This blog was intended to supply the masses with “everyuselessthing” I could find. There are also thousands of so-called “trivia experts” out there with knowledge of thousands upon thousands of other strange and odd facts. It’s a true challenge for me to search out a few that even the experts may not have heard before. Here are ten items that were new to me, and I hope new to them as well.

• The name of the monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel was not “Frankenstein” but “Adam”.

• According to Ian Fleming’s writings, James Bonds favorite alcoholic beverage wasn’t a vodka martini (shaken not stirred) but bourbon. Of the 317 drinks consumed, Bond drank 37 bourbons, 10 bourbons and branch water, and seven bourbons and soda, but only 19 vodka martinis.

• Although the deerstalker hat is almost a trademark of Sherlock Holmes, he never wore one. Nowhere in Sir Arthur Conan Doyles four novels and 56 stories is the hat ever mentioned. The belief that Holmes wore such a hat can be traced to Sydney Paget, an illustrator for Strand Magazine. Paget, who liked deerstalker hats and wore them himself, produced drawings inaccurately depicting Holmes wearing one.

• The official name of the bed created by the Murphy Door Bed Company was not called a Murphy Bed but an In-A-Door bed.

• The monkey wrench was named after its inventor, Charles Moncky.

• The rock group America was actually formed in England.

• The specific English word for a group of kittens is not litter, which can designate animals of different species, but Kittles, or Kindle.

• Table tennis was invented not in China but in England, where it was originally played with balls made from champagne corks and paddles from cigar box lids. English engineer James Gibbs introduced the celluloid ball.

• The person who invented the electric chair was a dentist. In 1881, Dr. Alfred Southwick, a dentist from Buffalo, New York, saw an intoxicated man touch a live electric generator, which promptly killed him. Thus, the electric chair was born.

• In slang Italian perfume describes garlic.

A special thanks to Ted Nugent for this quote.