Random Thoughts by Jon W. Baker
Thursday, January 03, 2013
The Fishing Trip
The Fishing Trip
Four guys have been going on the same fishing trip for many years.
Four guys have been going on the same fishing trip for many years.
Two days before the group is to leave, Ron's wife puts her foot down and tells him he isn't going.
Ron's mates are very upset that he can't go, but what can they do.
Two days later the three get to the camping site only to find Ron sitting there with a tent set up, Firewood gathered, and dinner cooking on the fire.
"Ron! How long you been here, and how did you talk your missus into letting you go?"
"Well, I've been here since yesterday. Yesterday evening, I was sitting in my chair and my wife came up behind me and put her hands over my eyes and said, 'Guess who?'
I pulled her hands off, turned around, and she was wearing a brand new see-through nightie. She took my hand and pulled me to our bedroom. The room had candles lit and rose petals all over. On the bed she had handcuffs, and ropes! She told me to tie and cuff her to the bed, and I did.
And then she said, 'Do whatever you want.'
So, here I am."
Labels: Men Rule., Men who ignore their wives, The Fishing Trip
Friday, December 21, 2012
Three Wise Men-From Texas
Three Wise Men-From Texas
In a small southern town in
Texas there was a nativity scene that showed great skill and talent had gone
into creating it. One small feature stood out. The three wise men were wearing
firemen’s helmets. Totally unable to come up with a reason or explanation, a
visitor decided to ask a local what it meant.
The visitor assured her that
he did, but simply couldn’t recall anything about firemen in the Bible. She
jerked her Bible from behind the counter and ruffled through some pages, and
finally jabbed her finger at a passage. Sticking it in his face she said, ‘See,
it says right here, “The three wise man came from afar.”’
Labels: Three Wise Men-From Texas
A Christmas Tradition Comes to Pass
A Christmas Tradition Comes to Pass
Santa was very cross. It
was Christmas Eve and nothing was going right. The elves were complaining about
not getting paid overtime. The reindeer had been drinking all afternoon and the
sleigh was broken. Santa was furious.
‘I can’t believe it!’ he
yells. ‘I’ve got to deliver millions of presents all over the world in just a
few hours – all of my reindeer are drunk, the elves are on strike and I don’t
even have a Christmas tree! I sent that stupid little angel out to find one
hours ago! What am I going to do?’
Just then, the little
angel opens the front door and steps in from the snowy night, dragging a
Christmas tree. ‘Oi fatty!’ he says. ‘Where d’you want me to stick this?’
And thus the tradition
of Angels atop the Christmas trees came to pass.
Friday, October 12, 2012
The Butt Dial
THE BUTT DIAL
I heard on the news yesterday, that there are over 1 million mis-dials to the 911 emergencey system nationwide per year. 12 percent of those dials are Butt Dials!
If you do not know what a Butt Dial is, it is when you sit on your phone and accidentally depress the 911 button on your phone and dial it.
I got to thinking: What if those Butt Dials are not accidental?
I was thinking that the majority of those 12 percent that Butt Dialed, have Smart Phones. What if the Smart Phone is smart enough to know when a big fat ass American is going to sit on it, and is actually dialing out for help?
Saturday, May 05, 2012
DID YOU KNOW THAT
·
Barbie's measurements if she were life size:
39-23-33.
·
The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S
(U.S.)
·
Our eyes are always the same size from birth,
but our nose and ears never stop growing.
·
The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet
thick.
·
There are two credit cards for every person in
the United States.
· The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is
'Live Free or Die'. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the
state prison in Concord.
·
The straw was invented by Egyptian brewers to
taste in-process beer without removing the fermenting ingredients which floated
on the top of the container.
·
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.
· The United States government keeps its supply of
silver at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY
·
There are only thirteen blimps in the world.
·
Nine of the thirteen blimps are in the United
States.
·
The existing biggest blimp is the Fuji Film
blimp.
·
Naugahyde, plastic "leather" was
created in Naugatuck, Connecticut.
·
The Swiss flag is square.
· The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the
constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The
abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an
'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation. Same goes for the Italian lira which uses the
same abbreviation ('lira' coming from 'libra'). So British currency (before it
went metric) was always quoted as "pounds/shillings/pence",
abbreviated "L/s/d" (libra/solidus/denarius).
· The three largest land-owners in England are the
Queen, the Church of England and Trinity College, Cambridge.
·
The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime,
tierce, sext, none, vespers and compline.
·
If you come from Manchester, you are a
Mancunian.
· No animal, once frozen solid (i.e., water
solidifies and turns to ice) survives when thawed, because the ice crystals
formed inside cells would break open the cell membranes. However there are
certain frogs that can survive the experience of being frozen. These frogs make
special proteins which prevent the formation of ice (or at least keep the
crystals from becoming very large), so that they actually never freeze even
though their body temperature is below zero Celsius. The water in them remains
liquid: a phenomenon known as 'supercooling.' If you disturb one of these frogs
(just touching them even), the water in them quickly freezes solid and they
die.
· The white part of your fingernail is called the
lunula.
·
Madrid is the only European capital city not
situated on a river.
· The name for fungal remains found in coal is
sclerotinite.
· The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth
Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can
sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.
· Emus cannot walk backwards.
· It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around
the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first
word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear. This actually has no bearing on anything at
all, but it is a really neat useless piece of coincidence like the
Lincoln/Kennedy thing.
· The shopping mall in Abbotsford, British
Columbia, Canada has the largest water clock in North America.
·
Both writer Edgar Allen Poe and LSD advocate
Timothy Leary were kicked out of West Point.
·
The word posh, which denotes luxurious rooms or
accommodations, originated when ticket agents in England marked the tickets of
travelers going by ship to the Orient. Since there was no air conditioning in
those days, it was always better to have a cabin on the shady side of the ship
as it passed through the Mediterranean and Suez area. Since the sun is in the
south, those with money paid extra to get cabin's on the left, or port,
traveling to the Asia, and on the right, or starboard, when returning to Europe.
Hence their tickets were marked with the initials for Port Outbound Starboard
Homebound, or POSH.
·
The top layer of a wedding cake, known as the
groom's cake, traditionally is a fruit cake. That way it will save until the
first anniversary.
·
The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm
and often hid the fact by posing with his hand resting on a sword, or by
holding gloves.
·
The forward pass was created by the football
team at Saint Louis University.
·
In every show that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt
(The Fantasticks) wrote, there is at least one song about rain.
·
A kind of tortoise in the Galapagos Islands has
an upturned shell at its neck so it can reach its head up to eat cactus
branches.
·
The only city whose name can be spelled
completely with vowels is Aiea, Hawaii, located approximately twelve miles west
of Honolulu.
·
Parthenogenesis is the term used to describe the
process by which certain animals are able to reproduce themselves in successive
female generations without intervention of a male of the species. At least one
species of lizard is known to do so.
· Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while
dogs only have about ten.
· The word "Checkmate" in chess comes
from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat", which means "the king is
dead".
· The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2, should always
be written as QE2. QEII is the actual queen.
· "Quisling" is the only word in the
English language to start with "quis."
· All of the cobble stones that used to line the
streets in New York were originally weighting stones put in the hulls of
Belgian ships to keep an even keel.
· Nepal is the only country with a non-quadrilateral
flag (it looks like two pennants glued on top of the other).
·
Libya has the only flag which is all one color
with no writing or decoration on it.
· The only borough of New York City that isn't an
island (or part of an island) is the Bronx.
· The 1957 Milwaukee Braves were the first
baseball team to win the World Series after being relocated.
·
The tune for the "A-B-C" song is the
same as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
·
When a coffee seed is planted, it takes five
years to yield its first consumable fruit.
·
The common goldfish is the only animal that can
see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.
· Linn's Stamp News is the world's largest weekly
newspaper for stamp collectors.
· Tennessee is bordered by more states than any
other. The eight states are Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
·
Des Moines has the highest per capita Jello
consumption in the U.S.
·
The Western-most point in the contiguous United
States is Cape Alava, Washington.
· There are only three animals with blue tongues,
the Black Bear, the Chow Chow dog and the blue-tongued lizard.
· The first fossilized specimen of Austalopithecus
afarenisis was named Lucy after the palentologists' favorite song, Lucy in the
Sky With Diamonds, by the Beatles.
·
Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
·
The geographical center of North America is near
Rugby, North Dakota.
·
The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.
·
Hacky-sack was invented in Turkey.
·
If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it
measures 87 feet long.
· There are six five words in the English language
with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum, continuum,
duumvirate and duumvir, residuum.
· The "Calabash" pipe, most often
associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an
American) portrayed Holmes onstage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his
mouth while he spoke his lines.
·
Most Americans' car horns beep in the key of F.
·
Dirty Harry's badge number is 2211.
·
The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
·
The shortest French word with all five vowels is
"oiseau" meaning bird.
·
Camel's milk does not curdle.
·
"Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim
Morrison.
·
The ball on top of a flagpole is called the
truck.
·
A person from the country of Nauru is called a
Nauruan; this is the only palindromic nationality.
·
The word "modem" is a contraction of
the words "modulate, demodulate."
·
Oliver Cromwell was hanged and decapitated two
years after he had died (that will teach him!).
·
In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been
domesticated.
·
Iowa has more independent telephone companies
than any other state.
·
Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
·
Hamsters love to eat crickets.
·
The only "real" food that U.S.
Astronauts are allowed to take into space is pecan nuts.
·
The word "queueing" is the only
English word with five consecutive vowels.
·
The first Eagle Scout west of the Mississippi is
buried in San Marcos, Texas.
·
In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman
somewhere.
·
Roberta Flack wrote "Killing Me
Softly" about singer Don McLean.
·
The Greek version of the Old Testament is called
the Septuagint.
·
Spencer Eldon was the name of the naked baby on
the cover of Nirvana's album.
·
All three major 1996 Presidential candidates,
Clinton, Dole and Perot, were left-handed.
·
The Madagascan Hissing Cockroach is one of the
few insects who give birth to live young, rather than laying eggs.
·
The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book
which does not mention the name of God.
·
Sheriff came from “Shire Reeve”. During early
years of feudal rule in England, each shire had a reeve who was the law for
that shire. When the term was brought to the United States it was shortened to
Sheriff.
·
An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
·
Dracula is the most filmed story of all time,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is second and Oliver Twist is third.
·
Songs by Yoko Ono appear to be the longest songs
ever recorded, but they are not. It just
seems that way.
·
The silhouette on the NBA logo is Jerry West.
·
The silhouette on the Major League Baseball logo
is Harmon Killebrew.
·
The name Jeep is locally believed to have come
from the abbreviation “Just Empty Every Pocket”. Not true, it actually came from the abbreviation
used by the army for "General Purpose" vehicle, “G.P” pronounced
jeep.
·
The little lump of flesh just forward of your
ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
·
Soweto in South Africa was derived from SOuth
WEst TOwnship.
·
Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly
used to clean elephants.
·
The Andy Griffith Show was the first spin-off in
TV history. It was a spin-off of the Danny Thomas Show.
·
Goat's eyes have rectangular pupils.
·
Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to
the famous Disney logo.
·
Other than humans, black lemurs are the only
primates that may have blue eyes.
·
The United States has never lost a war in which
mules were used.
·
The two longest one-syllable words in the
English language are "screeched" and "strengths."
·
Great Britain was the first county to issue
postage stamps. Hence, the postage stamps of Britain are the only stamps in the
world not to bear the name of the country of origin. However, every stamp
carries a relief image or a silhouette of the monarch's head instead.
·
Images for picture stamps in the United States
are commissioned by the United States Postal Service Department of Philatelic
Fulfillment.
·
Artist Constantino Brumidi fell from the dome of
the U.S. Capitol while painting a mural around the rim. He died four months
later.
·
Since 1896, the beginning of the modern
Olympics, only Greece and Australia have participated in every Games.
·
There were no squirrels on Nantucket until 1989.
·
Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for
Sports Illustrated. (August 1972).
·
Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially
for Ronald Reagan.
·
Will Clark of the Texas Rangers is a direct
descendant of William Clark of Lewis and Clark.
·
When ocean tides are at their highest, they are
called "spring tides." When they are at their lowest, they are call
"neep tides."
·
February 1865 is the only month in recorded
history not to have a full moon.
·
The last NASCAR driver to serve jail time for
running moonshine was Buddy Arrington.
·
Many Japanese golfers carry
"hole-in-one" insurance, because it is traditional in Japan to share
one's good luck by sending gifts to all your friends when you get an
"ace." The price for what the Japanese term an "albatross"
can often reach $10,000.
·
The difference between male and female blue
crabs is the design located on their apron (belly.) The male blue crab has the
Washington Monument while the female apron is shaped like the U.S. Capitol.
·
It takes a lobster approximately seven years to
grow to be one pound.
·
The ridges on the sides of coins are called
reeding.
·
The lot numbers for the cyanide-tainted Tylenol
capsules scare back in 1982 were MC2880 and 1910MD.
·
Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state
capital without a McDonalds.
·
The Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a
senator (which is OK I guess, since I voted for an Ass for President).
·
At latitude 60 degrees south you can sail all
the way around the world.
·
A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes.
·
The hyoid bone, in your throat, is the only bone
in the body not attached to another bone.
·
Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and man all
have seven neck vertebra.
·
Sunbeams that shine down through the clouds are
called crespucular rays.
·
Very small clouds that look like they have been
broken off of bigger clouds are called scuds.
·
On a dewy morning, if you look at your shadow in
the grass, the dew drops shine light back to your eye creating a halo called a
heilgenschein (German for halo.)
·
The correct response to the Irish greeting,
"Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to
yourself."
·
Giraffes have no vocal cords.
·
Joe DiMaggio had more home runs than strikeouts
during his career.
·
All porcupines float in water.
·
Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of
Ohio.
·
A-1 Steak Sauce contains both orange peel and
raisins
·
Worcestershire Sauce on the other hand, contains
molasses, cloves and anchovies (among other things).
·
Many northern parishes (counties) of Louisiana
did not agree with the Confederate movement. To show their disapproval, they
changed their names. That's why there is a Union Parish, Jefferson Parish, etc.
·
The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice
as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of
Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for
blacks and whites.
·
Residents of the island of Lesbos are
Lesbosians, rather than Lesbians. (Of course, lesbians are called lesbians
because Sappho was from Lesbos).
·
The Chinese ideogram for 'trouble' symbolizes
'two women living under one roof'.
·
German has a wood for the peace offerings
brought to your mate when you've committed some conceived slight. This is
"drachenfutter" or dragon's food.
·
In Chinese, the words for crisis and opportunity
are the same.
·
No word in the English language rhymes with month.
·
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."
·
The poisonous copperhead smells like fresh cut
cucumbers.
·
In Disney's "Fantasia", the Sorcerer's
name is "Yensid" (Disney backwards).
·
The smallest mushroom's name is
"Hop-low."
·
Anne Boleyn had six fingernails on one hand.
·
Mustard gas was invented in the McKinley
Building on the American University campus. Additionally, preliminary work on
the Manhattan Project was done in that building. The government used the
McKinley Building because of its unusual architecture. If there would be any
type of large explosion inside the building, the building would implode onto
itself, containing any lethal gas or nuclear material. The building now houses
the Physics Department.
·
When angered, the ears of Tazmanian devils turn
a pinkish-red.
·
The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only
six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
·
The naval rank of "Admiral" is derived
from the Arabic phrase "amir al bahr", which means "lord of the
sea".
·
The Les Nessman character on the TV series WKRP
in Cincinnati wore a band-aid in every episode. Either on himself, his glasses,
or his clothing.
·
A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened.
·
The roads on the island of Guam are made with
coral. Guam has no sand. The sand on the beaches is actually ground coral. When
concrete is mixed, the coral sand is used instead of importing regular sand
from thousands of miles away.
·
Mt. Vernon Washington grows more tulips than the
entire country of Holland.
·
Jamie Farr (who played Klinger on M*A*S*H) was
the only member of the cast who actually served as a soldier in the Korean war.
·
The southern most city in the United States is
Na'alehu, Hawaii.
·
Alaska was the only part of the United States
that was invaded by the Japanese during WWII. The territory was the island of
Adak in the Aleutian Chain.
·
Woodward Ave in Detroit, Michigan carries the
designation M-1, named so because it was the first paved road anywhere.
·
Michigan was the first state to plow it's roads
and the first to adopt a yellow dividing line.
·
Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big
Village".
·
The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119.
·
The shortest verse in the Bible is "Jesus
wept."
·
Way back when they were using marble columns,
the people selling the columns would carve out the centers and fill it with
wax. So the people buying them started asking "Is it without wax?" Or
in other words "Are you sincere?"
·
Zaire is the world leader in cobalt mining,
producing two-thirds of the world's cobalt supply.
·
No modern language has a true concept of "I
am." It is always used linked with are in reference of another verb.
·
Little known Cathedral Caverns near Grant,
Alabama has the world's largest cave opening, the largest stalagmite (Goliath),
and the largest stalagmite forest in the World.
·
The only person ever to decline a Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book Arrowsmith.
·
Maine is the only state that borders on only one
state.
·
There are almost twice as many people in Rhode
Island than there are in Alaska.
·
Kudzu is not indigenous to the South, but in
that climate it can grow up to six inches a day.
·
Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
·
The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.'
·
The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either
'picture cell' or 'picture element.'
·
Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz.
·
Bananas do not grow on trees, but on rhizomes.
·
Astronauts in the Space Shuttle were weightless
not because there is no gravity in space, but because they are in free fall
around the Earth.
·
St. Augustine was the first major proponent of
the "missionary" position.
·
Lizzie Borden was acquitted.
·
Alexander Hamilton was shot by Aaron Burr in the
groin (ouch!).
·
Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book
in every Dewey-decimal category.
·
Roger Ebert is the only film critic to have ever
won the Pulitzer prize.
·
A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is
called a Sadian, not a Sadist (of course).
·
Tribeca in Manhattan stands for TRIangle BElow
CAnal street. Soho stands for SOuth of HOuston street.
·
Columbia University is the second largest
landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
·
The world's largest wine cask is in Heidleberg,
Germany.
·
Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off
by an aligator while he hosted "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."
·
Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
·
Seven Olympic gold medal winners eventually went
on to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
·
Kerimski Church in Finland is world's biggest
church made of wood.
·
The St. Louis Gateway Arch had a projected death
toll while it was being built. But, no one died.
·
The average ear of corn has eight-hundred
kernels arranged in sixteen rows.
·
A cat has four rows of whiskers.
·
Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide while painting
Wheat Field with Crows.
·
An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
·
Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly
beans in outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21, 1983
voyage of the space shuttle Challenger (the same voyage as the first American
woman in space, Sally Ride).
·
Baseballer Connie Mack's real name was Cornelius
McGilicuddy.
·
If you were standing in the northernmost point
in the contiguous (48) states, you'd be standing in Minnesota.
·
Only thirty percent of the famous Maryland blue
crabs are actually from Maryland, the rest are from North Carolina and
Virginia.
·
Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible
computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run
Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
·
Not all of West Virginia voted to go with the
North. When the State of West Virginia was formed from Virginia in 1863 the
three western counties in Virginia voted to go with West Virginia, but West
Virginia didn't take them because they were poor. Instead they took three
counties that voted to stay with Virginia, because they were richer and they
had the B&O railroad. Those counties since split and are 5 Jefferson,
Hampshire, Berkley, Mineral, and Morgan.
·
The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.
·
The Dodge brothers Horace and John were Jewish,
that's why the first Dodge emblem had a star of David in it.
·
Studebaker was the only major car company to
stop making cars while making a profit from them.
·
Studebaker still exists, but is now called
Worthington.
·
Chrysler built B-29's that bombed Japan,
Mitsubishi built Zeros that tried to shoot them down. Both companies now build
cars in a joint plant call Diamond Star.
·
On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the
clock tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.
·
The top three cork-producing countries are
Spain, Portugal and Algeria. (Cork comes from trees).
·
In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy's last name is Gail.
It is shown on the mail box.
·
If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker,
New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town.
·
New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and
the late M*A*S*H star McLean Stevenson were both once assistant football
coaches at Northwestern University.
·
The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet
that doesn't have 1 syllable... it has three.
·
All swans and all sturgeons in England are
property of the Queen. Messing with them is a serious offense.
·
Michael Di Lorenzo, who played Eddie Torres on
New York Undercover series is one of the lead dancers in Michael Jackson's
"Beat It" video.
·
Only two people signed the Declaration of
Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest
signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 year later.
·
October 4, 1957 is a historic date to be remembered,
it is the day both "Leave it to Beaver" and the Russian satellite
Sputnik 1 were launched.
·
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
·
It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook
macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot.
·
Do you know who invented Television? The
credit as to who was the inventor of modern television really comes down to two
different people in two different places both working on the same problem at
about the same time: Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, a Russian-born American inventor
working for Westinghouse, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a privately backed farm
boy from the state of Utah. Zworykin had a patent, but Farnsworth had a
picture.
·
The antifungal, nystatin, which is sometime used
for treating thrush, is named after New York State Institute for Health
(Acronym).
·
QANTAS, the name of the Australian national
airline, is a (former) acronym, for Queensland And Northern Territories Air
Service.
·
The world's largest four-faced clock sits atop
the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
·
Almonds are members of the peach family.
·
The first video ever played on MTV Europe was
"Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits.
·
If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively
(1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050.
·
The "Grinch" singer and voice of Tony
the Tiger is a charming man named Thurl Ravenscroft.
·
The famous split-fingered Vulcan salute is
actually intended to represent the first letter ("shin," pronounced
"sheen") of the word "shalom." As a small boy, Leonard
Nimoy observed his rabbi using it in a benediction and never forgot it;
eventually he was able to add it to "Star Trek" lore.
·
The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is
called an octothorpe.
·
Ham radio operators got the term "ham"
coined from the expression "ham-fisted operators", a term used to
describe early radio users who sent Morse code (i.e. pounded their fists).
·
While the Chinese invented gunpowder, they were
not the first to develop firearms.
·
Sam Colt invented the "revolving
pistol." Therefore, all revolvers are correctly called pistols.
·
A 12 gauge "rifled slug" does not
spin, even though there are grooves on its bearing surface. A slug actually
travels like a dart.
·
Revolvers cannot be silenced, due all the noisy
gasses which escape the cylinder gap at the rear of the barrel.
·
A bullet fired from the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge
(also called the .308 Winchester) is still supersonic at 1000 yards.
·
The term "the whole 9 yards" came from
WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the
ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before
being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target,
it got "the whole 9 yards."
·
The home team must provide the referee with 24
footballs for each National Football League game.
·
The maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62 oz.
·
A flea expert is a pullicologist.
·
A bear has 42 teeth.
·
M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest
Mars, Sr., then candy maker, and his associate Bruce Murrie.
·
The only domestic animal not mentioned in the
Bible is the cat.
·
The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
·
Table tennis balls have been known to travel off
the paddle at speeds up to 105.6 miles per hour.
·
In Irian Jaya exists a tribe of tall, white
people who use parrots as a warning sign against intruders.
·
In the Dutch province of Twente people live on
average half a year shorter than in the rest of the Netherlands.
·
Spiral staircases in medieval castles are
running clockwise. This is because all knights used to be right-handed. When
the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their
right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties in climbing
the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles except left-handed
people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were
descendants of the devil.
·
Duddley DoRight's Horses name was
"Horse."
·
If the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT was a golf
ball, to be the proportional size to hit it, you'd be two miles tall.
·
On Sesame Street, Bert's goldfish were named
Lyle and Talbot, presumably after the actor Lyle Talbot.
·
The word "hangnail" comes from Middle
English: ang- (painful) + nail. Nothing to do with hanging.
·
Louis IV of France had a stomach the size of two
regular stomachs.
·
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty
cigars a day for the last years of his life.
·
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day
in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into view. When he died in 1910, Haley's Comet
came into view again.
·
Pepsi originally contained pepsin, thus the
name.
·
Babies are born without knee caps. They don't
appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
·
The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than
the lowest point in Colorado.
·
If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico
during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birthplace
was listed as a post office box in Albequerque.
·
Robert Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador
Hotel, the same hotel that housed Marilyn Monroe's first modelling agency.
·
Ronald Regan sent out the army phoyographer who
first discovered Marilyn Monroe.
·
Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can
dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals.
Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda pop.
·
Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox,
Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
·
The newest dog breed is the Bull Boxer, first
bred in the United states in 1990-91.
·
The first hard drive available for the Apple II
had a capacity of 5 megabytes.
·
South of Tucson, Arizona, all road signs are in
the Metric System.
·
In many cases, the amount of storage space on a
recordable CD is measured in minutes. 74 minutes is about 650 megabytes, 63
minutes is 550 megabytes.
·
The real name of Astro (the dog fromThe Jetsons)
is "Tralfaz" -- his real owner appeared one day to claim him but
wound up giving him back to the Jetsons.
·
Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
·
The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian
Nights begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy."
·
Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected
intravenously.
·
When a film is in production, the last shot of
the day is the "martini shot", the next to last one is the "Abby
Singer".
·
Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges,
three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp).
·
Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the U.S.,
but technically it is number 47. Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote
on a resolution to admit Ohio to the Union.
·
It is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a
butterfly -- so says City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California.
·
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.
·
Other than fruit, honey is the only natural food
that is made without destroying any kind of life! What about milk, you say? A
cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is living!
·
When Saigon fell, the signal for all Americans
to evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on the
radio.
·
The Fort George Point in Belize City was formed
by the silt runoff of Hurricane Hattie.
·
If you lace your shoes from the inside to the
outside the fit will be snugger around your big toe.
·
Only 1/3 of the people that can twitch their
ears can twitch only one at a time.
·
The expression "What in tarnation"
comes from the original meaning: "What in eternal damnation"
·
Gary Burgough who played Walter Radar O'Reily on
M*A*S*H has a deformed left thumb. If you watch closely you will see that he
never shows his left hand.
·
Only two states' names begin with double
consonants: Florida and Rhode Island.
·
The volume of the Earth's moon is the same as
the volume of the Pacific Ocean.
·
Ingrown toenails are hereditary.
·
The Cincinnati Reds baseball team name was
officially changed to the Redlegs during the anti-communist movement.
·
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room
during a dance.
·
"Xmas" does not begin with the Roman
letter X. It begins with the Greek letter "chi," which was used in
medieval manuscripts as an abbreviation for the word "Christ" (xus =
christus, etc.)
·
The ampersand (&) is actually a stylised
version of the Latin word "et," meaning and."
·
The largest city in the United States with a one
syllable name is Flint, Michigan.
·
The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
·
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike
annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
·
On the cartoon show 'The Jetsons', Jane is 33
years old and her daughter Judy is 15.
·
In Mel Brooks' 'Silent Movie,' mime Marcel
Marceau is the only person who has a speaking role.
·
No NFL team which plays its home games in a
domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl. (Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, is
not a dome, there is a large hole in the roof).
·
The word "set" has more definitions
than any other word in the English language.
·
The first toilet ever seen on television was on
"Leave It To Beaver". Wally and Beaver had a baby alligator which
they kept in the toilet.
·
In the great fire of London in 1666 half of
London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured.
·
The most eastern part of the western world is
located in Ilomantsi, Finland.
·
"Hara kiri" is an impolite way of
saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally,
"belly splitting."
·
The term the "Boogey Man will get you"
comes from the Boogey people, who still inhabit an area of Indonesia. These
people still act as pirates today and attack ships that pass. Thus the term
spread "if you don't watch out the Boogey man will get you."
·
The Saturn V moon rocket consumed 15 tons of
fuel per second.
·
The state with the longest coastline in the US
is Michigan.
·
Race car is a palindrome.
·
We had
four consecutive full moons making two blue moons in 1999 (January 2 and 31,
March 2 and 31.) The only other time it happened this century was in 1915
(January 1 and 31, March 1 and 31).
·
The Basset Horn, a kind of alto clarinet, was
named after its inventor -- a man named Horn. "Basset" is from
"Basetto," or "little bass" in Italian.
·
There are more bald eagles in the province of
British Columbia then there are in the whole United States.
·
Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd
Wright's son.
·
The "second unit" films movie shots
that do not require the presence of actors.
·
Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5
million going to actor's salaries.
·
The world's second largest pipe organ is located
at the Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
·
Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented
fiberglass.
·
One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because
cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as
competition. It is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or
caffeine.
·
Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to
have exactly fourteen feathers.
·
The music group Simply Red is named because of
its love for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home strip.
·
In case you ever find yourself piloting a
dogsled, shout "Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!"
to go right.
·
Richard Nixon left instructions for
"California, Here I Come" to be the last piece of music played at his
funeral ("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
·
The earliest document in Latin in a woman's
handwriting (it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a birthday party.
·
Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next
Generation, was played by six different cats.
·
Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named
Livingston.
·
Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the
world, at 0.08988 g/cc.
·
Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in
the world, at 70.6 g/cc.
·
The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in
Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop,
California.
·
The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in
the city of Paris, Texas, shortly after its box office release.
·
The 'y' in signs reading "ye olde.."
is properly pronounced with a 'th' sound, not 'y'. The "th" sound
does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use
the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent
of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest
resembled thorn was the lower case "y".
·
Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
·
The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars
(20th Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
·
Each year there is one ton of cement poured for
each man, woman, and child in the world.
·
At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot
pies instead of cherry ones.
·
The word "samba" means "to rub
navels together."
·
The only two days of the year in which there are
no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the
day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
·
The international telephone dialing code for
Antarctica is 672.
·
A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A
nibble is half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
·
A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley
crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
·
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional
baseball.
·
If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be
heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends
up on the bottom.
·
The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's
highest airport.
·
The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified
kosher.
·
The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of
F.
·
Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de
Janeiro.
·
Original copy of the Declaration of Independence
is lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a holograph.
That is a term for a handmade copy of a document and is not the same as a laser
produced hologram.
·
Singapore is the only country with one train
station.
·
The little bags of netting for gas lanterns
(called 'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of an alarm
at a nuclear reactor.
·
When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the
height of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch). 'Pitch' is a
horizontal measurement of the number of letters which can be printed in an
inch.
·
The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet
with exactly one endpoint is P.
·
In the movie "the Right Stuff" there
is a scene where a government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program
(played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake, California. His
partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to
badmouth Yeager claiming they need someone who went to college. During the
conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who is standing
behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General Yeager is listed low in the movie
credits as 'Fred.'
·
"Speak of the Devil" is short for
"Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you
spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your
talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the
Devil"
·
Maine is the only state whose name is just one
syllable.
·
There are only four words in the English
language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous,
and hazardous.
·
Nauru is the only country in the world with no
official capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren).
·
District, but there's no official capital.)
·
South Africa is the only country with three
official capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
·
Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
·
Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in
Italy.
·
The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter
larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
·
If your eyes are six feet above the surface of
the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away.
·
The one-hundred eleventh element is known as
"unnilenilenium".
·
The longest muscle name is the "levator
labii superioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip
motions.
·
The longest time someone has typed on a
typewriter continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
·
The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225
different ways.
·
There was once a town named "6" in
West Virginia.
·
Only one person in two billion will live to be
116 or older.
·
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
·
An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
·
The oldest word in the English language is
"town".
·
The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and
more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
·
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
·
Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously
of all crimes of treason.
·
The band Duran Duran got their name from an
astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
·
There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on
the Paramount Pictures logo.
·
After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts
in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to
toe.
·
Police dogs are trained to react to commands in
a foreign language; commonly German but more recently Hungarian or some other
Slavic tongue.
·
A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial
bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if
not held on by skin.
·
Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
·
Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one
connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
·
The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the
our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
·
Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to
a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though
it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2
is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
·
Most snakes have either only one lung, or in
some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make
room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
·
A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat
a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these
snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they
are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
·
Cinderella's slippers were originally made out
of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
·
It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel
(Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
·
Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
·
If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
·
The names of all the continents end with the
same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
·
There is a word in the English language with
only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
·
The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home,
conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in
Virginia.
·
According to Einstein's Special Theory of
Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but
it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
·
In most advertisments, including newspapers, the
time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the
watch.
·
Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of
Cher and Sonny Bono.
·
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.
·
The "heat" of peppers is rated on the
Scoville scale.
·
Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand
side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at
5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were
chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning
and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.
·
In left hand drive countries, such as the UK,
Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car.
Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
·
Japan is the third most densely populated
country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
·
Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It
was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
·
The "D" in D-day means
"Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
·
Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas.
The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer
lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
·
Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider
family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
·
The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name
was Temujin.
·
Genghis Khan started out life as a goat herder.
·
The type specimen for the human species is the
skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American paleontologist of the late 1800's. A
type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
·
The first word spoken by an ape in the movie
Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
·
The two lines that connect your top lip to the
bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
·
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels
in the correct order.
·
The name Wendy was made up for the book
"Peter Pan".
·
Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly
backwards.
·
All the dirt from the foundation to build the
World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the
community now known as Battery City Park.
·
The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels under the Hudson
River connecting New Jersey and New York are an engineering feat. The air
circulators in the tunnels circulate fresh air completely every ninety seconds.
·
The dirt road that General Washington and his
soldiers took to fight off General Clinton during the Battle of Monmouth was
called the Burlington Path.
·
The only social fraternity founded during the
Civil War was Theta Xi fraternity, at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy,
New York in 1864.
·
The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan
flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
·
Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer".
It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means
"adversary", devil means "liar".
·
A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
·
Geller and Huchra have made three-dimensional
maps of the distribution of galaxies. In each layer of the map some galaxies
are grouped together in such a way that they resemble a human being.
·
Avocado is derived from the Spanish word
'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning testicle.
·
Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their
birthdays.
·
Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
·
Al Capone's business card said he was a used
furniture dealer.
·
The smallest port in Canada is Port Williams,
Nova Scotia.
·
The Canadian province of Newfoundland has its
own time zone, which is half an hour behind Atlantic standard time.
·
Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high
probability of having six toes.
·
Did you know that the second longest word in the
English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism"? It means against the act of establishing a
state church.
·
Rats like boiled sweets better than they like
cheese.
·
Big Ben was slowed five minutes one day when a
passing group of starlings decided to take a rest on the minute hand of the
clock.
·
The "wild" horses of western North
America are actually feral, not wild.
·
Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish much
more easily than they learn English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish
much more easily than they learn Japanese.
·
New Zealand kiwis lay the largest eggs with
respect to their body size of any bird.
·
Elephants have been found swimming miles from
shore in the Indian Ocean.
·
When two words are combined to form a single
word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is
called a "portmanteau."
·
Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black
striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.
·
Every photograph of an American atomic bomb
detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.
·
The topknot that quails have is called a hmuh.
·
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."
·
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is
thirteen seconds.
·
The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint -- no
two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
·
There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that
likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
·
New Zealand is also the only country that
contains every type of climate in the world.
·
Cockroaches' favorite food is the glue on
envelopes and on the back of postage stamps.
·
In 1969, the last Corvair was painted gold.
·
Ralph Kramden made $62.00 dollars a week.
·
The most effective way to stop the pain of a
flathead fish's sting. is by rubbing the same fish's slime on the wound it gave
you.
·
Betsy Ross was born with a fully formed set of
teeth.
·
Betsy Ross's other contribution to the American
Revolution, beside sewing the first American flag, was running a munitions
factory in her basement.
·
Devo's original name was going to be
De-evolution. They shortened it to Devo.
·
Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device
depicted in the book 'The Naked Lunch'.
·
Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman.
·
Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stone's emblem
depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the 'Sticky
Fingers' album.
·
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were the two
left-handed Beatles.
·
Chris Ford scored the first ever NBA three-point
shot.
·
Of all the East Coast States, New Hampshire has
the shortest coastline, about fourteen miles.
·
New Hampshire is also the only State name the
has four consecutive consonants in it (in the same word).
·
Ontario is the only Canadian Province that
borders the Great Lakes.
·
Alaska has the longest border with Canada of all
the fifty states.
·
Montana has the longest border with Canada of
the lower forty-eight States.
·
Montana also borders the most Canadian Provinces
of all the fifty states. It borders three of them.
·
Arkansas is the only US State that begins with
"a" but does not end with "a". All the other States that
begin with "a", Arizona, Alabama and Alaska, also end with
"a".
