Interesting Facts

For Your Warehouse of Useless Knowledge

1. 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire a strung across the U.S.
2. 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
3. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
4. 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
5. 123,000,000 cars are being driven down the U.S's highways.
6. 160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road.
7. 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S.
8. 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is "A meaningless existential hell."
9. 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled.
10. 5% of Canadians don't know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem.
11. 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball each year.
12. 7% of Americans don't know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem.
13. 85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S.
14. 99% of the solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun.
15. A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints.
16. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
17. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.
18. A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.
19. A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.
20. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
21. A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
22. A fully loaded supertanker travelling at normal speed takes a least twenty minutes to stop.
23. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
24. A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.
25. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
26. A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there.
27. A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.
28. A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
29. A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
30. A jellyfish is 95 percent water.
31. A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
32. A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.
33. A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.
34. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 6 years. Wow.
35. A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.
36. A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
37. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
38. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
39. A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
40. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
41. A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.
42. A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.
43. A skunk can spray its stinky scent more than 10 feet.
44. A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
45. A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans!
46. A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually talking.
47. A whale's penis is called a dork.
48. About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.
49. About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money. [The rest of us are avoiding reality for four more years.]
50. According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged for trying.
51. Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.
52. Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
53. All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
54. All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
55. All porcupines float in water.
56. Almonds are a member of the peach family.
57. Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is taken up by automobiles.
58. America once issued a 5-cent bill.
59. America's first nudist organization was founded in 1929, by 3 men.
60. Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
61. An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
62. An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
63. An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
64. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
65. Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
66. Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
67. Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
68. Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant "plenty of excrement."
69. Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under is cap to keep him cool. He changed it every 2 innings.
70. Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
71. Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day.
72. Back in the mid to late 1980's, an IBM-compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
73. Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
74. Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
75. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
76. Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
77. Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
78. Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
79. Bubble gum contains rubber.
80. Camel's milk does not curdle.
81. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
82. Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
83. Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
84. Cats can produce over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs can only produce about ten.
85. Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.
86. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
87. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
88. Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
89. Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
90. David Prowse was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.
91. Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
92. Dogs and cats consume almost $7 billion worth of pet food a year.
93. Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
94. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
95. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
96. Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
97. "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt."
98. Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
99. During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food, that's the weight of about 6 elephants.
100. Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
101. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
102. Eskimo ice cream is neither icy, or creamy.
103. Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks.
104. Every person has a unique tongue print.
105. Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head.
106. Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
107. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."
108. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
109. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
110. Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.
111. Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.
112. Giraffes have no vocal cords.
113. Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.
114. Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio.
115. Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
116. Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
117. Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
118. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
119. Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams.
120. Hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego.
121. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
122. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
123. If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die; they need gravity to swallow.
124. If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town.
125. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
126. If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
127. If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away.
128. In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.
129. In 1980, there was only one country in the world with no telephones - Bhutan.
130. In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.
131. In 1984, a Canadian farmer began renting ad space on his cows.
132. In 75% of American households, women manage the money and pay the bills.
133. In Bangladesh, kids as young as 15 can be jailed for cheating on their finals.
134. In England, in the 1880's, "Pants" were considered a dirty word.
135. In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
136. In every episode of "Seinfeld" there is a Superman somewhere.
137. In Kentucky, 50 percent of the people who get married for the first time are teenagers.
138. In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.
139. In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.
140. In space, astronauts cannot cry, because there is no gravity, so the tears can't flow.
141. In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not re-number the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1.
142. In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured.
143. In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
144. In the movie "Casablanca," Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
145. In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons.
146. In Tokyo, they sell toupees for dogs.
147. Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.
148. It takes a lobster approximately seven years to grow to be one pound.
149. It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.
150. It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
151. It was once against the law to have a pet dog in a city in Iceland.