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Amazing-But-True Facts!
2007 Edition
(The following have all been verified as true as of 4/1/07.)
- More coins are swallowed by American children in six months than are produced by the treasury mint of Luxembourg in six years.
- The use of the word "Love" to denote zero in tennis comes from the 18th Century French custom requiring the losers of the match to grant sexual favors to the winners.
- The malicious introduction of urine into an experimental soft drink batch indirectly led to the creation of Diet Mountain Dew.
- The world's first toupees appeared in mid 16th-century France and were actually stapled to the skull.
- Two hundred years ago in what is now Turkmenistan, custom dictated that couples would consummated their marriages on mattresses stuffed with body hair collected from the bride's family.
- An average human burp provides the capacity to fill 1/64th of a regular-sized balloon.
- Sources very close to the Beatles have said that John Lennon was not actually murdered; he grew tired of being in the public eye and faked his death with the help of some NYPD officials and a fan who is being well compensated financially for his time in prison. Oddly enough, John eventually longed for the spotlight again and now plays in a Beatles tribute band in San Francisco.
- When Teddy Roosevelt charged San Juan Hill, he carried a pair of his wife's underwear in his pocket for good luck.
- Had all the people on earth at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time on October 11, 2002 held hands, it would have formed a line the exact distance from the earth to the moon.
- The name Pekoe, as a breed of tea, has its derivation in the Boer War, when British officers, devoid of proper equipment to make tea, would strain the leaves in their socks. It was considered an extremely unlucky day if the socks became too worn ("peek'd a toe") for use.
- Disgraced author James Frey once worked as a fact checker for the magazine, Highlights for Children.
- A study conducted by the Center for Emotional Studies at Hefner University found the emotional trauma of seeing your parents having sex is equivalent to the head trauma sustained in a 25-mile-per-hour vehicle crash.
- Had Kevin Bacon's mother accepted a marriage proposal offered by her high school sweetheart, the actor's name would have been Kevin Hamm.
- Oranges were originally called "greens" because their discoverer named them before they had ripened.
- While the Library of Congress does not have a copy of the King James version of the Bible in its collection, it does have The Joy of Sex in 37 different languages.
- Actor William Shatner delivers his lines in that signature stop-and-start manner due to a learning disability he has had since birth.
- The average ball point pen contains enough ink to draw a thin line from San Diego to Anaheim, California.
- Kevin Federline, the estranged husband of Britney Spears, is actually a Reserve Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff, and holds the rank of Detective in the narcotics division.
- Religious scholars say the Harry Potter series of novels is actually a thinly veiled retelling of the story of the life of Jesus Christ.
- The rate of "snap, crackle, pop" in Rice Crispies varies according to the type of milk it is placed in. Goat's milk results in no activity at all, while human breast milk increases the rate by as much as 50 percent.
- Among his tests for the best electric light bulb filament, Thomas Edison included a cotton thread submerged in horse urine.
- It was considered unladylike for 13th-century Iberian peninsula women to use a razor of any sort. To get around this, they spread a sugar coated substance over their legs which would cause humming birds to pull out each hair individually over a matter of hours.
- Blind chess players keep track of their games using special bells placed on each chess piece.
- Dark chocolate is known to contain 18 compounds that regulate the aging process, including an antidote from the four compounds it contains that dramatically accelerate human cell damage.
- The state of Kentucky has minerals in much of its groundwater that completely neutralize tooth-decay fighting additive fluoride.
- Mumbly Peg was used to determine the marching order of cadets at West Point until late into the 1840's when alphabetical order as used today was instituted.
- In certain Portuguese dialects, "La Quinta" translates to "The Cheese Whore."
- A credit card can be turned into a rudimentary compass by simply running a sewing needle through the center of the magnetic strip, then immersing it in liquid.
- Retail security tags can possibly emit low-level radiation if removed without using the manufacturer's deactivator.
- The expression "There's no business like show business!" was coined by an exuberant Mark Twain after seeing a performance of Joseph Pujol, the "fartiste" known as Le Petomane, at Paris' famous Moulin Rouge.
- The total cost of manufacturing a dollar bill, including labor, supplies and energy is now $1.37.
- To prepare for the food needs of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China's communist government displaced a city of 40,000 people to convert the land into cattle pasture.
- The Samurai swords made by renown blacksmith Suishinshi Masahide were so sharp that, if balance blade-down on a willow-tree plank, they would under their own weight cut through the wood at the rate of approximately a half-centimeter per day.
- Self-stick stamps were invented by the Post Office after employees developed addictions to licking the original type.
- Musician Barry White's first paid musical work was as a background bass vocalist on the The Beach Boys' album, Surfin' Safari.
- An autopsy performed on illusionist Harry Houdini revealed a complete set of hand-carved lockpicking tools concealed inside his various orifices.
- Walt Disney's The Love Bug was a whimsical fantasy loosely based on the 1937 Belgian Grand Prix, which was won by a stock Volkswagen Beetle. Disney omitted the embarrassing fact that the driver was Adolph Hitler's nephew.
- In the first hour after orgasm, the average woman's foot temperature can drop by as much as seven degrees.
- At the center of every Rubik's Cube lies a regular six-sided die. In the place of the "six" side is a small imprint of Hungarian inventor Erno Rubik's wife, Helena.
- Absorption of caffeine through the gills made fish so hyper-alert that 92% of New England fishermen lost their livelihoods in the two years following the Boston Tea Party.
- Some "male enhancement" herbal products sold on the Internet give the appearance of effectiveness because they actually shrink the size of a man's testicles.
- The rhesus monkey does nearly as well on standardized tests as third graders in Omaha.
- Certain breeds of goats in the Zambezi floodplains of Zimbabwe can be trained in kicking techniques found in martial arts such as kung fu and judo. Such trained goats have been able to successfully defend themselves from ravenous lions.
- The Reverend Fred Phelps, controversial founder of GodHatesFags.com, was a dancer in the original traveling national production of Jesus Christ, Superstar.
- Oddly enough, the name Sanjaya is Sanskrit for "off-key."
- There are three "sweet spots" on the globe which if hit by lightning simultaneously would create a on-going fire too large to be put out by man. Each area is protected by a minimum of 75 lightning rods and four fire teams, even though the odds of simultaneous strikes is well over 251,208,629 (to the trillionth power) to one.
- Many modern sex toys have microprocessor chips with more computing capability than the Sputnik satellite had.
- Due to the large attendance, number of races and all the gas-guzzling vehicles involved, US economists estimate that canceling NASCAR would drop gasoline prices by $0.40 per gallon, but could possibly lead to a depression.
- There are now more macro-generated characters in the virtual world of Second Life than the population of the United States and China combined.
- The color chartreuse was named by painter Claude Monet after his mistress.
- An M&M dropped from the top of the Sears Tower travels faster than one dropped from the Empire State Building, due to meteorological factors slightly altering the aerodynamics of the candy shell.
- Due to a rare enzyme it contains, camel-milk cheese never spoils.
- In the winter of 1922, the recently widowed Alistair Miller was performing research experiments on a penile enhancement cream, when a dollop dripped onto the floor. As he wiped up the spill, he noticed the brilliant shine -- and thus was born the Johnson Wax company.
- Deep-sea dwelling giant squid have sex organs five times larger than their brains.
- Women profess to hate "potty humor" but nevertheless purchase 88 percent of greeting cards containing "fart" humor.
- America's premier slapstick comedy team began their career as the Four Stooges, but changed their name in 1925 when Clark Gable's brother Simon Gable quit the act.
- Actor Tom Cruise was mistakenly listed as a female on his birth certificate. The error went unnoticed until young Thomas Cruise Mapother began elementary school.
- Records kept by official White House physicians show that Gerald Ford had the largest penis of any United States president.
- A cat thrown into the air north of the equator will right itself using a clockwise twisting motion. South of the equator, a tossed cat will spin itself counter-clockwise.
- A rare species of fish recently discovered off the coast of New Zealand was named the "tori" for its uncanny resemblance to actress Tori Spelling.
- The South American guanaco, a member of the camel family, can last up to 10 days without water, due to its ability to drink and store eight times its own weight of water.
- Just as chocolate is poisonous to dogs, Nilla Wafers are toxic to ferrets.
- The drive-through restaurant window concept was patented by an aging Thomas Edison within a year of the first of Henry Ford's Model T's coming off of the assembly line.
- If you say you're from Greenpeace, many Chinese restaurants will let you release one of their tank lobsters into the wild.
- An early animator at Walt Disney Studios surreptitiously hid the word "Bolshevik" within the background landscapes of over a dozen Mickey Mouse cartoons in the 1930s before he was caught.
- In the Southern Hemisphere, stock cars race in the opposite direction to avoid creating cyclones.
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