I saw the following list on Facebook and thought you might enjoy expanding your knowledge. Well, some of you. Okay, one or two of you. I was aware of only five or six of them myself. The most important thing to remember is: Some of them may not even be true.
1. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
2. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
3. A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
4. A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
5. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
(I know a lot of people like that)
6. A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
7. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
8. A snail can sleep for three years.
9. Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
10. All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial
on the back of the $5 bill.
11. Almonds are a member of the peach family.
12. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
(I know people like that too.)
13. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child
reaches 2 to 6 years of age!
14. Butterflies taste with their feet.
15. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
16. "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
17. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have
a full moon.
18. In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
19. If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line
would never end because of the rate of reproduction. (When I first heard this twenty or thirty years ago, it had the words "four abreast" or "eight abreast" instead of "in single file" so either someone has tinkered with it since it first came out or the Chinese are slowing down.)
20. If you are an average American, in your whole life you will spend
an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
21. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
22. Leonardo DaVinci invented scissors.
23. Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
24. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange,
silver, or purple.
25. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and
ears never stop growing.
26. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
27. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
28. "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand
and "lollipop" with your right.
29. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
30. The cruise liner QE2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel
that it burns.
31. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar
tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
32. The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
uses every letter of the alphabet.
33. The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
34. The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether
they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
35. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
36. There are more chickens than people in the world.
37. There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous":
tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous
38. There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels
in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
39. There's no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.
40. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
41. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters
only on one row of the keyboard.
42. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
43. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
44. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks;
otherwise it will digest itself.
Lesson of the Day: You can't know everything, and even if you could, it might be a waste of your valuable time.
It only took a jiffy to realize that at the moment I would like to be a snail.
ReplyDeleteNice work RWP
Because I have a head full of information I knew more of these than I care to admit. I was taught "The quick sly fox jumped over the lazy brown dog." Maybe it is a difference of where we live.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to No.16, I must protest. What about "undreamt" and "redreamt"? Otherwise, a most satisfactory and rather fascinating list. I commend your effort.
ReplyDeleteGoldfish are unfairly maligned. Their memories are considerably longer than three seconds. They can even be trained to come to be fed.
ReplyDeleteSome I knew, some I didn't, some I doubt...
Thanks.
Just the sort of useful (useless?) information I love to collect. But with regard to No 38 I would refer you to the Oxford English Dictionary which also includes: arsenious 'relating to arsenic with a valency of three'; abstentious 'abstinent'; the rare botanical and zoological terms acheilous 'having one or both lips absent'; anemious 'growing in windy situations'; caesious 'bluish or greyish green' and; annelidous 'belonging to the phylum Annelida'. Admittedly, I have never used any of these in casual conversation for fear of being thought facetious!
ReplyDeleteGreat list of weird and wonderful facts sir. I must tell Yorkshire that his two words are derivatives of Dreamt, and therefore do not count as extra words, (or so the Oxford Dictionary tell me). Loving Shooting Parrots' extras there too!
ReplyDelete