44 things you may not have known until now

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.

You have an unhealthy interest in trivia if...

1. You can name all eight of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands.

2. You know what ontogeny recapitulates.

3. You can name every U.S. president, his years in office, his vice-presidents, and every British monarch starting with Alfred the Great.

4. You know the first 17 numbers in the Fibonacci series by heart and are working on the first 100 decimal digits of Pi.

5. You know what John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley have in common beside the fact that they are all dead.

6. You know all the words to every song in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I.

7. You know how to say “Goodbye” in more languages than you have fingers and “Thank you” in more languages than you have toes.

8. You know how to sing “O Sanctissima, O Piissima, Dulcis virgo Maria, Mater amata, Intemerata, Ora, ora pro nobis” in Latin and you are not even Roman Catholic. Also “Panis Angelicus.”

9. You know all the halogens in the periodic table of elements.

10. You can name the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the eight labors of Hercules.

Okay, maybe you don’t have an unhealthy interest in trivia, maybe you are just smart, but you definitely need to get out more.