Interesting and True
- 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 glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
- The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
- A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
- If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the
horizon will be about three statute miles away.
- The longest word in the English language, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, is
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word
with the same amount of letters is
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.
- Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are
the largest anagrams.
- Los Angeles' full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina
de los Angeles de Porciuncula."
- Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
- An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
- Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots
- The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the
1968 Jane Fonda movie "Barbarella.
- 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 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.
- Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture
dealer.
- 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 very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World
War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
- Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty
Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
- A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
- 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
- The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses
II who fathered over 160 children.
- If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, they need
gravity to swallow.
- Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are
registered blood donors.
- The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after
Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A
Wonderful Life"
- It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw
up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling
out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of
the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down
again.
- Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when
they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern
military salute.
- White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (Formerly
of the Monkees)
- Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an
Oscar with "Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six
minutes.
- Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his
famous transatlantic flight.
- Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only
write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.
- 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.
- Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only
used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy.
The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was
mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about
the wreck.
- In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to
speak.
- Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If
captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map
for escape.
- The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.
- Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing
the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it
float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated,
and it has floated ever since.
- Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a
building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a
cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about
eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and
correct itself.
- The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off
a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used
in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid
formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold
outside they would crack and break off... Thus the saying.
- Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks
otherwise it will digest itself.
- The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
- A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in
the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are
actually talking.
- 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.
- 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney
cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die
throughout the movie.
- 'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the
left hand.
- The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover
Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.
- A whale's penis is called a dork.
- Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all
the same sex.
- Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get
leprosy.
- To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into
its eyeballs - it will let you go instantly.
- Reindeer like to eat bananas.
- A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
- Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink."
- A group of frogs is called an army.
- A group of rhinos is called a crash.
- A group of kangaroos is called a mob.
- A group of whales is called a pod.
- A group of geese is called a gaggle.
- A group of ravens is called a murder.
- A group of officers is called a mess.
- A group of larks is called an exaltation.
- A group of owls is called a parliament.
- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the sub-atomic particles known
as quarks for a random line in James Joyce, "Three quarks for Muster
Mark!"
- Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a
calorie.
- The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early
mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched
across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
- "Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came
about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed
three dogs (dingos, actually) to keep from freezing.