Thread: useless facts
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Old 11-29-2006, 11:06 PM   #2
CD5Passion
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Santa Barbara, California
Age: 39
Posts: 5,446
The Grateful Dead were once called The Warlocks.
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.
The Professor's real name was Roy Hinkley, Mary Ann's last name was
Summers and Mrs. Howell's maiden name was Wentworth.
The male gypsy moth can "smell" the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8
miles away.
In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
Reindeer milk has more fat than cow milk.
The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.
The original fifty cent piece in Australian decimal currency had
around
$2.00 worth of silver in it before it was replaced with a less
expensive
twelve sided coin.
The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
Alexander the Great was an epileptic.
The lead singer of The Knack, famous for "My Sharona," and Jack
Kevorkian's lead defense attorney are brothers, Doug & Jeffrey Feiger.
The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator,
Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence
"Oz."
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube
and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
Elton John's real name is Reginald Dwight. Elton comes from Elton
Dean, a Bluesology sax player. John comes from Long John Baldry,
founder of Blues Inc. They were the first electric white blues band
ever
seen in England--1961
The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a
brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the
Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called
a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack
and
break off... Thus the saying.
Horses cannot vomit.
Rabbits cannot vomit.
S.O.S. doesn't stand for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls" -- It was
just chosen by an 1908 international conference on Morse Code because
the letters S and O were easy to remember and just about anyone could
key it and read it, S = dot dot dot, O = dash dash dash..
Pocahontas appeared on the back of the $20 bill in 1875.
When a female horse and male donkey mate, the offspring is called a
mule, but when a male horse and female donkey mate, the offspring is
called a hinny.
The way to get more mules is to mate a male donkey with a female horse.
A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule won't.
Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.
Hugh "Ward Cleaver" Beaumont was an ordained minister.
The Old English word for "sneeze" is "fneosan."
John Lennon's first girlfriend was named Thelma Pickles.
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
Woodpecker scalps, porpoise teeth and giraffe tails have all been used
as money.
The Los Angeles Rams were the first U.S. football team to introduce
emblems on their helmets.
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed, and continue living.
Dartboards are made out of horsehairs.
One of the many Tarzans, Karmuela Searlel, was mauled to death on the
set by a raging elephant.
Slinkys were invented by an airplane mechanic; he was playing with
engine parts and realized the possible secondary use of one of the
springs.
There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
Octopi have gardens.
"Ever think you're hearing something in a song, but they're really
singing something else? The word for mis-heard lyrics is 'mondegreen,'
and it comes from a folk song in the '50's. The singer was actually
singing "They slew the Earl of Morray and laid him on the green," but
this came off sounding like 'They slew the Earl of Morray and Lady
Mondegreen.'"
Some biblical scholars believe that Aramaic (the language of the
ancient Bible) did not contain an easy way to say "many things" and
used
a term which has come down to us as 40. This means that when the bible
-- in many places - refers to "40 days," they meant many days.
Napoleon constructed his battle plans in a sandbox.
'Strengths' is the longest word in the English language with just one
vowel.
'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left
hand.
One of the longest English words that can be typed using the top row of
a typewriter (allowing multiple uses of letters) is 'typewriter.'
When a giraffe's baby is born it falls from a height of six feet,
normally without being hurt.
Virgina Woolf wrote all her books standing.
The pitches that Babe Ruth hit for his last-ever homerun and that Joe
DiMaggio hit for his first-ever homerun where thrown by the same man.
To "testify" was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a
statement
made by swearing on their testicles.
Stalin was only five feet, four inches tall.
Stalin's left foot had webbed toes, and his left arm is noticably
shorter than his right.
Tomb robbers believed that knocking Egyptian sarcophagi's noses off
would and therefore forstall curses.
The allele for six fingers and toes is dominant in humans. (Watch out
Inigo Montoya...)
The face of a penny can hold about thirty drops of water.
Medieval knights put sharkskin on their swordhandles to give them a
more secure grip; they would dig the sharp scales into their palms.
Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's
stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
The only planet without a ring is earth.
Wayne's World was filmed in two weeks.
If you feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer, its stomach will explode.
The raised reflective dots in the middle of highways are called Botts
dots.
Boris Karloff is the narrator of the seasonal television special "How
the Grinch Stole Christmas."
A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink."
A group of frogs is called an army.
A group of rhinos is called a crash.
A group of kangaroos is called a mob.
A group of whales is called a pod.
A group of geese is called a gaggle.
A group of ravens is called a murder.
A group of officers is called a mess.
A group of larks is called an exaltation.
A group of owls is called a parliament.
The 80s song "Rosanna" from the Eighties was written about Rosanna
Arquette, the actress.
Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.
Starfish don't have brains.
Shrimps' hearts are in their heads.
The derivation of the word trivia comes from the Latin "tri-" + "via",
which means three streets. This is because in ancient times, at an
intersection of three streeets in Rome (or some other Italian place),
they would have a type of kiosk where ancillary information was listed.
You might be interested in it, you might not, hence they were bits of
"trivia."
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