I Did Not Know That: Wierd Stuff You Know

Did you know...
The guy in Mel Brooks' The Prouducers (My favorite movie only bested by Star Wars) who says "Don't be stupid; be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!" is actually Mel Brooks.

One of the famous gaps in the Nixon tapes was 18 minutes and 20 seconds long. The original recording of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree" (yes, there are two 'e's)is 18:20 long. The song is about an anti-Vietnam movement.

If you count the letter in a number or a word, in the end, it will end with four. I.e,
twenty has six letters.
six has three letters.
three has five letters.
five has four letters.
four has four letters, and so you can't go further.

Example b:
one-hundred-thousand has eighteen letters.
eighteen has eight letters.
eight has five letters.
five has four letters, and four has four.
Get it? Try it if you don't believe me.

 

that's cool Ash!

Ok, here's another go:

Black cats are lucky in Britain and UNlucky in the USA !!

For every drop of rain in Cairo, Egypt, there are 23 in London, Britain and 170 drops in Conakry, Guinea.

The Atacama Desert has had no rain for over 400 years!

A Poison-arrow frog has ebough poison to kill 2,200 people!

:TIEdie:

 

AEFHIKLMNTVWXZ- Letters drawn with only straight lines

COS- Letters drawn with only curved lines

BDGJPQRU- Letters drawn with straight and curved lines.

BDO- Letters with no endpoints.

P- Letters with one endpoint.

ACGIJLMNQRSUVWZ- Letters with two endpoints.

EFTY- Letters with three endpoints.

HKX- Letters with four endpoints.

CEFGIJKLMNSTUVWXYZ- Letters with no enclosed areas.

ADOPQR- Letters with one enclosed area.

B- Letters with two enclosed areas.


BCDEHIKOX- Letters with horizontal symmetry.

AFGJLMNPQRSTUVWYZ- Letters without horizontal symmetry.

AHIMOTUVWXY- Letters with vertical symmetry.

BCDEFGJKLNPQRSZ- Letters without vertical symmetry.

HIOX- Letters with horizontal and vertical symmetry.

ABCDEFGJKLMNPQRSTUVWYZ- Letters without horizontal and vertical symmetry.

HINOSXZ- Letters with 180 degree rotational symmetry.

ABCDEFGJKLMPQRTUVWY- Letters without 180 degree rotational symmetry.

BCDGIJLMNOPRSUVWZ- Letters that can be drawn without taking pen off paper.

AEFHKQTXY- Letters that can't be drawn without taking pen off paper.

COPSUVWXZ- Capital letters that look like the corresponding lower case letters.

ABDEFGHIJKLMNQRTY- Capital letters that don't look like the corresponding lower case letters.

IJ- Letters that are dotted in lower case.

ABCDEFGHKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ- Letters that aren't dotted in lower case.

BDFHKLT- Letters that have ascenders in lower case.

ACEGIJMNOPQRSUVWXYZ- Letters that have do not ascenders in lower case.

GJPQY- Letters that have descenders in lower case.

ABCDEFHIKLMNORSTUVWXZ- Letters that do not have descenders in lower case.

CDILMVX- Letters that are Roman Numerals.

ABEFGHJKNOPQRSTUWYZ- Letters that aren't Roman Numerals.

EHIS- Letters that consist of just dots in Morse Code.

MOT- Letters that consist of just dashes in Morse Code.

ABCDFGJKLNPQRUVWXYZ- Letters that consist of both dots and dashes in Morse Code



The fear of Popes is Papaphobia.

Hitler had five step brothers and sisters all who died at birth.

Maine is the only U.S. state with a dead animal on its license plates. (A red lobster. Lobsters only turn red when boiled.)

Boris Yetzemeloff, of Russian decent, lived in Mexico his whole life. Even though that's besides the point, he raped eighteen women in what was considered a serial case, in the early 1940's. Mexico's legal system convicted him to a 'life-term' in prison. Twenty years into his service, he had a heart attack, and was pronounced medically dead for twenty minutes. Miraculously, medical supervisors at the jail brought him back to life, and he was then allowed to leave since he had served his life-sentence.

It is a fact that none of the witches put to death in the Salem Witch trials were burned at the stake. They were all hanged but one, Giles Cory, who was pressed to death. In fact, there are no official written reports of ANY witches in the US being burned, burning was a European practice associated with the Catholics. The people in the New World were so opposed to Catholic procedures that they even rebuked their procedures for the punishment of witchcraft as well.

Famed French scientist, Marie Curie, died of radiation poisoning. The books she used to take notes in during her experiments are so radioactive that until this day they remain locked away as it would be deadly for any human to handle them.

The world?s worst lifeguard has to be Lorenzo Trippi of Ravenna, Italy. In 1995, three people on three separate occasions wound up dead thanks to Lorenzo?s efforts to save them. In each case, he hit all three of them on the head with his life preserver, causing them to black out and drown.

Laws on drink driving vary from the death penalty in Iraq to Belgium, where they drive you to the outskirts of town and make you walk back and (possibly the worst)in Norway, where you are forced to sit through government lectures for 3 months.

There's a condition call

 

Sheesh, that's a lot of "wierd" info. Especially the whole Kennedy and Lincoln thing.

More useless info from Ash:

Sugar doesn't make you hyper; caffeine does.

A 6 oz. cup of coffee has 4 times as much caffeine than most 6oz. sodas. (Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper).

W-D 40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th Attempt.

If you want to learn more stuff like that, visit http://www.howstuffworks.com/.

 

he Queen of Spain, Juana la Loca, loved her husband so much that she carried around his body after he died and kept checking it for signs of life. She even kissed the corpse to bring it back to life!

That is auctually untrue. Although Juana did keep her husbands body for months after his death the reason for it were fabricated, by her father in law, to demean her character. The reasons she carried the body around are.
1. She was trying to honor her dead husband's wishes by burying him where he wished to be buried.
2. The process of placing a new king on the throne could not be completed until the former king was buried.

 

On the night before he was murdered,the Roman Emperor Caligula dreamed that the god Jupiter kicked him out of Heaven with his right toe,which was a symbol of foreboding in Roman times.

 

1 kg of deuterium (a form of nuclear fuel) can produce as much energy as 3,000,000 kg of coal.

 

I'm upping this sucker.

The first letter of each month from July to November spell out JASON. (It's something I picked up on my own.)

Kryptonite first appeared on the Superman radio show,then later in the comics.

 

The Revolutionary War battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought at Breed's Hill. Afterwards, newspapermen decided Bunker Hill sounded better.

During the Second World War, the American Office of Strategic Services tried to slip Adolf Hitler female hormones. Someone thought that perhaps a little inducement towards the female side might change his temperament, especially as he was considered to be close to the border, psychologically, between masculine and feminine. OSS agents actually went into Germany with a syringe full of hormones. They paid a gardener to inject the syringe into Hitler's vegetables. Given that no effects were ever recorded, it is believed the gardener pocketed the cash and threw the syringe into the bushes.

(Something people often don't realize, but not that weird) Virtually every major weapons technology prominent in the post-WWII era was actually developed during the war by the Germans, and in some areas (nerve gases for one), their versions were never surpassed. From guidance be it radio, command, radar, or infrared, to antitank rockets, to ballistic missiles, to cruise missiles, they developed at least a primitive version.

The CIA actually tested methods of breaking down people's minds and wills using LSD and electro-shock therapy, on American citizens, among others, in a secret program called MK-ULTRA, during the 1960s. Victims included Paul Robeson, Sr.

During the 1960s, many people believed that the interior surfaces of banana peels contained a drug that could be smoked. This myth is the origin of the song "mellow yellow." My father once was working in a lab at UCI and a guy came in and was going to put a bunch of banana peels in some sort of furnace or oven. He asked him what he was doing. "We're gonna get high, man."

Diamonds were not considered especially valuable, compared to other gems and so on, and had practical uses only in certain cutting tools, until the world's diamond supply and market came under the domination of the De Beers cartel and they were able to artificially inflate the value with skillful PR. Diamonds can be created synthetically by coating a lump of carbon in molten iron, and then dropping it in cold water.

 

This isn't going to sound as cool or intelligent as so many of the other posts, but it takes 477 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop .

I was bored one day.

 

Australia is the only country to take up an entire continent....we RULE!!!!!!

 

Continents in the Northern Hemisphere are wider than those in the Southern Hemisphere. No one knows why.

Most serial killers were bedwetters as children.

Queen Victoria's first act as queen was getting her own bedroom,which she shared with her sisters and mother until that time.

Protestant Refromation leader Martin Luther's family all slept together in the nude together while he was growing up.

According to the Apollo astronaugts,the moon smells like burnt fireworks.

 

Great thread!!

After his famous ride, Paul Revere billed Massachusetts 10 pounds, 4 shillings, to cover expenses.

Goodyear once made a tire out of corn.

About 45% of all prescription drugs contain ingredients originating in the rainforest.

It would take 27,000 spider webs to produce a single poun of spider silk.

My favorite source for weird and useless knowledge is Uncle John's Bathroom Readers.

 

This is ALL such cool stuff!

Dolphins and humans are the only species who have sex for fun.

 

Aren't there also benobo(sp?) monkeys/apes/whatever? ?

 

Possibly, I probably should have worded that different . . ..

 

"Aren't there also benobo(sp?) monkeys/apes/whatever?"

Bonobos are pigmy chimps, just for clarification's sake, and I've also heard that they have sex for fun.

Amazing.

 

scientists once bred chickens with breasts so big that they couldn't stand on their own.

domestic turkeys are incapable of reproducing on their own; it has to be artificial insemination.

most of the mass of excrement is dead bacteria cells.

 

"Dolphins and humans are the only species who have sex for fun."

ummmmmmmmmmmmm...

::awkward silence::

 

I dont know if these were used, but here i go:

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes when you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where the phrase, "good night, sleep tight" came from

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet.

THe only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

When opossums are playing 'possum', they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

The term "the whole nine yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the Pacific. When arming thier airplanes on the ground, the ...50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. if the pilot fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole nine yards."

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

The name Jeep came from the abbreviaton used in the army for the General Purpose vehcile, G.P.

The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intarvenously.

No NFL teams which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl.

The first toilet paper ever seen on television was on "leave it to Beaver."

Only one person in two billion years will live to be 116 or older.

In Cleveland, Ohio, its illegal to catch mice without a hunting liscence

it takes over 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply or footballs.

35% of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

There are an average fo 178 sesame seeds on a McDonald's Big Mac bun.

The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.

The 3 most valuable brand names on Earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

When Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle, it travels at a rate of 25 miles per year.

10% of the Russian's government income comes from the sale of vodka.

on average 100 people choke to death on ball point pens every year.

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month" or what we know today as the "honeymoon."

In ancient England A person could not have sex unless you had consent of the king (unless you were the Royal Family) When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King & The King gave them a placard that they hung on their door when they were having sex. The placard had F. U. C. K. (Fronication Under Consent of the King) on it. Hence that's were the word **** came from.

 

* A single share of Coca-Cola stock, purchased in 1919, when the company went public, would have been worth $92,500 in 1997.
-
* A U.S. company came out with a toilet night-light that sends out a green warning beacon when the seat is up.


* American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.


* Bill Bowerman, founder of the shoe company Nike, got his first shoe idea after staring at a waffle iron. This gave him the idea of using squared spikes to make the shoes lighter.


* Business.com is currently the most expensive domain name sold for $7.5 million.


* Close to fifty percent of Internet shoppers spend over five hours a week online.


* David McConnell started the California Perfume Company (CPC) in 1886. Today the company is known as Avon, which he named after his favourite playwright William Shakespeare, and Stratford on Avon.


* Every year, kids in North America spend close to half a billion dollars on chewing gum.


* Frosted Flakes mascot ""Tony the Tiger"" has a wife, son (Tony Jr.) and daughter (Antoinette) that were used in early advertising commercials.



* Google.com's company headquarters is nicknamed the Googleplex, which houses over two hundred and seventy employees.


* IBM's motto is Think.
(Source: N/A)


* In 1897, Bayer, who is the makers of Aspirin, once marketed the drug heroin.


* In 1962, the first Wal-Mart opened up in Rogers, Arkansas.


* In 1976, fourteen banks merged to form a bank credit card called ""Mastercharge."" This was later renamed to what is now know as ""Mastercard.""


* In 2001, the five most valuable brand names in order were Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Nokia.


* In the 1930's, Pepsi-Cola had an advertising campaign starring two cartoon cops called ""Pepsi & Pete.""


* In the late 1960's, Mountain Dew bottles featured a hillbilly on them. These are now collector items worth five to ten dollars.


* It cost the soft drink industry $100 million a year for thefts committed involving vending machines.


* It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.


* It would take approximately twenty-four trees that are on average six to eight inches in diameter to produce one ton of newsprint for the Sunday edition of the New York Times.


* Mexico City boasts the world's largest taxi fleet with over sixty thousand taxis running every day.


* NERF, the popular foam children's toy company, doesn't actually stand for anything.


* Nestlé is the largest company in Switzerland, yet more than 98 percent of its revenue comes from outside the country.


* Oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, was the world's first billionaire.


* Organized crime is estimated to account for 10% of the United States' national income.

 

In ancient England A person could not have sex unless you had consent of the king (unless you were the Royal Family) When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King & The King gave them a placard that they hung on their door when they were having sex. The placard had F. U. C. K. (Fronication Under Consent of the King) on it. Hence that's were the word **** came from.

I heard it differntly...
In ancient England the walls out side of inmates cells would be incribed with a short description of what the were incarcerated for. On the outside of sexual offenders cells were the letters, F. U. C. K. which stood for, For Unlawful Carnel Knowledge.

 

"Only one person in two billion years will live to be 116 or older."

Yeah, but that's only because the world has been around so long and people haven't.

"on average 100 people choke to death on ball point pens every year."

Social Darwinism at its finest.

Amazing.

 

The computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, is made up from the letters immediatley preceding IBM.

Also, laugh hard at AmazingB's Social Darwinism!

 

Thing you didn't know: This is my 1,500th post!









Kinda sad really, I need a life.