Heh. I just felt the need to counter with something from the last, oh, fifty years or so. It was the first one that popped to mind.
I like the song a lot but I think it's tailor-made to appeal to someone who grew up on 80s Top 40. Although my 11 year old daughter likes it to so maybe that tells you something.
Fun Fact: Bert Bell, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, came up with the concept of a draft 1935, where the team with the worst record gets to take the first pick of available incoming players to the league to create more parity for the next season. The concept was then soon adopted by the pro basketball and hockey leagues (baseball didn't adopt until the 60s). I learned this while listening to the Y on WHYY last night...
ok a few years ago when we went away for the weekend, my husband left behind all the books I had put in a pile to pack. so i was stuck with the reading material at this semi-dumpy fishing cabin. and lo, I found this: a book called 1227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow your Socks Off. I forgave my husband.
The name of first human being in norse mythology was: Ask.
40% of the human race didn’t survive past its first birthday.
The word time is the most commonly used noun in english.
George W. Bush and Saddam hussein had their shoes handmade by the same italian shoemaker
Most diamonds are at least 3 billion years old.
There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful.
A burning candle creates 1.5 million tiny diamonds per second
A language dies every 14 days.
Nikhedonia: the pleasureable anticipation of success before any actual work has been done.
A medium size cumulus cloud weighs about the same as 80 elephants.
At least 99% of all species that ever existed have left no trace in the fossil record.
A snowflake that falls on a glacier on central greenland can take 200,000 years to reach the sea.
Wombats have cubic feces.
The highest scoring word in scrabble is oxyphenbutazone, 1178 points, an arthritis drug.
There are thought to be 100,000 uncharted mountains under the sea. Only 1000 or so have ever been mapped.
Aborigines, whose culture reaches back to the last ice age, have names for (and can locate) mountains that have been under the sea for 8,000 years
Victorians made tiepins out of badgers’ penis bones
As soon as tiger shark embryos develop teeth they attack and eat each other in the womb
Every human being starts out as an ******* – it is the first part of the body to form in the womb..
90 percent of baby rabbits are eaten by predators.
Only 2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful.
Sir walter raleigh’s devoted widow elizabeth kept his decapitated head with her in a velvet bag for 29 years.
Time and weather are the same word in french, hungarian, spanish, italian, portugese, latvian, serbo croatian bosnian maulbevegin and Tagolog. Weather and consciousness are the same word in Inuit (silay)
St. Brigid of Ireland, the 6th century abbess of Kildare, was noted for the miracle of transforming her used bathwater into beer for visiting clerics.
An estimated 18 million spoons, together weighing as much as 4 blue whales, go missing in Melbourne every year.
Placebos are 305 more effective as an antidote for depression than drugs.
Elizabeth Taylor lived to be 79 but never learned to boil an egg.
The entire internet weighs about the same as one large strawberry.
When a navajo baby laughs aloud for the first time the family throws a party, the one person who made the baby laugh provides the food.
Highways in the west are based on the migratory routes of bison.
Sciapodus – have feet large enough to be used as umbrellas.
Guy faked his own death in 2007, Amir Vehabaric, to see who would come to his funeral. Only his mother came.
Hummingbirds have 2,000 meals a day and hibernate every night.
A piece of the suns core the size of a pinhead would kill a person 99 miles away
A typist’s fingers cover about six miles a day.
The bible is the most shoplifted book in the US.
Rabbits swallow up to 80 % of their own feces.
About 250,000 birds die from crashing into window glass every day.
Women buy 85 percent of the world’s valentines.
Humans kill 11,000 sharks an hour, 100million a year.
2/3 of the world’s population has never seen snow.
In Inuit areodjarekput means to exchange wives for a few days only.
Manchester united is the7th most hated brand I the world.
The speed of the wind has fallen by 60% in the last 30 years.
99% of all the species that ever lived are now extinct.
Fun fact: Tonic water was invented as a means for British colonials in India to take quinine, an anti-malarial drug, which is extremely bitter. It was combined with soda water and sugar to make it more palatable.
An estimated 18 million spoons, together weighing as much as 4 blue whales, go missing in Melbourne every year.
You're welcome!
That's true about the wombats.
However, I'd like to know which Melbourne is the spoon-thieving city:
Melbourne, Australia Mount Melbourne, Antarctica Melbourne, Nova Scotia, Canada Melbourne, Quebec, Canada Melbourne, Derbyshire, UK Melbourne, East Riding of Yorkshire, UK Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, UK Melbourne, Arkansas, U.S. Melbourne, California, U.S. Melbourne, Florida, U.S. Melbourne, Iowa, U.S. Melbourne, Kentucky, U.S.
Good morning everyone and welcome to National Pickle Day!
Fun fact: the « 57 » on Heinz products refers to 57 varieties of pickles. However it just started out as a number the founder Henry Heinz thought was lucky,
Fun Fact: Today is the 92nd anniversary of the opening of the Holland Tunnel. On this day in 1927, some 200,000 passengers made the transit under the Hudson River to Jersey City, NJ or to Manhattan. $26,142 was collected in tolls that day.
Fun Fact: Today is the 92nd anniversary of the opening of the Holland Tunnel. On this day in 1927, some 200.000 passengers made the transit under the Hudson River to Jersey City, NJ or to Manhattan. $26,142 was collected in tolls that day.
At the end of the day, they could only find $16,142 of it. Asking around everyone was all like "I didn't see it."
Sadly, my acquired brain injury has impaired my ability to remember where and when I learnt this wonderful fact. I suspect it was about 10 years ago in a Food Safety Supervisor's course, but I can't remember where my notes from that course are.
I haven't heard of any living humans aged over 200 years, though.
I do suspect you might have to contact Marc Abrahams directly for the teaspoons' award info. It was several years ago, and I've lost the email. I subscribe to mini-AIR (Annals of Improbable Research)
In searching for it I found this wonderful Academia Obscura series of columns with treasure troves of fun facts - keep scrolling! Down towards the very end, there are true cute chemical diagrams with very cheeky names, as well as wonderful citations for fun research
Teddy Roosevelt accidentally mispronounced "Caribbean." Originally, the third syllable is emphasized and still is by some, but Roosevelt emphasized the second syllable. People tend to emulate the president's speech, so that's how it became common.
Fun fact: on this day in 1981 the space shuttle Columbia became the first space vehicle to be used more than once.