Archive for the ‘odd facts’ Tag
- The can opener wasn’t invented until nearly 50 years after the can itself.
- If there are twenty-three people in a room, there is a 50% chance that two of them will share a birthday. This is what statisticians call “The Birthday Paradox”.
- Human beings landed on the moon before inventing wheeled suitcases.
- A majority of Canadians live south of Seattle.
- Astroglide Lube was originally supposed to be a space shuttle coolant.
- The Cornish word for “breath” is “anal.”
- The letters in “eleven plus two” can be rearranged to spell “twelve plus one.”
- Some people are afraid of gravity. (Barophobia).
- “Phobophobia” is a real thing. It’s sufferers are afraid of fear.
- The vibrator was originally invented as a medical device. Orgasms were believed to be able to cure many medical ailments.
My Favorite
Cornflakes were originally developed to suppress the urge to masturbate. The Kellogg brothers were deeply religious and believed that the food would help their brethren suppress the urge to pleasure themselves.
GUESS AGAIN KELLOGG BROTHERS
Yesterday was a less than a spectacular day. My better-half was diagnosed with Covid after returning from her safari to the northern wilds of Maine. It effectively required that the cat and I sleep alone for a few days until she recovers. Today started off when the Maine Medical System decided to charge me an out-of-pocket charge of $117.30 to appear at their office to have my blood pressure checked. I said, “Hell No!” and immediately cancelled the appointment. I hate it when people in any organization think of me as just another revenue stream rather than a real patient. Well, I think that’s enough of my bitching and complaining for today. This post is trivia related but contains much more obscure information than my normal facts. Enjoy!
- Shaquille O’Neal wears a size 52XXXXL (extra-extra-extra-extra-long) jersey.
- 20.41 pounds is the weight of $1,000,000 worth of U.S. $100.00 dollar bills.
- It is 14 miles distance from the Batcave to Gotham City.
- There is an average of 512 plain M&M’s per pound.
- Jimy Olsen’s middle name was Bartholomew.
- The movie Roots was originally titled “Before This Anger”.
- The original family surname of John Cleese was Cheese.
- “Et one, Brute?” was the advertising slogan for Lay’s Potatoe Chips in the 60’s.
- “JoJo” is Bart Simpson’s middle name.
- Kelcy’s Bar was Archie Bunkers favorite hangout.
ONE OF MY FAVS
Manfred was the oldest of the Marx Brothers who died before his first birthday.
🚨👮🏻🚨
ARREST THE LAWBREAKERS
It’s “Weird Facts” Day here at Everyuselessthing. I’m offering a few odd and strange truisms you’ve probably never heard of before. Just another public service for those of you interested in the unusual. Some of this information was collected from a book authored by Dan Lewis in 2013. This is my homage to him, a fellow lover of the weirdness that is the human race.
- In August 1962, American singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett released a novelty Halloween song “Monster Mash”. The song (his only hit) reached the top of the US Billboard charts in October of that year. But it took more than ten years for it to have any success in the UK. In 1962, the BBC banned the song from the airwaves, claiming it was “too morbid.” When the song was finally rereleased in 1973, the BBC saw it immediately rise to number three on the UK charts.
- The Mona Lisa is not painted on canvas, but on three pieces of wood roughly an inch and a half thick.
- Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Abbott was born without a right hand. Nevertheless, he had a ten-year career in the league, and on September 4, 1993, threw a no-hitter.
- New York City is filled with carts selling hotdogs, pretzels, cold drinks, etc., with the core products running just a few bucks, depending on location. Central Park spots can earn as much as $175,000.00 annually, says Yahoo.com, and in 2008, one vendor bid more than $600,000.00 for the exclusive rights to sell wieners outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Toilet paper is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It can’t be, because TP predated slice bread by more than 50 years. Commercial TP was invented in 1857 by a New Yorker named Joseph Gayetty, who sold packs of 500 sheets for $.50. It’s marketing language called the product “the greatest necessity of the age,” so perhaps, sliced bread is the greatest thing since toilet paper.
HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY
How about a few strange trivia facts. After all this blog isn’t called Every-Useless-Thing for nothing. Here’s a small collection of useless things for your enjoyment.
- One pound of peanut butter can contain up to 150 bug fragments and 5 rodent hairs.
- Roughly 100 people die every year from choking on ball-point pens.
- Some scientists view love in terms of addiction. One study discovered that monogamous pairing is based in the same region of the brain as drug addiction.
- Studies show that 87 percent of people fear getting trapped in dull conversations at dinner parties.
- A retired teacher in California once admitted that he taught for 17 years without knowing how to read or write.
- There is a real neurological disorder called Alien Hand Syndrome (AHS). It causes the sufferer’s hands to move independently, without control of the action.
- The acid in your stomach is so powerful that it can dissolve a razor blade in less than a week.
- You can find 20 million microscopic animals living on a square inch of human skin.
- More than 90 percent of women have asymmetrical breasts.
- On any given day, approximately 400 million people across the globe will have sexual intercourse, which means that about 4,000 people are probably having sex right now.
THE HUMAN MIRACLE – NOT
Are you ready for another day of freaky and bizarre? Let me dig into my bag of nonsense and come up with four or five more oddities which you might find interesting. I don’t need to say anything else, here we go.
- When English writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) died, his heart was kept apart from his body that was cremated. The idea was to bury it in Stinsford, England, the home of his beloved childhood church and his family’s burial plot. All went according to plan until his sister’s cat leaped up on her kitchen table, snatched the heart, and ran off into the woods with it.
- Centuries ago, animals were often put on trial for crimes ranging from witchcraft to theft and murder. Throughout history, the animal that’s been prosecuted mostly is the pig. In 1547 France, for example, a mother pig and her six babies were sentenced to death for killing and eating a child. The sow was executed, but the piglets were pardoned because it was felt that they were led astray by the bad example of their mother.
- A fortune teller told businessman Kichiro Toyoda that it would be good luck to change his company’s name to Toyota and to give the company cars names beginning with the letter “C “such as Celica and Camry.
- Francesco Lentini was born in 1889 with what appeared to be a tail, but which was in fact a nearly developed foot growing from the base of his spine. Although he was treated as a disabled outcast most of his life, he found work in Italian sideshows and was quoted as having said, “I have never complained. I think life is beautiful, and I enjoy living it.” He lived to the ripe old age of 78 years.
- Investigators in Tacoma, Washington, were able to identify two generations of maggots on a body that had died from a gunshot wound. In doing so, they determined the approximate date of the corpses demise, as a maggots lifecycle lasts only about three weeks. Armed with the estimated time of death, the investigators were able to trace the disease whereabouts and eventually found the killer.
OOH MY!!!
With my better half’s spending a week with her grandson in California, I thought I’d enjoy this gray and rainy Maine day by supplying all of you with interesting, weird, freaky, and odd tidbits of facts and trivia. So, todays post (part 1) and Tuesdays post (part 2) should be interesting and just a bit weird.
- On April 21, 1997, a rocket containing the cremated remains of 24 people was launched into space. Among the remains were those of Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek series creator. The rocket was launched by Celestis, a company formed in 1996 for the expressed purpose of launching ashes into space.
- A tourist visiting San Francisco in 1964 was involved in a minor cable car accident. As a result, she sued the city of San Francisco, claiming that the incident had turned her into a nymphomaniac. She won the case and received an award of $50,000. (Only in San Francisco)
- The extreme dread of thunder is called brontophobia. For brontophobes , the boom and crash of thunder has a demonic quality. Often found in people suffering from a psychoneurosis, brontophobia can also be associated with a person, often a person in a position of authority, and the fearsome thunder is their expression of disapproval.
- During World War II a young woman in Germany, Emmie Marie Jones, gave birth to a daughter, despite the fact that she insisted she was a virgin. In 1955, scientists in England did genetic testing and discovered that Emmie and her daughter were genetically identical twins. The only explanation the scientists could offer was that the shock of the bombing caused parthenogenesis, the spontaneous splitting of an unfertilized egg.
- Queen Mary I of England and Ireland (1516-1558) was a Catholic who had Protestants tortured and killed. Her actions inspired the nickname “Bloody Mary”, which in turn later inspired the famous cocktail.
LOOKS LIKE MY HIGH SCHOOL PROM DATE
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.
As you’re probably aware I collect weird and odd trivia. I stumbled upon a book by a Mr. Russ Kick titled “50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know”. It’s a collection of somewhat obscure facts collected by Kick. I’ll list ten of the facts from the book without the accompanying lengthy explanations provided to prove his points. Some facts appear outrageous, but it seems his research was well done. If you want to check his facts, then you’ll need to find and buy the book or do some lengthy research online.
Barbie is based on a German sex doll
Fetuses masturbate
George Washington embezzled government funds
Scientists are re-creating the highly lethal 1918 Spanish Flu virus
Several thousand Americans were held in Nazi concentration camps during WW2
Well over 300,000 tons of chemical weapons have been dumped into the sea
Men have clitorises
Native Americans were once kept as slaves
James Audubon killed all the birds he painted
The Environmental Protection Agency lied about New York’s air quality after the 9/11 disaster.
This little book makes for interesting reading.
The human body never ceases to amaze. Just when you think you’ve heard everything you could possibly hear about human bodies and their uses and peculiarities, you find out you had no idea just how strange they can be. So, let me start your education with more facts about your human body.
- Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails.
- Bright light and sunshine can make you sneeze.
- Right-handed people live on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
- Redheads are more likely than other people to be left-handed.
- Humans sweat up to a pint of fluid each night.
- Humans can survive longer without food than they can without sleep.
- Sleeping with an electric blanket can interrupt your sleep patterns and make it difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
- Your belly button is home to more than 60 strains of bacteria.
- The average adult toenail is home to 43 species of fungi.
And here’s an historical fun fact that is one of my favorites:
Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about farts and flatulence called “Fart Proudly”.
HUMAN ANIMALS – WOW!
As you should be aware I have quite the collection of weird facts I’ve collected over many years and from many sources. As I was cleaning up my old desk top computer yesterday, I found this list of strange and odd facts that hasn’t seen the light of day since 2006. So, let’s take a walk down a very old memory lane.
- A Crocodiles tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.
- A group of larks is called an exaltation.
- A kangaroo can’t jump unless its tail is touching the ground.
- A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.
- A man had the hiccups for 69 years.
- A mole can dig over 250 feet of tunnel in a single night.
- A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
- A noisy restaurant is 100,000 times as loud as a watch ticking, a rock Concert is 1,000,000,000 times as loud. and a shotgun blast 1,000,000,000,000 times as loud.
- A person at rest generates as much heat as a 100watt light bulb.
- A group of owls is called a parliament.
- About 300 million cells die in your body every minute.
- A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
- A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.
- A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
- A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.
- A group of ravens is called a murder.
- A shark can grow a new set of teeth in a week
- A snail can have about 25,000 teeth.
- A group of toads is called a knot.
- About 3,500 gallons if water is needed to produce one pound of beef.
*****
HAVING A DRINK ON THE BEACH OR ON THE DECK
YOU CHOOSE
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