Interesting Facts

I haven't verified any of these, so if you find one that's in error, let me know...

Smitty

A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

A snail can sleep for three years.

All Polar bears are left-handed.

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

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, dogs only have about ten.

Cat's urine glows under a black light.

China has more English speakers than the United States.

Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

I am. is the shortest complete sentence in the English language

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.

If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

If you keep a goldfish in a dark room, it will eventually turn white.

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

Marilyn Monroe had six toes.

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.

No word in the English language rhymes with month.

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.

One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today is because cotton growers in the '30s lobbied against hemp farmers--they saw it as competition.
 -- A fact I have verified is that on long cruises before the advent of synthetic rope, sailors who ran out of tobacco would shred and smoke pieces of large ropes called hawsers.  The hawsers were made from Manila Hemp-- and they would get a slight buzz from smoking it.
 -- Another verified fact is that when World War II disrupted the supply of hemp from Asia, the United States government had farmers grow it--primarily in the Midwest.  The shortage also spurred the development of alternatives--one of the first ones used was fiberglass, though it had some shortcomings as anyone who has rubbed against it knows...

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

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
(Whew!! That's encouraging...)

Shakespeare invented the word "assassination" and "bump."

Some lions mate over 50 times a day.

Starfish haven't got brains.

Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.

An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.

The average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime at night.

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.

The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.

The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.

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

The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

The word racecar and kayak are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

You are more likely to be killed by a Champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.

You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.

You share your birthday with at least nine million other people in the world.