didn't use corks. Instead, they used oil-soaked rags stuffed into the necks of bottles. And the corkscrew was only invented in 1860.
In a properly poured pint of Guinness, how do the bubbles work their way down the glass instead of up? Scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia recently did some computer-simulated fluid dynamics research and found that the largest bubbles are in the centre - where they are hidden - and do rise. Only the smaller bubbles at the edges are pushed to the bottom of the glass.
Ohio state law prohibits getting a fish drunk. "Listen Mr Pike, you've had your limit." And in Fairbanks, Alaska, it's illegal to feed a moose any alcohol beverage. Proper order too.
The Manhattan cocktail (whiskey and sweet vermouth) was invented by Winston Churchill's mum.
In 1596 John Harrington penned an article named "Plan Plots of a Privy of Perfection". It was a bit of a piss-take, in more ways than one, but it described in detail his invention of the first flushing water closet. He built one too, for Queen Elizabeth, and called his device "Ajax" ("a jakes" or, yep, a jacks).
About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they're still sitting on it. OK, who studied this? And why?
The Pentagon has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had racist segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.
US patent 6,329,919 is a business-method patent issued in December 2001 to four IBM developers for a system that issues reservations for using the toilet on an airplane.
A five-card poker game has 2,598,960 possible hands.
The Eiffel Tower weighs approximately 9,441 tons.
The longest place name in Britain is in Anglesey in North Wales:
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-Llantysilio-gogogoch".
It's now many years since the last train stopped at its station. But whenever one did, the porter would cry out "Anybody in there for here?" But here's a right clanger: that place (we won't say it again) was inadvertently moved to England in the official 2002 Commonwealth Games souvenir programme.
There are now more mobile phones in Taiwan than people. The ratio of phones to people is 100.7%. Some people carry separate handsets for communicating with different friends or business contacts.
Eighty percent of married men cheat in Norway. The rest cheat some other place around the world.
It's estimated that each year chemical companies produce enough acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin, to make about 90 billion tablets. If all those tablets were stacked on top of each other, they would make a very high stack.
How long is an average metal coat hanger when straightened? 44 inches
Some $31 million was mistakenly paid in social security payments to deceased people in the US in 2000. The amount in Norway was slightly higher.
Over 50 tons of rubbish have been left behind on Mount Everest by mountaineering expeditions
Great put-downs of our time: I don't believe in reincarnation, but what were you when you were alive?
Nobody knows what a kleptomaniac can I take for it?
"According to a recent report, Americans spend more money on pornography than they do on political campaigns. Last year they spent $11 billion on pornography and only $1.2 on politics. That was the great thing about Bill Clinton - with him you got both." - Jay Leno
In medieval times, between 200 and 300 sheepskins or calfskins were needed to produce enough parchment for a large bible.
The last two times Brazil won the World Cup before their victory in 2002 were in 1970 and 1994. Add them two numbers together and you get 3,964. The last times German teams won were in 1974 and 1990. Add them up and you also get 3,964. Coincidence or what? Argentina won in 1978 and 1986. That adds up to 3,964! But Brazil also won in 1962, which added to 2002 makes... 3,964! Blimey!
Earthworms can live for 15 years. They don't have lungs, but breathe through their skin.
It would take a competent barber 19,000 years without sleep or any break to shave the face of every man on the planet.
A fresh egg sinks in water, but a stale one doesn't.
In Japan it's considered rude to blow your nose in public.
The tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. It's also the world's most popular fruit, outselling bananas and oranges
The tomato which looks nice and tast like water you would reject, is a Dutch invention. Why people still buy them, nobody knows. Brandulph doesn't.
The computer mouse was introduced in 1981 on a Xerox computer. Douglas Englebart invented the mouse in 1963 and patented it in 1970
Pearls melt in vinegar. Probably in Coca Cola too.
Among the most prominent early Irish settlers in Argentina were the offspring of one Patrick Lynch from Galway. He settled in Buenos Aires in the 1740s, and his descendants included: Benito and Pastor Lynch (officers during the struggle for independence); the writers Benito and Alberto Benegas Lynch; Cabinet Ministers Matias Frers and Alberto Rodriguez Varela; and revolutionary Che Guevara.
Togo is the country with the world's lowest crime rate, with an average of just 11 reported crimes annually per 100,000 of the population.
There are 42 dots on a pair of dice.
The first official international soccer match was Scotland v England in 1872
In 2001 the average American spent five times as much on their pets as Sub-Saharan Africa received in aid per capita. About time they avail themselves as pets rather than subsaharans.
Singer-songwriter John Denver died when a small plane he was flying crashed at sea in 1997. His real name was Henry John Deuschendorf
The British royal family are actually Germans! Their surname was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but they dropped it in 1917 (a mere three years after the outbreak of WWI), in what modern marketing consultants would call "a rebranding exercise". King George V renounced all the German titles belonging to him and his family, and adopted the name of his castle, Windsor
The average office chair on wheels travels about eight miles per year
Not for the faint-hearted: during a kiss as many as 278 bacteria colonies are exchanged
When was the first e-mail sent? In 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson. It was just a test message to himself, in Massachusetts
The first Apple Macintosh computer went on sale in 1984, for $2,495 (about 2,900 €!)
Austria was the first country to use postcards
Why do whips make a cracking sound? Because the tip moves faster than the speed of sound (760 miles per hour)
The only English word that contains a triple letter is "goddessship"
What does Geronimo say when he jumps out of a plane?
"Emordnilap" is "palindrome" spelled backwards. Hence "pelidrome" is not a "pelidrome".
Socrates, one of the most famous Greek philosophers, never wrote down a single word of his teachings. The only knowledge we have of his thinking today comes from the notes taken by some lick-arse student of his called Plato.
A polar bear's stomach can hold 15 to 20% of its body weight. They can weigh well over 650kg and are at the top of the Arctic food chain, with no natural enemies. When they see you, they see a walking meal. So that's another good reason why they don't make great pets.
A hippo's lips are two feet long. Might be the reason why it can't jump.
A walking polar bear can cover a distance of 30 kilometres a day for several days at a time.
On average, 1,600 glasses of Baileys Irish cream are consumed worldwide every minute of every day.
Why isn't 11 pronounced onety one?
Between 1937 and 1945 Heinz produced a version of Alphabetti Spaghetti specially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas. Allegedly.
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache.
The bit under your nose is called your "feltrum". "Yez are very snotty Jacinta, clean yer feltrum." "Frenulum breve" is under the tip of your pecker.
Rats reproduce so quickly that in 18 months two of them could have over a million descendants
Australia's "paper" currency is made from plastic. They say the special polymer is virtually uncounterfeitable and can be recycled.
The most common cause of death among cowboys in the American Wild West in the 1850s-80s wasn't being shot. Or marijuana either. It was being dragged by a horse while caught in the stirrups.
We're fed up with all those anti dyslexic jokes. In fact, isn't it cruel that "dyslexia" itself is such a hard word to spell? A dyslexic will often write the letters in a word in the wrong order. So, if he or she wants to write about his dyslexia, it might come out as "Ever since I was a child I've had daily sex."
How do they get the deer to cross at that "Deer crossing" road sign?
Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
The winning design for the euro notes (all them windows and bridges) had to be touched up, cos one of the bridges was discovered to be in India. Which isn't in the EU. (Yet).
The new euro notes are smelly, and "Euros" in Greek means urine. They originally wanted to call the euro the "eurofranc", "euromark", "eurolira" etc. But somebody objected and they dropped that idea in 1995. Then the French wanted to call the euro "le ecu", but the Germans objected. They said it sounded too much like their word for cow (Die Kuh).
They've done tests on the Belgian euro coins, and because they're asymmetrical, heads come up far more often. Belgian football will never be the same again.
If you smoke a packet of 20 cigarettes per day for five years, at £4.04 a packet (current Irish prices) you'd spend £7,373. On a gross wage of £20,000, this is roughly equivalent to working half a year just for the fag money. Plus more than a day (£91.25 net) for the matches. That's it - we're giving up.
The average cost per animal of rehabilitating the seals after the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of these expensively saved animals were released back into the wild, amid the onlookers' cheers and applause. Imagine the scene just a minute later, when the cheering stopped and the crowd watched - while both seals were gobbled up by a killer whale.
How come safety was never a big thing when we were growing up? In fact, a seatbelt was just something that got in the way: "Ma, the seat belt is digging into me back." "Arra go on an' stuff it down into the seat. And roll those windows up, you're letting the smoke out."
In Turkish, the word for cannibal is "yam yam," pronounced "yum yum". Apparently.
In Wien they like to eat Frankfurters. In Frankfurt, they eat the same thing, only they call them Wieners.
On his deathbed, Stan Laurel said: "I wish I was skiing." His nurse said: "But you don't ski, Mr Laurel." Stan replies: "I know, but I would still rather be skiing than doing this."
"Put it back in the horse!" were the words of H. Allen Smith, an early 20th century humorist, after drinking his first American beer at a bar.
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
Someone told us in the pub at the weekend that ducks can't fart, and if you feed them baking soda that they'd explode from the pressure. Is it true? Does that make ducks and beans an offensive weapon?
There is no other word for synonym?
Duck-billed platypuses have nipples all over their bodies.
Worms have five "hearts".
It takes about nine minutes for a snowflake to fall to Earth from a height of 1,000 feet.
Fresh apples float because 25% of their volume is air.
Tina Turner's real name is Annie Mae Bullock. Wonder if she's related to Sandra.
Elephants can smell water up to three miles away. Brandulph can smell a pint 30 meters away.
The food parcels being dropped in Afghanistan in October 2001 each weighed 900 grams (2lb). The bright yellow packages had wings and were designed to "flutter". At least a dozen Kurdish refugees were killed in the early 1990s when the Americans dropped food aid.
Scientists at Oxford University estimate that people who eat fresh fruit daily had 24% fewer heart attacks and 32% fewer strokes.
There are more sheep than people in Ireland. The total breeding numbers were 4.12 million in the Republic in mid 2001.
You're just as likely to die by falling out of bed then you are to get struck by lightning; each is a 1 in 2,000,000 chance. You have a 1 in 3,000,000 chance of being killed by a snake.
QEII cruise liner move six inches per gallon of fuel that it burns?
There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
Experts estimate that there are around 10 million landmines scattered across Afghanistan, most of them dating from the Soviet occupation.
How come you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?
Killer whales aren't whales. They are actually dolphins, who generally prey on seals.
The active ingredients in marijuana are fat and alcohol soluble, and when filtered through such substances the active ingredients go into solution, maaaan.
The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000 million tons. Approximately. On Earth that is.
The "Weight Watchers" organisation's answering machine was hacked once, and a new message was inserted which said "Hello, you fat bast*rd!"
What sweet was originally named "Fat Emma" but didn't take off until it was relaunched with a different name? Milky Ways.
A housefly can transport germs 15 miles away from the original source of contamination.
Fingerprints were used for the the first time to solve a criminal case in Argentina in 1892.
Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former US Vice-President Al Gore were roommates at Harvard.
The Earth moves in its 585-million-mile orbit around the Sun about eight times faster than a bullet travels.
When a shrimp is first born, it is male, and it gradually evolves to female as it matures.
With an estimated population of 40 million, there are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia.
When it first appeared on the market in 1886, Coca Cola was billed as an "esteemed brain tonic and intellectual beverage".
The average square inch of skin holds 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels, 60,000 melanocytes (pigment cells), and more than 1,000 nerve endings.
The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury. Parker Brothers prints about 50 billion dollars worth of Monopoly money in one year
The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters. How interesting.
City with the most Rolls Royces per capita: Hong Kong.
State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska.
Only twentyeight percent of Africa is wilderness, while 38% of North America is.
Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33 and she would be 7 feet 2 inches tall.
Cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400
Average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000.
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair. Does that make bald people stupid?
The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
The youngest pope was 11 years old. FTP!
First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
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.
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 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.
The Eisenhower interstate highway system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil.
40% of all people who come to a party snoop in your medicine cabinet.
An apple, onion, and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavor are caused by their smell. To prove this you can pinch your nose and take a bite from each. They will all taste sweet.
The estimated number of M & M's sold each day in the United States is 200.000.000.
Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave. Eggs too! :-)
A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.
Domestic cats hate lemons or other citrus scents.
Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath at least once a year.
203 million dollars is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.
No word in the English language rhymes with "month".
The letter J does not appear anywhere in the periodic table of elements.
In Canada, if a debt is higher than 25 cents, it is illegal to pay it with pennies.
Impotence is grounds for divorce in 24 states in the United States.
Federal law forbids recycling used eyeglasses in the United States
If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in U.S. coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
If you are hedenophobic, you have a fear of pleasure. Sure?
"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom more often.
The longest word that can be typed solely with the left hand is stewardess.
"Bookkeeper" is the only one word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters.
Cleveland spelled backwards is "DNA level C."
The # symbols is often referred to as a "number sign" or "pound sign." Its actual name is an octothorpe.
The letters in the abbreviation e.g. stand for exempli gratia - a Latin term meaning "for example."
Women blink nearly twice as much as men do.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet!
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable"!
A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off - it dies from starvation.
The state of Florida is bigger than England!
Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes. (Airline propaganda?)
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.
The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin. Hence, try to avoid inviting people you don't like
The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that
order.
It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second was William Jefferson Clinton.
Turtles can breathe through their butts. (I've met people who also seem to manage that.)
Butterflies taste with their feet.
In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of the world's nuclear weapons combined.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow. (It didn't work, did it?)
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
·All polar bears
