Odd Fact Day

OK apparently it’s Odd Fact Day.  I have no idea if that is true or not I just read it somewhere online & decided it was a good excuse to write:

100 Pointless Facts Nobody Realised They Didn’t Care About

1. The Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion is the feeling that a tiny rabbit is hopping over your skin
2. The coldest place in the solar system is on the moon
3. If everybody in a city painted their roofs with reflective white paint they could cool the city by up to 0.6 °C
4. Keeping a plant on your desk can make you more creative
5. There is a commonly held myth that polar bears are right handed
6. A headless cockroach will live until it starves to death or is shot with a small calibre revolver
7. Gone With The Wind is the highest grossing film in history if you take inflation into account
8. The legend of the Mongolian Death Worm says it can kill humans by spitting sulphuric acid at them or & firing bolts of electricity
9. A person is more likely to give you what you want if you touch them on the upper arm when you ask them
10. Earthquakes on the moon are called moonquakes
11. The oldest ever wheel is Mesopotamian & over 5000 years old
12. Some scientists believe that a bees wiggle dance is mostly pointless & bees just go to where they think food is anyway
13. Some male ducks rape the females of their species
14. The highest score you can get on your first turn in scrabble is from the word ‘muzjiks’
15. The word ‘crap’ predates Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the toilet
16. Researchers found so many mummified cats in the 19th Century that they began to use them for fertilizer
17. There is no proof that cracking you knuckles leads to arthritis
18. Ducks have different accents depending on what noises they live around
19. The blackbox for airplanes was invented by an Australian
20. White lines & horizontal ridges in your fingernails is a sign of arsenic poisoning
21. You can buy square watermelons in Japan
22. Hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly backwards
23. A jiffy is 1/100th of a second
24. The first napkin was Spartan, made of dough & called apomagdalie
25. Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill were hung for murder at Greenberry Hill
26. There have been actual documented cases of zombie trade in Haiti
27. Microwaves do not cook things from the inside first
28. Building a pyramid took approximately 10 000 Egyptians 25 years
29. Most of Uluru is underground
30. There is no such things as a truly one way mirror
31. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong is not Murphy’s Law but Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives
32. 22-year old Marie-Augustin was jailed for 50 years for whistling at Marie-Antoinette
33. No piece of square, dry paper can be folded in half more that 7 times
34. The word ‘cookie’ is derived from the Dutch word ‘koekje’; the cake from which the modern sweet biscuit evolved
35. Botox is basically cane toad poison
36. Dr George Papanicolaou, the inventor of the Pap Smear test, performed a Pap Smear test on his wife almost every day for 20  years
37. Champagne is not fizzy underground
38. NASA is running out of radioactive material to power it’s space flights
39. The earliest ever discovered animal tracks were made by a slug like creature over 565 million years ago
40. The words ‘trousers’ & ‘pants’ were once considered obscene
41. The sun weighs 1.988435 x 10^30 kg
42. Pi has been calculated to over 200 000 000 000 digits with no observable pattern
43. Charles Darwin studied to become a priest
44. The world’s youngest mother was 5 year old Lina Medina
45. The lightest substance on earth is called Aerogel
46. There is approximately one chicken for every human being in the world
47. A 9 sided 2 dimensional shape is called a nonagon
48. Arbitrage is the practice of gambling on sports with no possibility of losing financially
49. One day on Venus is longer than one year
50. Aibohphobia is the fictional term for a fear of palindromes
51. Top level male soccer players are more likely to have longer ring fingers than lower level soccer players
52. The first recorded use of the word ‘software’ is from 1850
53. The smallest measurable length is the Planck length
54. It is illegal to hunt camels in the US state of Arizona
55. The longest recorded game of Monopoly in a bathtub took 99 hours
56. The world’s oldest joke can be traced back to 1900 B.C.
57. The word ‘Ahoy’ was nearly the common greeting at the start of a phone call
58. The earth rotating the sun is called the Heliocentric Theory
59. Horses have toe bones
60. Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets in our solar system combined
61. In a gun fight, if you go for your gun first you will probably be shot
62. Butterflies taste with their hind feet
63. 90% of bird species are monogamous
64. The word ‘skepticisms’ is the longest word typed using alternate hands
65. The oldest known depiction of a parachute is from Italy in the 1470s
66. In term of DNA we are only 1.2% different to apes
67. In North America the Mexicn Wave is referred to as The Wave & is believed to have been invented in 1981
68. Only female mosquitos bite
69. The Steeple Chase began in the 1750s when two riders decided to race their horses between two churches
70. Psycho was the first film to have a flushing toilet scene
71. To morn the death of cats ancient Egyptians would shave their eyebrows
72. A flush toilet exists today that dates back 4000 years
73. Astronauts can now ‘Tweet’ from space
74. Mickey Mouse’s name in Italy is Topolino
75. There is a huge cloud of alcohol near the centre of the Milky Way
76. The name of the character Elphaba from the musical Wicked is based on the initials of the author of The Wizard of Oz; Lyman Frank Baum
77. Forgetting a task as soon as it is completed is known as the Zeigarnik Effect
78. The Baji Dolphin became functionally extinct in 2006
79. Chung Wan Ping designed an ash tray that senses when you are about to light a cigarette & reminds you of the health risks associated with smoking
80. It is possible that cigarette smoke traces which accumulate on carpets and in furniture pose a cancer risk when they reacts with the air
81. A fertile woman is more likely to be receptive to a corny chat up line
82. Men who are born short or with a low weight are more prone to violent suicide
83. Scientists don’t actually know why stars on the outer reaches of galaxies don’t fly out into space
84. The biblical figure Ezekiel may be the oldest recorded case of temporal lobe epilepsy
85. Roy C. Sullivan holds the record for being struck by lightning (7 times)
86. The oldest known accurate map of Britain was made in approximately 1360
87. Some scientists believe the moon was created by something the size of Mars colliding with the earth 4.45 Billion years ago
88. The oldest recorded joke is about women farting in their husband’s laps
89. The Million Dollar Homepage made $1 000 000 by selling 1 000 000 pixels at $1 each
90. The planet Kepler 7b has the density of Styrofoam
91. Velcro was invented by George de Mestral & its name is derived from the two French words ‘velours’ & ‘crochet’
92. Each Bic ballpoint pen can draw a line between two & three kilometers long before it runs out of ink
93. The Cambodian alphabet has 74 characters
94. When the platypus was fist discovered it was believed to be a fake
95. The word Pumpernickel loosely translates to ‘Devil’s Fart’ in German
96. Studies have shown that homosexual men are attracted to the scent of other homosexual men
97. Australia has approximately 20 sheep per resident
98. The word ‘queue’ is the only English word that is pronounced the same if you take away the last four letters
99. In 1386 in Falaise, Normandy, France, after a fair trial with legal representation, a pig was dressed in a man’s clothing & hung for the murder of a young girl
100. James Dean died in 1955 driving his Porshe Spyder, the engine of which was taken to a mechanic upon whom it fell, breaking his leg, then sold to a doctor, who died using it in the same race that killed another driving using the cars drive shaft, before the car’s shell was put on display at a showroom, which later burned down, & then again in Sacramento where it fell on a spectator, breaking his hip, prior to being shipped to Oregon where it smashed through a shop window and later broke into 9 pieces while sitting on steel supports.

All of these facts are completely true as far as I know but I will admit that some of my sources are a bit dubious.  If you have read this far then I strongly suggest you read Dr Richard Wiseman’s book ’59 Seconds’.  It contains some marvelous tips on dating.

Unless there is a next time.
Goodbye forever.

Luke Venables
Bald Eagle Hair Stylist