Yet more useless facts

[peachyboo]

Dr. Seuss coined the word "nerd" in his 1950 book "If I Ran the Zoo".
It takes 3000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.
There are an average of 178 sesame seeds on a McDonald's Big Mac bun.
The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.
Pound for pound (kilo for kilo), hamburgers cost more than new cars.
When Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle, it travels at a rate of 25 miles per year.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
Average lifespan of a major league baseball: 5 pitches.
Average age of top GM executives in 1994: 49.8 years. Average age of the Rolling Stones: 50.6.
Elephants can't jump. Every other mammal can.
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.
More than one million Earths could fit inside the sun.
By the age of 75, the average American has created about 110,000 pounds of garbage.
Nine out of every 10 living things live in the ocean.
When you sneeze, the air shoots out of your nose at about 100 miles per hour.
There is enough energy in one bolt of lightning to power a home for two weeks.
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roasted turkey from foil packets at their first meal on the moon.
In Miami, Florida, roosting vultures have taken to snatching poodles from rooftop patios.
A living tree never stops growing.
Giraffes have the same number of neck bones as humans: seven.
A hummingbird's heart beats 1,260 times per minute.
If you unfolded your brain, it would cover an ironing board.
There is a canyon on Mars that would stretch from New York to San Francisco.
The average one-dollar bill wears out in less than two years.
The human body produces more than a pint of sweat each day.
The lips of a hippopotamus are nearly two feet wide.
Footprints astronauts make on the moon will remain for millions of years: there's no wind to blow them away.
The elephant is the only animal with four knees.
The world's longest-named lake has 45 letters (Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg)
Sunglasses became popular in the 1920's when movie stars began wearing them to cut the camera's bright lights.
The two most commonly sold items in grocery stores are breakfast cereals and soda.
Female mosquitoes flap their wings nearly 500 times per second.
The energy given off by a hurricane in one day would power the entire U.S for three years.
On average, each american ate 4.4 pounds of jelly last year.
The rings of Saturn are made of ice chunks-some as small as an ice cube some as big as a house.
Babies start dreaming even before they're born.
If you weighed all the earthworms in the U.S, they'd be about 55 times heavier than the combined weight of all Americans.
Ice-cream cones were first served in 1904 at the world's fair in St. Louis, MO.
About 300 years ago, people used toothbrushes made from hog bristles.
Io, a moon of jupiter, has the most active volcanoes in the solar system.
People use 200 muscles when they walk.
The average American eats about seven pounds of potato chips a year.
The hurricane plant has holes in its leave-which keep it from being destroyed by wind.
An elephant's trunk can hold two gallons of water.
The canopy of a rainforest is so thick, only one percent of sunlight reaches the ground.
More than 1,800 medals are awarded at the Olympics.
Unlike humans, canaries can regenerate their brain cells.
The clouds on Venus are made of deadly sulfuric acid.
Cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 15 minutes.
The liver performs more than 500 different functions, including storing vitamins and removing harmful chemicals from the blood.
Sharks have no air bladders, so they must swim constantly or they'll sink.
A diamond is the hardest natural substance.
The Galileo spacecraft traveled to Jupiter at a speed of 107,000 mph-fast enough to cross the U.S. in 85 seconds.
The world's oldest piece of chewing gum is over 9000 years old.
The saguaro cactus of the Arizona Desert grows less than one inch in it's first 10 years.
On average, people spend more than five years of their lives dreaming.
Saturn isn't the only planet with rings: Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have them, too.
Your eyeballs are three and a half percent salt.
Flamingos lay their eggs on top of volcano-shaped nests made of mud.
People began surfing in Hawaii before Columbus sailed to America.
An anteater sticks its tongue in and out 100 times per minute to slurp up its food.
The world's fastest-growing plant is the giant water lily, which grows almost a foot a day. Kudzu grows almost as fast.
Track athletes are most likely to break records later in the day, when their body temperatures are highest.
Gold is the only metal that doesn't rust-even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of years.
Astronauts wear an underwear lined with water tubes to keep cool.
During your lifetime, you will shed about 40 pounds of skin.
Earth's oceans contain 7 1/2 million tons of gold, dissolved in the water.
Just like fingerprints, no two lip prints are alike.
A banana is about 75 percent water.
Some yak's milk is pink.
The average human head weighs about 10 pounds.
Gum on postage stamps have from two to eight calories.
The winds on Saturn blow at 1,200 mph-10 times faster than a strong Earth hurricane.
When baby giraffes are born, they drop six feet to the ground and land on their heads.
The pouch under a pelican's bill holds up to 25 pounds of fish and water.
Your body has over 40 miles of nerves.
A car traveling 100 mph would take more than 29 million years to reach the nearest star.
A lobster can lay up to 150,000 eggs at one time.
A dog can understand between 35 to 40 commands.
The average American makes six trips to the bathroom every day-that's about 2 1/2 years of your life down the drain.
Over 10 million Indonesians are boy scouts.
In most advertisements the time displayed on an analog watch is 10:10.
There are almost 2 billion Christians in the world, about a billion Muslims, 800 million Hindus, 300 million Buddhists, and 14 million Jews.
According to the World Heath Organization, there are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.
David Prouse (the man inside the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars) spoke all of his lines in the first movie. He did not know that his voice was being dubbed over with that of James Earl Jones until he saw the finished movie.
Giraffes have no vocal chords.
The highest point in Virginia is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
Cats can make over 1,000 different vocal sounds, and dogs can make only about 10.
The only known English word that you cannot rhyme is orange.
White dwarf stars can be as small as 1,000 miles across.
In the course of a lifetime the average person will grow 2 meters of nose hair.
Since the successful launch of space shuttle Columbia on mission STS-90 there have been more crickets in space than humans.
The national dish of the Faroe Islands is Puffin stuffed with Rhubarb.
The tongue of a blue whale weighs more than most elephants.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet.
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable
_________________
Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart.

[Rurik]

Wow Peachy. The list goes on and on. I'llnever to pthat, but let me add some specialist curiosities.

The word "bistro' means "quickly" in Russian. After Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, he was pursued by Tsar Aleksandr I across Europe. After Napoleon's surrender, Aleksandr's Russian army occupied Paris. The young Russian officers got into the habit of eating their meals from convenint dtreetside cafes, being nobles accustomed back home to being waited on by obedient serfs - got into the habit of arrogantly summoning the Frenchwaiters with "bistro! bistro!

Originally in public banquest food was served a la Francaise - or all courses at the same time on community serving platters (what we now call "family style". Our current style of serving single course of food sequentially, and on individual plates is called service a la Russe. It was practical for hte Russians since it kept the food warm longer in a cold climeate where buildings and palaces were not well heated. It was indroduced into western Europe by Antoine Careme,who had fled to Russia after the Frrench Revolution, where he cooked for Catherine the Great and the afore-mentioned Aleksandr I. When he returned to France after the defeat of Nappy.

Russia had a functioning republic before England. The Magna Carta of 1215 granted rights only to the Kings nobles. However in the Russian trading city of Novgorod, at the eastern end of the Baltic, , in the year 1146, became indignant at their ruler, a junior princelyson of the Grand Prince based in Kiev. In the words of their chronicle "And ws showed our prince the gates of the city". Then they sent a message to the Grand Prince in Kiev, telling him to "send us another of your sons to be our prince if he has two heads". From that time on the city was a republic, governed on a daily basis by an elective council of five members, elected from the five districts of the city, with one of them being chosen as the mayor. All free males enjoyed the franchise, and unfreedum in the form of serfdom or slavery appears to have been limited. Anyone could call a general assembly of the citizens for major or special matters. Princes were hired take care of the military and policing needs of the city; hired under contract which spelled out in careful detail thier duties, rights,and all other questions, including the fact that they were not to live within the city nor quarter their troops there. Women had extensive rights including the right to own property, and though they nominally were not allowed to hold political office, the last mayor of Novgorod was a woman, Maartha Boretskaya. Literacy was the rule and people usually wrote on birchbark strips. A number of other Russian trading cities had similar forms of elective city government. Obviously something happened between 1200 and the present.
_________________
I refuse to become a rhinoceros.

[taranaki]

[peachyboo]

Obviously there are those who get hung up on minor details.
There are also, obviously, several of us that like the entertainment value, whether it's absolutely prove-able or not.
_________________
Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart.

[klaus]

not much for quantity, but the 'mission impossible' theme is one of only wo well known songs written in 5/4 time.
_________________
Let the world be fair. But if the world will be unfair, let it be unfair in my favor.

[Sneeral]

[Notabunny]

[ec437]

[Rurik]

Unnhhh Sneeral, EC437,
Excuse me, but do you think you could translate all that discussion into binary please?
_________________
I refuse to become a rhinoceros.

[peachyboo]

[Rurik]

[peachyboo]

"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
The sloth (a mammal) moves so slowly that green algae can grow undisturbed on it's fur.
Cat's urine glows under a black-light.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland.
A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.
Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times.
Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.
Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.
A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
Until 1796, there was a state in the United States called Franklin. Today it's known as Tennessee.
The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.
The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.
One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.
The average American will eat about 11.9 pounds of cereal per year.
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".
Babies have 300 bones, Adults only have 206.
Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
7% of Americans don't know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem.
5% of Canadians don't know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem.
Over 1000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.
The state of Florida is bigger than England.
The world record for passing gas was set on Japanese television, 3,000 times in a row.
Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day.
Mexico City is sinking at a rate of 18 inches per year as a result of draining the water table for human consumption.
During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food, that's the weight of about 6 elephants.
Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food.
Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
Each day, 14,000 tons of garbage are dumped into Fresh Kills, NY-the largest landfill in the world.
In space astronauts can't cry. There is no gravity, so the tears can't flow.
There are more plastic flamingos in the U.S., than real ones.
In 1995, Toys R Us sold more than $9 billion of goods in the U.S. alone.
Americans eat about 700 million pounds of peanut butter and 2 billion pounds of chocolate a year.
Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor, was afraid of the dark.
Alcoholics are twice as likely to confess a drinking problem to a computer than to a doctor, say researchers in Wisconsin.
Nanotechnology has produced a guitar no bigger than a blood cell. The guitar, 10 micrometers long, has six strummable strings.
In Victorian times, estate gardeners never planted grape vines without first burying a dead donkey underneath the plot.
Given sufficient amounts of chocolate candies, pigs can master video game skills, and perform far better than dogs.
The estimated value of services provided by the global ecosystem (water, food, materials etc.) runs between $16 and $54 trillion per year.
Glasses have been worn for about 700 years.
There may be three times as much antioxidant cancer-fighting power in the steam coming from a cup of coffee as there is in three oranges.
Desperate to increase veggie intake among children in Britain, researchers have developed chocolate-flavored carrots, pizza-flavored corn and baked-bean flavored peas.
Percentage of high school seniors with an A average who smoke cigarettes daily: 7. Percentage of seniors with a D average who smoke daily: 46.
Number of men who have undergone hair transplants: one in 547.
In 1960, an estimated 4,000 people were over 100 years old in the U.S. By 1995 the number had jumped to : 55,000.
Bubonic plague killed millions of people throughout Europe in the Dark Ages. In 1996, five cases of plague were reported in the U.S.
More than 20,000,000 seahorses are harvested each year for folk medicinal purposes. The world seahorse population has dropped 70% in the past 10 years.
Good news for skunk lovers- an Illinois company is now manufacturing "Eau de Pew" a perfume created from diluted skunk scent.
55,700 people in the US are injured by jewelry each year.
For the first time, the number of pet cats in the US now outnumbers the number of dogs, 60 million vs. 50 million.
The Christmas holidays are the busiest time in plastic surgeons offices. The average "facelift" will set you back about $4156.00.
Americans spend five BILLION dollars a year on gifts for their pets. Aside from dogs and cats, some 40% of birds and 48% of hamsters are on gifts lists.
_________________
Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart.

[taranaki]

Compassion,humour,companionship,and congeniality also require a degree of cerebral function.It would be a shame if the parts of the brain that deal in information and logic were allowed to consume the resources allocated to these vital functions.
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

[Sneeral]

[Sneeral]

I'm curious what happened to my post that Taranaki's above post responded to? The one referring to the apparent brain death of our most voluminous poster?

The removal of posts without public or private notification is quite a cowardly act by some mod.
_________________
Advocate for the Devil