Thursday, May 24, 2007

Random facts II

Found these random facts in some forum, quite interesting!

1) An ostrich's eye is bigger that it's brain.

2) A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
3) A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
4) It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
5) White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (Formerly of the Monkees).
6) In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
7) Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.
8) Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.
9) 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
10) A whale's penis is called a dork.
11) To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs- it will let you go instantly.
12) Reindeer like to eat bananas.
13) 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.
14) No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver and purple.
15) Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.
16) "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
17) The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
18) The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
19) Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.
20) The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
21) In the movie Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
22) Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
23) More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
24) More people are struck by lightning than attacked by sharks.
25) Cars are the biggest killers of people (except in Victoria where it?s swimming in the surf)!
26) A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
27) The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
28) The average man falls asleep within 30 seconds of having sex (if not during).
29) Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
30) Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
31) The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
32) A mathematical wonder: 111,111,111 multiplied by 111,111,111 gives the result 12,345,678,987,654,321.
33) Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
34) Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
35) There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
36) The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
37) The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
38) The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
39) Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.
40) Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with rejoice.
41) The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke someone's eye out.
42) Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.
43) The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
44) Non-dairy creamer is flammable.
45) Stewardesses and reverberated are the two longest words (12 letters each) that can be typed using only the left hand.
46) The longest word that can be typed using only the right hand is lollipop.
47) Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands.
48) A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
49) In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not re-number the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1.
50) A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group of geese in the air is a skein.
51) The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.
52) The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments
53) The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards.
54) The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
55) The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
56) The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
57)
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."

58) The shape of plant collenchyma cells and the shape of the bubbles in beer foam are the same - they are orthotetrachidecahedrons.
59) The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation. Sames goes for the Italian lira which uses the same abbreviation ('lira' coming from 'libra'). So British currency (before it went metric) was always quoted as "pounds/shillings/pence", abbreviated "L/s/d" (libra/solidus/denarius).
60) Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
61) Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
62) The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead".
63) Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
64) Camel's milk does not curdle.
65) In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
66) An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
67) Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.
68) The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.
69) Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
70) All porcupines float in water.
71) Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
72) Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
73) The world's largest wine cask is in Heidelberg, Germany.
74) Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."
75) Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
76) If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town.
77) St. Stephen is the patron saint of bricklayers.
78) The first song played on Armed Forces Radio during operation Desert Shield was "Rock the Casba" by the Clash.
79) The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
80) The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)
81) Texas is also the only state that is allowed to fly its state flag at the same height as the U.S. flag.
82) The only nation who's name begins with an "A", but doesn't end in an "A" is Afghanistan.
83) The names of the three wise monkeys are: Mizaru: See no evil, Mikazaru: Hear no evil, and Mazaru: Speak no evil.
84) When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror.
85) The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
86) Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.

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