ANIMALS

CULTURE & LANGUAGE

 

INVENTIONS

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

SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE FOR CHRISTMAS FACTS.

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. 

This is the Chinese Year of the Dragon, considered to be a good time to launch a business. It's also a good year for a wedding or to have a child. The Water Dragon bestows the Five Blessings of harmony, virtue, riches, fulfillment, and longevity.

The U.S. Weather Service defines a blizzard as a storm with winds of more than 51 km (32 miles) per hour and enough snow to limit visibility to 150 meters (500 feet) or less.

Snowflakes begin when rising air, moisture and cold temperatures combine in clouds high above the earth. First, a water droplet freezes into ice crystal, and if the temperature is near 5 degrees Fahrenheit and plenty of moisture is present, the crystal grows six branches with arms. It then grows heavier as moisture condenses onto it. Crystals falling into warm air begin to melt, and since water can act like glue, it holds the crystals together in large flakes.

In 2011,  July had 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays, and 5 Sundays. This happens  once every 823 years.

There are three Friday the 13ths in 2012, 13 weeks apart. 

Friday the 13th has many origins. According to Wikipedia, in numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the clock, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles of Jesus, twelve gods of Olympus, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness. There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having thirteen people seated at a table will result in the death of one of the diners. And Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales. Black Friday has been associated with stock market crashes and other disasters since the 1800s. It has also been suggested that Friday has been considered an unlucky day because, according to Christian scripture and tradition, Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

There's more: Jesus was the 13th person at the Last Supper, and Eve gave Adam the apple on a Friday. The launch of Apollo 13 took place at 13.13 hours, and had to be aborted on April 13, 1970 (but that was a Monday, not a Friday).

Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man, died on April 14, 2011, at the age of 114. Breuning lived in Minnesota at the beginning of the century, in a house with no electricity or running water. At 16, he left home and went to work for the Great Northern Railway in Melrose as a clerk. He moved to Great Falls, Montana, when his boss received a promotion, and stayed there for the rest century. Breuning retired from his job as a railroad clerk after 50 years, in 1963, and went on to work at a local chapter of the Shriners until he was 99. At the Rainbow Senior Living retirement home in Great Falls, where he lived since 1980, he visited the doctor just twice a year and the only medication he took was aspirin. He attributed his good health to eating only two meals a day. Everybody says your mind is the most important thing about your body, Breuning told the Associated Press in October, 2010. Your mind and your body. You keep both busy, and by God you’ll be here a long time.

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

Benjamin Franklin was the youngest of 10 sons. His sister, Jane, was the youngest of seven daughters. Their father was a Boston candle-maker. The law in Massachusetts at the time required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.  Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin became successful and wealthy; his sister did not.

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. 

The Miss America Pageant, now an American institution, began in 1921 as an attempt by Atlantic City businessmen to keep tourists in town after Labor Day.

Ever wonder why boys are dressed in blue and girls in pink? Researchers say that in Anglo-Saxon Britain, in the 5th and 6th centuries, boy babies were more prized than girls. The belief spread that evil spirits would visit the cradle and harm or carry off a boy child. Blue, a power color representing the sky, would scare away an evil spirit. Later, in Germany, a widespread legend held that girl babies sprang from a pink rose and it became customary to dress baby girls in pink. That custom merged with the British one of dressing boys in blue.

New research indicates that we learn a great deal while still in the womb, from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods.

The custom of family (surnames) names did not really arise until the 11th century in Europe. Prior to the 11th century a surname, if used at all, represented the name of a primitive clan or tribe.

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

The memory-recording processes of the brain seems to switch off during sleep. In so-called non-dreamers, this memory shutdown is more complete than it is for the rest. Dreams may be forgotten because they are incoherent or because they contain repressed material that the conscious mind does not wish to remember.

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

Thomas John Watson, Sr. started as a clerk at the National Cash Register Co. Eventually, Watson became president of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which made scales, time clocks, and tabulators that sorted information using punched cards. Watson renamed the company International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in 1924 and became its chairman in 1949, widening IBM’s line to include computers.

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. 

As Canada considers abolishing the penny, consider it's British cousins, long since gone:  A farthing was worth a quarter of a penny; then there was the half penny, the threepenny bit,  and the sixpence.

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.

Seventy-five percent of all gold in circulation has been extracted since 1910.

Gold is the only metal  that doesn't rust, even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of  years.

Roman coins were used to publicize the emperor, his achievements, and his family in a world with no mass media.

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.

The average life expectancy at birth for a Canadian is 81.16 years, the eighth highest in the world. The United States ranks 46th, at 78.14 years.

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.

The Dutch are the tallest people in Europe.

In 1776, The first fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1881, In Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909.

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., at the age of 35, was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize 

Golf balls were originally made of wood, but in the early 17th century the feather ball was introduced. It was a slow and expensive process to manufacture these balls, which consisted of boiled feathers compressed into a hole left in a stitched leather cover. The invention of the cheaper gutta-percha ball about 1848 helped to make the game more popular. Regulation balls have a maximum weight of 1.62 ounces (45.93 grams) and a minimum diameter of 1.68 inches (4.27 centimeters).

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

The pigments in leaves (carotenoids) which are responsible for the fall colors are actually present in the leaves all during the growing season of spring and summer. The colors are eclipsed by the green chlorophyll. Toward the end of summer, chlorophyll production stops and the colors of the carotenoids (yellow, orange, red, purple, etc.) become visible. Different trees turn different colors, e.g. sugar maple and sumac turn flame red and orange; popular, birch, tulip trees, and willows turn yellow.

Surfing was invented thousands of years ago by the Polynesians who first settled Hawaii. Their boards weighed more than 150 pounds and measured up to twenty feet.

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.

Babe Ruth compiled an outstanding pitching record between 1914 and 1919, but because pitchers do not play in every game, he was shifted to the outfield so that his powerful hitting could be used consistently. In 1919, he was sold from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees, and his batting feats and public personality helped salvage baseball’s popularity, which had been damaged by the Black Sox scandal.

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.

Amethyst is one of the oldest recorded gemstones. How it obtained its rare color is the subject of speculation, thought by some researchers as the replacement of some silicon ions by iron. Nearly all yellow quartz is actually heat-treated amethyst. True yellow quartz is citrine or topaz, which show more of the yellow that comes from iron.

Amethyst rates high as a gemstone because of its beauty and  durability. Significant deposits exist in Brazel, Sri Lanka, and the Ural Mts, as well as Thunder Bay, Ontario (the largest amethyst mine in North America).  

Google is the  common name for a number with a million zeros.

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.

The University of Alaska spans four time zones.

The lowest point on earth is called Challenger Deep, located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean – nearly 36,000 feet (about 6.8 miles) below sea level.

In 1943, a Mexican farmer named Dionisio Pulido witnessed the birth of a volcano in his cornfield about 329 kilometers west of Mexico City. It started as a slight depression in his field and soon became a fissure that emitted smoke and hissing noises. During the next nine years, the volcano Paricutin had grown to an elevation of 2,272 meters and its voluminous lava flows had destroyed several towns.

The first coast to coast telephone was established in 1914. 

The first traffic signals were established in Cleveland in 1914. They were just red and green. In the early 1920s, in Detroit, they started using the three colors we use today.

The world’s oldest running vehicle, the De Dion-Bouton et Trepardoux Dos-a-Dos Steam Runabout, has sold at a U.S. auction for $4.6 million. The car, built in France in 1884, has had only four owners in the past 127 years, can still be driven. It has a top speed of 38 miles per hour.

Louis Chevrolet, born in Switzerland, was an auto mechanic who emigrated to the US in 1900 to race cars. In 1905, he drove a mile in a record 52.8 seconds. In 1911, he founded the Chevrolet Motor Company with support from General Motors founder William C. Durant and designed its first car. He sold his interest in 1915 but continued making racecars. His cars won the Indy 500 in 1920 and 1921. He later formed an aircraft company with his brother, but the venture failed.

The first president to ride in a car was Theodore Roosevelt in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1902. The first president to fly in an airplane was Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 from Miami, Florida, to French Morocco. The first president to fly an aircraft was Theodore Roosevelt who was a passenger in a Wright biplane in 1910. The first president to hold an airplane pilot’s license was Dwight Eisenhower.

Florida did not become part of the United States until Spain surrendered it in a treaty in 1819. It didn't actually became a state until 1845.

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. 

Romans discovered that mixing lead with wine not only helped preserve wine, but also gave it a sweet taste. It's now thought that chronic lead poisoning was one of the causes of the decline of Rome.

Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra reveals that women in ancient Egypt were able to buy land, become mathematicians, doctors and poets, unlike the rest of the ancient world. They had many legal  opportunities unavailable to women anywhere else for the next 2000 years. 

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.

Flags are thought to be the invention of China or India. The first “national” flags in Europe didn’t appear until the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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.

Native American Indians have a signature strand of DNA known as Halpogroup X. The only other large population on earth with this genetic marker is Europeans.

Researchers now believe that humans began to stand upright very gradually, by first straightening the back while squatting to gather food or skin animals, and later by extending the legs.

The sun contains 99.85% of the mass in the solar system.

Lisa Randall, Professor of Physics at Harvard, says we can only see 4% of the matter in the universe. The other 96% is dark matter.  And we can only recognize 40% of the energy in the universe. The other 60% is unknown.

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.

The lowest point on earth is called Challenger Deep, located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean – nearly 36,000 feet (about 6.8 miles) below sea level.

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.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. began in 1920, and had a 43-year run as the largest retailer in the world, transforming the retail industry in ways that made Walmart possible. Led for decades by the brothers George L. Hartford and John A. Hartford, paternalistic bosses known throughout the company as Mr. George and Mr. John, A&P mastered vertical integration: the company manufactured items like bread, coffee and milk for itself, thus eliminating reliance on the wholesalers, brokers and other middlemen who played major roles in the country’s inefficient, archaic system of moving food from producer to consumer. Their high-volume, low-price strategy led the way for supermarket chains and big box stores.

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!

Franklin D. Roosevelt served longest as U.S. President, in office for 12 years, 39 days (1933-1945). The shortest term in office was 32 days by William Henry Harrison (March 4-April 4, 1841).

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!

Your tongue is the only  muscle in your body that is attached at only one end. 

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.

The sun is just one of millions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy is just one of the millions scattered throughout the universe. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years deep, meaning that a beam of light would take about 100,000 years to shine from one end to the other.

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 "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. Vinegar can reduce swelling, inflammation and bruising in a third of the time that ice will take.

Corn dextrin, a common thickener used in junk food, is also the glue on envelopes and postage stamps.

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.

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

During American Prohibition, whisky-peddlars roamed the streets selling swigs from flasks in their boot-tops . They came to be known a  “bootleggers.”

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

There are several families where descendants still own the family business: : Beretta, Italy (since 1526), the oldest arms manufacturer in the world; de Kuyper, the Netherlands (since 1695), distillers of gin, schnapps and liqueurs; Hoshi, Japan (since 717), innkeepers—the Ryokan with 100 rooms that can accommodate 450 guests.

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.

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. 

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.

Marketing guru Denny Hatch has a private archive of 60,000+ stories in 268 major categories on his computer.

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.
           The Carousel in Central Park is one of America’s largest merry-go-rounds, complete with calliope music. It's open seven days a week year round, and charges just $1.50 a ride.
           Manhattan is laid out in a grid with avenues running north/south and streets running east/west. That makes it one of the easiest cities to get around. Broadway cuts diagonally across six north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces (Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, etc,).

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.

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

Different colored roses have different meanings. Red means love, yellow means friendship, and pink means friendship or sweetheart. Red carnations mean admiration, white carnations mean pure love, red chrysanthemums mean love, forget-me-nots mean true love, primrose means young love, and larkspur means an open heart.

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

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.

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)

CHRISTMAS FACTS

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

Hallmark introduced the first Christmas card in 1915.

Jingle Bells was composed in 1857 by James Pierpont.

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

Until the late 19th century, Christmas ornaments were traditionally handmade using wood, paper or other easily accessible materials. It wasn’t until the 1880s when the German glass industry began producing hand-blown glass ornaments, which were subsequently imported to the United States. By the mid-1920s, Czechoslovakia and Japan had begun to encroach on Germany’s hold on the glass ornament market.

The New Year's Eve ball was first dropped from One Times Square in 1907.

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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