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Useless
Facts
A rat can last
longer without water than a camel.
Your stomach has
to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks,
otherwise it will digest itself.
A raisin dropped
in a fresh glass of soda will bounce up and down
continually from the bottom of the glass to the
top.
The dot over the
letter 'i' is called a tittle.
A female ferret
will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a
mate.
40% of McDonald's
profits come from the sales of Happy
Meals.
Every person has
a unique tongue print.
The 'spot' on 7UP
comes from its inventor who had red eyes. He was an
albino.
315 entries in
Webster's 1996 Dictionary were
misspelled.
During the
chariot scene in 'Ben Hur' a small red car can be
seen in the distance.
On average, 12
newborns will be given to the wrong parents
daily.
John Wilkes
Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham
Lincoln's son. Irony.
Warren Beatty and
Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.
Chocolate kills
dogs! Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous
system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small
sized dog.
Daniel Boone
detested coonskin caps.
Playing cards
were issued to British pilots in WWII. If they were
captured, the cards could be soaked in water and
unfolded to reveal a map for escape.
Most lipstick
contains fish scales. Yum.
Dr. Seuss
actually pronounced Seuss such that it sounded like
Sue-ice.
Ketchup was sold
in the 1830s as medicine.
Leonardo da Vinci
could write with one hand and draw with the other
at the same time.
During the
California Gold Rush of 1849 miners sent their
laundry to Honolulu for washing and pressing. Due
to the high costs in California during these years
it was deemed more feasible to send the shirts to
Hawaii for servicing.
American Airlines
saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from
each salad served in first class.
The number of
possible ways of playing the first four moves per
side in a game of chess is
318,979,564,000.
Upper and lower
case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower', because
in the time when all original print had to be set
in individual letters, the 'upper case' letters
were stored in the case on top of the case that
stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters. The
proper term for upper case letters is "majuscule"
and for lower case it's "minuscule".
The printing
industry gives us other popular phrases, such as
"mind your 'p's and 'q's." The moveable block type
had the letters in reverse so they would read
correctly when imprinted on paper. Apprentices had
to remove the type from the pages and return the
blocks to their upper and lower cases. Each drawer
in the case held a different size of letters, and
each drawer was divided into compartments (called
sorts) for each letter. The letters 'p' and 'q'
could easily be mistaken, so the master printer
would advise their apprentices to mind their 'p's
and 'q's.
When the master
printer was building a page and discovered that a
particular sort was empty, he would get angry. Thus
the term "out of sorts".
The question mark
came from a monk habit of writing the Latin word
for question, quo, at the end of sentences. Over
time, the letters were written vertically to save
space and morphed into the ? we write today.
Similarly, the exclamation point came from the
Latin word "Lo", meaning something important that
should be heeded. (Lo and behold...)
Wellfleet,
Massachusetts has the only town clock in the world
that strikes ship's time. (Rings every half hour,
to a maximum of 8 rings at the end of each four
hour period.)
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