ANIMALS

CULTURE & LANGUAGE

 

INVENTIONS

For Canadian Trivia, see books by The Trivia Guys, Mark Kearney & Randy Ray

We support The Ottawa Mission Last year 50 people studied in the Learning Centre,
223 new clients were helped to find employment and education, 332 people were helped to find housing, 
and 414,174 meals were served to the hungry. 

U.S. Presidents Adams, Jefferson and Monroe all died on the Fourth of July.

13% of Americans actually believe that some parts of the moon are made of cheese.

The average American spends hundreds of dollars each year on lottery tickets. Because they often spend only $10 or $20 at a time, they don't realize how it adds up. If they put that money into a savings account, compound interest would increase that investment to thousands of dollars in just 10 years.

After investigating winners' prizes for 20 popular reality shows, The Daily Beast has learned that most give out far less than they promise—because of payments dragged out over time, fine print, or taxes. In the end, sometimes they give nothing at all. 

A third of the world’s population lives on less than $2 per day.

Paul Allen, co-founded of Microsoft, has a personal yacht which holds two luxury submarines and a helicopter.

The dollar sign ($) was originally Spanish and was supposedly an ancient Phoenician sign indicating strength and sovereignty.  The U.S. government modified the original symbol to incorporate the letters of U.S. by superimposing the S on top of the U.

In 1866, the U.S. replaced the small "half dime" with a new coin, the nickel. 

To produce an ounce of gold requires 38 man hours, 1400 gallons of water, enough electricity to run a large house for ten days, and chemicals such as cyanide, acids, lead, borax, and lime. In order to extract South Africa's yearly output of 500 tons of gold, nearly 70 million tons of earth are raised and milled.

As baby boomers enter their 60s and 70s, demand for surgery to replace ankles with artificial joints is expected to grow. Just imagine the increase for younger women in the next few years, as they wobble on five and six-inch stilettos.

New research indicates that you can enhance cognitive functioning by stepping backwards. There seems to be a link between the backwards movement and a vigilant state of mind.

Continuous Partial Attention is a term coined by former Apple employee, Linda Stone, to describe the state of always being on high alert for the next cellphone call, text or tweet, and continually checking e-mail - a form of addiction, inability to be alone and unstimulated. Timothy Ferris, author of The Four-Hour Workweek, talks about "attention management" to allow us to concentrate on important tasks (and important people).

Although vision might largely seem effortless to us, in reality we actively choose what we look at, making about two to four eye movements every second for some 150,000 motions daily, said Karen Adolph, also a developmental psychologist at N.Y.U. Vision is not passive. We actively coordinate our eye movements with the motions of our hands and bodies.

Conservative people in the Middle East only look directly into the eyes of a social equal of the same sex.

Beelzebub, another name for the devil, is Hebrew for Lord of the Flies, and this is where the book's title comes from.

Until the 19th century, solid blocks of tea were used as money in Siberia.  

Coca-cola was developed by a Confederate veteran turned pharmacist to replace morphine and alcohol dependency among war wounded. Cocaine was considered a kinder, gentler addiction. The popular beverage was originally green.

Pepsi originally contained pepsin, which gave the soft drink its name. 

Carrots were originally purple. Dutch botanists developed an orange carrot to celebrate the Dutch Royal Family, the House of Orange.

The banana is the largest plant on earth without a woody stem. 

The poplar tree is an emblem of liberty and democracy in France. The word poplar comes from the Latin word for people: populus. 

Fortune cookies were actually invented in America (not China), in 1918, by Charles Jung.

June 4 is National Donut Day, created in 1938 as a fundraiser for the Chicago Salvation Army in honor of the women who served donuts to soldiers during World War I.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team his sophomore year. He now  makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

All major league baseball umpires must wear black underwear while on the job.

The world's highest official temperature is 136 degrees recorded at El Azizia, Libya, on September 13, 1922.

The world's largest cut diamond is an unnamed Fancy Black, containing small red diamond crystals. It weighs 555.55 carats and was polished into 55 facets over several years and completed in June 2004. The repetitive use of the number five is culturally significant in the Islamic world, and was inspired by Ran Gorenstein (Belgium), who also commissioned this creation.

Michigan was the first state to plow its roads and the first to adopt a yellow dividing line.

Woodward Avenue in Detroit,  Michigan, carries the designation M-1, so named because it was the first paved road anywhere.

The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight, to be used as air strips in times of war or other emergencies.

In 1907, the first taxis in the U.S. arrived in New York City.

Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence. 

Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world located on two continents. 

The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome,  Italy in 133 B.C. There is a city called  Rome on every continent.

Canada has the world's longest coastline of 202,080 kilometres (125,567 miles).
Canada also has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. 
Halifax has one of the world's largest harbors.

The  Amazon rainforest produces  more than 20% the world's oxygen  supply. 

Siberia contains more than 25% of the world's forests. 

Think the Grand Canyon in Arizona is the deepest valley in the world?  It's about 1737 meters deep - a little over a mile. But it's not the deepest. Cotahuasi Canyon in southwestern Peru is approximately 3354 meters - over twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.

The Himalayas were formed around 50 million years ago when the Indian landmass, which was a long way south of where it is today, shifted north and collided with Asia and forced a huge belt of mountains up into the air.

Among the world's tallest trees are the redwoods along the California coast, which reach up 38 stories. The thickest trees are giant sequoias, the largest of which is wider than three lanes of traffic. 

Angel Falls in Venezuela is the highest waterfall in the world. The falls are 3230 feet in height with an uninterrupted drop of 2647 feet. Angel Falls are located on a tributary of the Rio Caroni.

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.

The most expensive hotels, in order of cost per night, are located in Capri, Abu Dhabi, Geneva, Moscow, Venice, Cannes, NYC, Dubrovnik, Dubai, and Paris.

Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined. 

NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning author,  Thomas L. Friedman, comments on the auto industry:   Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: We have to make the cars people want. That's why they're in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don't know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can't live without my iPod. I didn't know I wanted it, but Apple did.

Friedman also says that the most important rule of business in today's environment is:  Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is:  will it be done BY you or TO you.

In a similar vein, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, author of The Opposable Mind, says that  successful business leaders are able to reconcile apparently irreconcilable options. An example is Izzy Sharpe, founder of the Four Seasons chain, who decided that rather than choosing between the services offered by a large hotel and the personal attention offered by a small hotel, it was possible to combine these in one operation.

Helena Rubinstein was the only one of a group of early female entrepreneurs to keep her own name. Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham, Lena Himmelstein Bryant Malsin founded Lane Bryant, and Henrietta Kanengeiser became Hattie Carnegie. Rubinstein developed the first waterproof mascara, and then the first mascara wand (before that time, mascara came in a cake and was applied with a tiny brush). She sold the U.S. arm of her company to Lehman Brothers in 1928, in time to miss the 1929 crash, then bought back the nearly worthless stock for less than $1 million and eventually turned the shares into millions of dollars.

Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz. 

If you're discouraged by the current economic situation, take heart. Hewlett-Packard, Revlon and La-Z-Boy all established their businesses during the Great Depression.

Coco Chanel started the trend for suntans in 1923 when she accidentally got a sunburn while on a cruise.

As print media is increasingly in peril, and the massive Tribune conglomerate is facing bankruptcy, it's interesting to note that a little more than a century ago, Chicago boasted 11 daily English-language newspapers. The fierce competition among them, immortalized in the 1928 play "The Front Page," even turned bloody at times, and that drive to outdo one another led to 35 Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's highest honor. Today, only two major dailies remain in this city of 3 million, and both are in serious trouble from declining circulation, plummeting ad revenue and a new kind of competition that threatens to make newsprint itself obsolete.

In his book, 32 Ways to be Champion in Business, Magic Johnson defines the difference between leading and managing. Leaders allow others to learn by success. This requires the leader not to monopolize all the opportunities, delegating key ones to staff. 

Kaizen is a Japanese concept that business improves very slowly, bit by bit. Prof. Robert Maurer's book, The Kaizen Way, explains that even tiny steps in the right direction can eventually reach the highest goal.

Paula Poundstone once observed that Canada is like an attic.  Everyone ignores it until someone pops their head up there and says, "Gee, look at all the neat stuff up here."

The U.S. is close to $10 trillion in debt. Most of this is owed to countries like China and India.

Tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent.

In Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, written in 1749, a comment on war is still pertinent 300 years later:
            How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed,
            When vengeance listens to the fool's request.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood reminds us that the word “mortgage” comes from two French words, which mean death and pledge.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, earned $14.83 billion in the third quarter of 2008. 

How much is a billion? 
        Two billion hours ago, human life appeared on the planet.
        A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged.
        A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old.

A perfect number is a number whose divisors add up to itself such as 28: 1+2+4+7+14=28

2,520 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 without having a fractional leftover.

In Dante's Inferno the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

Former U.S. President James Garfield could write with both hands at the same time, and in two different languages!

Abraham Lincoln faces to the right on a penny while all the other presidents face to the left on U.S. coins. The Lincoln penny is the only U.S. coin still in circulation after 100 years.

Francis Scott Key was a young lawyer who wrote the poem, The Star Spangled Banner, after being inspired by watching the Americans fight off the British attack of Baltimore during the War of 1812.  The poem became the words to the national anthem.

A 1784 satire written by Benjamin Franklin proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. But he didn't actually suggest Daylight Savings Time. That didn't come until William Willett conceived DST in 1905, and it wasn't widely accepted until 1916.    

A human brain comprises only 2% of the body, yet it uses 20% of the oxygen and blood.

Every 24 hours, the body's blood travels about 12,000 miles, a trip that's almost half of the Earth's circumference at the equator (around 24,800 miles).

Every time you sneeze, some of your brain cells die. Bad new for those of us with allergies!

There are more than 100,000 Americans over the age of 100.

Unlike the other chromosomes, which can repair one another because they come in pairs, one from each parent, the Y has no evident backup system. Nature has prevented it from recombining with its partner, the X, except at its very tips, lest its male-determining gene should sneak into the X and cause genetic chaos.

Blue eye color originated near the Black Sea, from a genetic mutation affecting gene OCA2 that turns off the production of melanin in the iris.

Florence Nightingale spent only three years as a nurse. 

China has 200 million students. Most of them are learning English.

At the turn of the last century, Ward McAllister compiled a list of New York City's “Four Hundred,” the elite aristocrats who ran corporations and social life. The number was supposedly how many people could fit into Mrs. William Astor's ballroom. 

Using Xs at the end of a letter for kisses started in the Middle Ages when people couldn't write and used crosses as signatures.

Kissing at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony can be traced to ancient Roman tradition where a kiss was used to sign contract.

The military salute came from knights in armor who raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. 

Conservative people in the Middle East only look directly into the eyes of a social equal of the same sex. It's a cultural difference that can make Westerners feel someone from the Middle East can't be trusted, as Westerners are used to looking directly at anyone they meet.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

A single chocolate chip provides enough energy to a human being to walk 150 feet.

On the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the worlds widest road, 160 cars can drive side by side.

1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire criss-crosses the U.S.

The world's first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court beneath a Chicago football stadium on December 2, 1942. While it only generated enough power to light a flashlight, it proved that nuclear power was feasible.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was opened in 1893, as part of the  Columbian Exposition (the World's Fair that transformed Chicago's downtown). In 1933, they changed their name officially to the Museum of Science and Industry, and built a working coal mine. In 1954, the obtained a submarine, and in 1994, a 727 jet plane.

China is the largest country with only one time zone, followed by India. Living in a country with a common time would be comparable to the United States having Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and New York all in the same time zone.

The Hubble Telescope has provided evidence that there are over 175 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

MEASURING TIME:
        An Aeon  (eon)  =  1  billion  years;  used  by  astronomers  to estimate the age of the galaxies, stars, or the universe.
       A Fortnight = an easy way  to say 14 nights or  two weeks; common in Great Britain.
       A Moon = 29.5 days or the time between two new moons; used by the early farmers of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and probably by our American Indians.
       A Generation = 25 years  for man, 4  for horses, 2 minutes for bacteria; used by biologists who study life cycles.
      A Nanosecond  =  one-billionth  of  a  second  or  the  time  it takes a beam of  light  to  travel 30 centimeters; used by scientists studying tiny atomic particles.

An Olympic-sized swimming pool must be 50 metres long, 25 metres wide and divided into 8 lanes.

The coldest national capital cities in the world are Astana (Kazakstan) and Ulan Bator (Mongolia). Ottawa (Canada) ranks somewhere below these.

Earth is the only planet not named after a pagan god. 

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

There are 292 ways to make change for a dollar.

New Jersey has a spoon museum with over 5,400 spoons from almost all the states.

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

The pupil of the eye dilates as much as 45% when a person looks at something pleasing.

One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.

A Greek poet named Archilochus defined two types of thinkers: foxes and hedgehogs.
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Foxes look at the world as individual pieces, while hedgehogs tend to see the whole. Foxes break every problem down into separate components, while hedgehogs look for universal ideas.

It is claimed that the Greek scholar, Palamedes, invented the “set-up” joke, numbers, the alphabet, lighthouses, dice, and the practice of eating meals at regular intervals.

The Eiffel Tower was originally painted orange. Greek temples were painted bright colors which bleached in the sun over the years.

Colors influence our moods. Blue is an appetite suppressant, while light green is calming, and red not only stimulates the appetite but also is attractive to men. Bubblegum pink diminishes anger and aggression.

The brand name Jelly Belly was created in 1982 after Nancy Reagan made a much-publicized quip about her husband's 20-pound weight gain.

The "heads" picture on a U.S. penny weighs just a fraction more than the "tails" side, so if you're making a bet on a penny toss, your odds are better if you call for "tails" because the "heads" side is more likely to end up on the bottom.

Apple cider vinegar is more effective than ice when dealing with wounds. This vinegar can reduce swelling, inflammation and bruising in 1/3 the time that ice will take.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.  It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off. 

In a game of chess, the number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side is 318,979,564,000.

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy who could read The New York Times by the time he was 18 months old. By age eight, he had taught himself eight languages and had invented one of his own. It is said that in his adult years he could speak more than 40 languages and learn a new one in a single day. In 1909, he became the youngest person ever to enroll at Harvard College and began lecturing on higher mathematics the following year.

Most people have more than 1,460 dreams every year. Animals also dream, although it's hard to tell what these contain. Simon II (Tiki), however, was a rescued feral kitten, and often had dreams that disturbed his sleep sufficiently to cause him to twitch as if he was trying to escape from something frightening. Terzo's naps, on the other hand, are always tranquil.

Most of us dream every 90 minutes, and the longest dreams (30-45 minutes) occur in the morning.

Procter & Gamble is the largest advertiser in North America.

The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

In 1913, Thomas L. Williams mixed Vaseline and coal dust for his sister, Mabel. It became the first cake mascara for his new company, Maybelline.

Coca-Cola used "Good to the last drop" as its slogan in 1908. This famous line was later adopted by Maxwell House Coffee. 

The 3 most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

Coupons were introduced in 1894 when Asa Candler bought the Coca-Cola formula for $2,300 and gave people coupons that he had written out to receive a free glass of Coke.

1894 was also the year the first women's pages in newspapers were created, to court female consumers.

The first permanent color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.

Canned pet food was introduced by James Spratt in 1865.

David McConnell started the California Perfume Company (CPC) in 1886. Today the company is known as Avon, which he named after his favorite playwright, William Shakespeare, who was from Stratford on Avon. 

The first credit card was issued in 1951.

Amedeo Giannini, son of Italian immigrants to the US, started the Bank of America in a converted saloon in San Francisco 1904. Giannini changed the name to Bank of America in 1928 and remained chairman until 1963.

In 1982, sales of Reese's Pieces increased 85% after appearing in the movie E.T.

Apples are part of the rose family.

Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, says "Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea, and the resources to make it happen."

Walt Disney named Mickey Mouse after Mickey Rooney, whose mother he dated for some time.

The Planters Peanut Company mascot, Mr. Peanut, was created during a contest for schoolchildren in 1916.

Dynamite contains peanuts.

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were both epileptic. 

Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies' brains. Canadian researchers claim that straining to recall information which seems to be “on the tip of my tongue” makes us learn mistaken guesses instead of the correct answers we may (or may not) eventually remember.  (source: Harper's)

Warren Buffett, John Kerry, Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, New Yorker Editor (and Pulitzer Prize-winner) David Remnick, Art Garfunkel, Jann Wenner, Meredith Vieira, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy and Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus were all rejected by Harvard.

General Gen. George Armstrong Custer graduated at the bottom of his West point class in 1861.

About New York:
           The term "The Big Apple" was coined by touring jazz musicians of the 1930's who used the slang  expression "apple" for any town or city (Therefore, to play New York City is to play the big time)
           New York City was briefly the U.S. capital from 1789 to 1790.
           There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, Ireland; there are more Italians in New York City than in Rome, Italy; there are more Jews in New York City than in  Tel Aviv.
           The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is the largest gothic cathedral in the world. |
           On Oct. 27, 1904, the first rapid transit subway, the IRT, opened in New York City.
           Columbia University owns more land in New York City than anyone else except the Catholic Church.
           40% of New Yorkers were born outside the U.S.
           The budget for restaurant critics at The New York Times is $150,000.

In 1893, the first mosque in the United States was built. 

The world's first underground was the London Underground in 1863. It has 275 stations and 253 miles of track.

Scrabble was invented in 1931 and was originally called Criss Cross. For 17 years toy makers snubbed this game, saying it was too intellectual, so the inventor Alfred Botts decided to manufacture and sell it himself. It is the world's second best selling game.

More than 200 million copies of Monopoly have been sold since it was first introduced in 1935.

Toilet paper was introduced in the United States in perforated form in 1884. Before then, a number of outhouses in America were stocked with dried leaves.

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.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king: 
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs -Alexander the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

The military salute came from knights in armor who raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. 

When it was time to build the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., a contest was held to select the architect. The winner was William Thorton, a doctor and amateur architect, who received $500 and a city lot as his prize.

The Haida natives believe you are not judged by what you have, but by what you give away.

In 1894, Lord Kelvin predicted that radio had no future; he also predicted that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.

Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark. Do you think that's why he was so interested in the  light bulb?  Actually, it was Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans who patented the first electric light bulb, after testing it successfully in Toronto. They later sold the patent to Edison.

First developed in 1967 in Canada, the IMAX technology premiered with the first IMAX film, a short titled Tiger Child at the Fuji Pavilion at EXPO '70 in Osaka, Japan. Today the company has 371 IMAX theatres in 43 countries, although two-thirds of them are located in North America. The bulb used in an IMAX projector is bright enough to be seen by residents of the International Space Station if pointed in their direction.

Other Canadian inventions include the paint roller, the electric oven, the green garbage bag, the cordless mower, and plexiglas.

In 1810, Peter Durand invented the tin can for preserving food.

The can opener wasn't invented until 48 years after cans were introduced. 

King Gilette gave away razors but charged for blades.

Yellowstone was established as the world's first National Park on March 1, 1872. It is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined and resides in three different states - Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. You can cross the Continental Divide more than once while traveling through Yellowstone. It has the largest concentration of free-roaming wildlife in the lower 48 states. There are approximately 10,000 geothermal features within the park.

An intoxicated ant will always fall over on its right side.

Charlie Chaplin once came in third in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

The cruise liner, QE 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

Sailors began to wear a gold earring because of a superstition that it would improve their eyesight.

The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.

New Haven, Connecticut, was the first planned city in the U.S., and Yale University was the first planned campus. Yale was also the first college to have a mascot, published the first college daily newspaper, and appointed America's first professor of paleontology.

Slaves under the last emperors of China wore pigtails so they could be identified quickly.

Michaelangelo's last name was Buonarroti.

Italy is approximately 116,400 square miles, which is slightly larger than Arizona.

The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. 
These nations have progressed through this sequence: 
          from bondage to spiritual faith 
          from spiritual faith to great courage
          from courage to liberty
          from liberty to abundance
          from abundance to selfishness
          from selfishness to complacency
          from complacency to apathy
          from apathy to dependence
          from dependence back into bondage.

What happened to those nine black students who walked bravely through an angry mob in Little Rock to enter Central High School? 
        Eight went on to college, seven graduated, three got masters' degrees, one a Ph.D.  
        Today they are:  an editor of a computer magazine, a social worker, a farmer, an assistant dean at UCLA, a talk show host, an accountant, an economics teacher, a real estate broker, and a V.P. at Shearson, Lehman. 
I wonder if the whites in that mob did half as well.  (Charles Peters)

If our world was a village of 1000 people, there would be:
        329 Christians, 174 Muslims, 131 Hindus, 61 Buddhists, 52 animists, 3 Jews
                34 members of other religions, 216 without any religion at all
In this village:
       60 persons would have half the income
       500 would be hungry
       600 would live in shantytowns (or be homeless)
       700 would be illiterate    (from The Prairie Rambler)

Franklin Pierce was the first U.S. President to have a Christmas tree in the White House.

Santa's reindeer are: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dnner, Blitzen.

Animal crackers are cookies that were imported to the U.S. from England in the 1800s. P.T. Barnum had boxes designed with a circus theme and a string handle so they could be hung on a Christmas tree.

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