I got an interesting forward yesterday from my friend, Amanda, and I thought I’d enlighten you all on a Friday morning with some useless trivia…
In the 1400’s a law was set forth that a man was not allowed to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence, we have “the rule of thumb.”
Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.
It is impossible to lick your elbow.
The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% (now get this…)
The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000
The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn’t added until 5 years later.
Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?
A. Their birthplace
Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?
A. Obsession
Q. Which day are there more collect calls than any other day of the year?
A. Father’s Day
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. Hence the phrase…….. “goodnight, sleep tight.”
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…which we know today as the honeymoon.
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts… So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them “Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down.” It’s where we get the phrase “mind your P’s and Q’s”
At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow.
That bit about the statue of the horse and rider is bullshit. See Snopes.com
I suspect most of these “factoids” were pulled out of someone’s sigmoid colon.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/18/2005 @ 5:09 pm
And the other 25% will try to lick yours.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/19/2005 @ 3:31 pm
The real explanation of ‘rule of thumb’ is that it derives from wood workers… who knew their trade so well they rarely or never fell back on the use of such things as rulers. instead, they would measure things by, for example, the length of their thumbs.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/20/2005 @ 8:20 am
Half of the African continent is taken up by desert.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/20/2005 @ 8:22 am
HB, you’ve been busy!!!
Comment by Tara — 8/20/2005 @ 10:19 am
I love wierd factoids, I have a ton of em. In fact, did you know that it is illegal to own a red
car in Shanghai, China. Or that it can take up to four hours to boil an ostrich egg, or that Maine
is the only us state with a one syllable name or that the potato chips that Americans eat every year
weigh six times what the Titanic did! Yeah, I’ve got my copy of uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
handy.
Comment by Matt — 8/20/2005 @ 10:37 pm
Or that half of all internet factoids are recycled urban myths with no basis in reality.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/21/2005 @ 2:03 pm
97% of all people named harold
will eat 18 lbs of banannas while reading blogs this year.
Comment by Neill — 8/22/2005 @ 10:55 am
98% of people who identify themselves on-line by clever acronyms will not only try to lick their own elbows, but also those of complete strangers.
Comment by Heraldblog — 8/22/2005 @ 1:21 pm
A few haters I see some people cant just get along.
Cool stuff here .
Comment by Brian — 9/18/2006 @ 9:39 pm
So Brian thinks that people who prefer truth to recycled non-facts are “haters”?
Comment by Walter — 10/24/2006 @ 4:53 pm
62.381527% of all statistics made up on the spot.
–John Allen Paulos
Comment by ziggy — 1/2/2007 @ 1:54 pm
I’m sorry I’m a hater
Comment by walter — 1/28/2007 @ 12:40 pm
‘mind your P’s and Q’s’ is infact a saying from the printing industry. when all the letters were hand placed to run the prints it was quite easy to mix up a p and a q because all the letters were backwards so that when you printed it it could be read. thus all “p’s” looked like q and all “q’s” looked like p.
Comment by Glen — 3/31/2007 @ 12:20 pm