Archive for the ‘stupid facts’ Tag
I’m a huge fan of statistics. No matter how you shake them out you can always get them to support your idea. I know because I’ve done it a few times myself and they made me look awfully smart. So, when I see information published and supported by statistics, I can’t wait to see how silly they are and how they might have been manipulated. Here are a few that made me smile.
- You’re unlikely to kill yourself by attempting suicide. Fewer than one in twenty-five suicide attempts are successful unless your a senior citizen. They take it more serious with a success rate of one in four.
- More than 70% of serious injuries at American colleges and universities are caused by cheerleading.
- You have a better chance of being killed by a donkey than of dying in a plane crash.
- You’re slightly more likely to die from a cave-in than from contact with tap water.
- It’s more likely you will die from your pajamas catching fire than from the bite of a venomous spider.
- Mosquitos are the deadliest animal on earth causing human deaths at 600,000 per year.
- More people are killed each year by freshwater snails than by salt-water crocodiles.
- You’re slightly more likely to drown in a bathtub than to die from electrocution.
- More than 100 billion (give or take a few million) people have died in the history of the world.
- And last a really stupid death. Cynthia was a topless dancer who died while performing her famous act of jumping out of a cake. Unfortunately, the cake was well constructed and apparently airtight. Cynthia suffocated after waiting 90 minutes to surprise the lucky groom.
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GOTTA LOVE STATISTICS
This is the perfect day to load you all up with a few more interesting tidbits of totally useless information. It’s been raining here for almost 24 hours, my backyard is flooded with 3 feet of dirty water, and it’s sure as hell not feeling much like Spring. It’s either sit in my warm and cozy man-cave and post this information or blow up an inner tube and go out in the backyard and float around in the lake. So, here’s your latest installment of ?????
- You can form the number 12,345,678,987,654,321 by multiplying 111,111,111 by 111,111,111.
- Chicago’s O’Hare airport sells more hot dogs than any other airport in the world.
- The “WD” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement. The “40” came about because it took the creators that many attempts to get the formula right.
- A United States green card is actually yellow.
- A shark jaws are not attached to the rest of its skeleton; that great maw is held in place by muscles and ligaments.
- In the early to mid 1800’s, a trip by Conestoga wagon from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh – a distance of about 300 miles – took roughly 3 weeks.
- During a 60-year life span, an average tree will produce nearly 2 tons of leaves to be raked.
- The working title of the Beatles hit “With a Little Help from My Friends” was originally “Bad Finger Boogie.”
- According to Hollywood lore, silent film actress Norma Talmage started the tradition of stars putting their footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese theater when she accidentally stumbled onto the freshly laid sidewalk in front of it in 1927.
- The first American president to be photographed was John Quincy Adams.
- Most people take about 23,000 breaths a day.
- The first paper towel came from defective toilet paper. Someone at the Scott company saw a crumpled, seemingly ruined roll of TP and decided it should be sold as a kind of disposable hand towel.
- First speed limit in the United States was set in 1901 in Connecticut at 12 mph.
- Samuel Seymour was five years old when he was at Ford’s theater the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. He was the last survivor of that event. He died in 1956.
- The former communist leader of Romania, Nikolai Ceausescu – also known as “The Giant of the Carpathians” – banned the game Scrabble because he felt it was too intellectual. He also believed that baseball was subversive.
I think that’s about enough for today. I hope you find these factoids interesting even though they are a bit obscure. These are just things you never realized you needed to know and you’re welcome!
C’MON SPRING
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