I always make a point of searching out odd facts from as many sources as possible. Today’s list is what this blog is really all about, totally useless information and totally useless statistics. Some are humorous and some are silly but never doubt my ability to come up with useless information that has absolutely no value whatsoever.
Thirty-nine percent of women who think their legs are fat still wear short skirts.
In seventy-five percent of American households, the women manage the money and pay the bills.
If the population of China began walking past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
There is a lawsuit filed every thirty seconds in the United States.
Approximately 30,000 Americans are injured by toilets every year.
Forty-five percent of cat owners buy holiday gifts for their pet.
A four-year-old child asks an average of 437 questions a day.
The average American spends eight years of his life watching television.
The average human produces 50,000 pints of spit in a lifetime – the equivalent of two small swimming pools.
The average person over the age of 50 will have spent a year of their life looking for lost or mislaid items.
“I think about this fact every time I eat a gummy.”
The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
I have three statements to make to start this post: I love T-shirts, I’m a proud American, and I have little or no use for politicians. That being said I wore one of my favorite T-shirts while food shopping yesterday. I have at least eighty T-shirts with all sorts of designs concerning musical groups to chintzy advertising logos, and I love them all. Yesterday’s shirt stated plainly “I love my country, but I fear my government”. I often get comments from passersby about the messages on my shirts, but this one apparently caught the attention of a number of people. They weren’t upset with me for wearing it, they were patting me on the back for wearing it proudly. Our founding fathers were very open about the responsibility of the citizenry to keep an eye on the government. Unfortunately, in recent years that is no longer the case. These days everyone can complain until their blue-in-the-face but unless your part of the politically elite you’re wasting your breath. Maybe it’s time to review some of the history of this country and the revolution that spawned it.
On June 12, 1775, the British offered a pardon to all colonists who would lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to this amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured they were to be immediately hanged.
“July 4th” could just as easily have been celebrated on July 2nd. It was on that date in 1776 that the Second Continental Congress voted our independence from England. John Adams, in fact, wrote: “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.” He believed that it would be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. “It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and Illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this day forward forever more.”
On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance happened today.” He had no way of knowing what had just occurred that day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And one signatory of the Declaration of Independence appended his address: Charles Carroll “of Carrollton,” Maryland. He wanted to be sure that the British, if they wanted to hang him, knew full well where to look for him.
It wasn’t until January 19, 1777, that the national Congress made public all of the names of the men who affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. One reason for the delay may have been the knowledge that if the war effort failed, the signatories would have sealed their fate as traitors.
I’m willing to bet you couldn’t find five current politicians in this country that would even consider doing half of the things the Founders dealt with at that time. Their pride in this country during its formation in the 1700’s seems to be a long dead memory. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow the British decided to retake America and threatened to hang all of our politicians who refused to surrender. I fear the roads to Canada would be clogged with carloads of fleeing representatives from this great nation. What do you think? I also wonder how long it would take the Canadians to close their borders for their own protection.
Being stuck in this house and this bed is driving me crazier than usual. Now that the Cov-19 has come and gone I still have a twenty-pound cast on my leg. I’m still limited by some door sizes which are too small for this freaking wheelchair to get through. Let me apologize, I immediately start to whine and feel sorry for myself when things aren’t going my way. It’s just human nature I suppose. I decided I would find a few items of trivia to help breakup your day. These are a mish-mosh of items collected totally at random. I hope you enjoy them.
An Egyptian papyrus, dated at approximately 1850 B.C., gives us the earliest record of a method to prevent pregnancies. It required putting into the vagina a concoction of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some sort of gummy substance.
Between the mid-1860’s and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from an estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
Not a single bank existed anywhere in the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
After twenty years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor, Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved – and misspelled.
In the seventeenth century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War, approximately sixty million people in Europe died from smallpox.
A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.
If all of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) with twenty-five feet of water.
The British erected in London’s Trafalgar Square a statue of U.S President George Washington, whose armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was not a federal felony to kill a President of the United States.
For fear he might conceal a joke in it was one reason why Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted by his peers with the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence.
No journal entry today because I need a bit of a break. I thought doing something a little different, interesting and off-beat might be just the ticket. I think I’m mentally already on vacation because I’ve started procrastinating many of my normal tasks and putting them off until I return from my Texas trip. I’ll begin preparing for that trip today.
My better-half is also preparing me for the trip by giving me her list of things I’m supposed to bring back for her. Since she was born in Texas and thinks she’s a real Texan, I’m being instructed to bring back a load of stuff. I just smile and nod my head so she’ll walk away happy but come on. Her list keeps getting longer and longer but I’ve managed to pare it down a little. She requires between 5-10 interesting Texas post cards. She’s something of a collector and loves sending random cards to her Mother who lives in Delaware.
She also wants me to somehow carry or ship home a few dozen tamales. She’s obsessed with Mexican food, especially the traditional style tamale. I think it was something special from her early childhood or so she says but I honestly don’t see that request being honored. Next on the list is a pair of cowboy boots or a western hat for the grandson. This one I might make happen if I can get away with spending a reasonable amount of money. The way he’s growing anything I buy will be too small within a month or two so I made no concrete promises on this request either.
Next on her list is her wish for two T-Shirts with some sort of Texas theme. I quote her as best I can, "nothing pornographic, dirty, or stupid". With that list of don’t’s the chances of pleasing her are now slim and none. As with all of her requests, I’ll figure something out once I get there. If I could find a small petrified chunk of horse droppings I’d buy that for her in a second because it would pretty closely reflect my feelings on this entire matter. Maybe I’ll just buy a really dirty T-Shirt for the grandson that he can wear when she comes to visit. Any eighteen month old can get away with wearing something like that and it would absolutely make her crazy as well. That’s called a Win-Win in any language.
Enough of that, now let me throw a short collection of useless things your way. These are things you never really never wanted to know or even cared about.
The line “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s Ulysses provided the name for the subatomic particles now known as “quarks”, named by physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
“Transurphobia” is the fear of haircuts.
Dylan Thomas once unkindly pointed out that, except for one misplaced letter, T.S. Eliot’s name spelled backwards is “toilets”.
The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
The single dot over the lower-case letter “i” is called a “tittle”.
And finally for all you nerds out there:
The letters of the word SHAZAM, which was shouted to conjure up comic-book hero Captain Marvel, stood for Solomon’s wisdom, Hercules’s strength, Atlas’s stamina, Zeus’s power, Achilles’s courage, and Mercury’s speed.
everyuselessthing.com 