Believe it or Not

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

NO REPLIES PLEASE!
I will try to update as often as possible.

• One out of 10 Japanese men describe themselves as "addicted to horse racing."

• The American Tobacco Association spends more money on lobbying than the GDP of Denmark.

• Iowa comes from the Indian word "I'owha," meaning "tea kettle."

• Including the hard and soft palettes, the human tongue weighs over one pound.

• Ben Franklin made the first preliminary sketches of the light bulb.

• Harry Truman was the last U.S. president who smoked regularly.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• 43 percent of American homes have wiring below national standards.

• The first atomic clock was originally set to the time on Albert Einstein's pocket watch.

• 16 percent of Catholics say they don't believe in God.

• A watch is more likely to run fast than it is to run slow.

• More people were sentenced to death in the year 2003 than any other year since 1971.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• "Toyota" is a conjugation of the Japanese word for "War Machine."

• More people die in September than any other month.

• If all the empty space were removed from all the atoms in the universe, the resulting matter would only be about the size of a grapefruit.

• The Guarani people of Paraguay consider conjoined twins to be the sacred incarnates of the twin gods Fire and Passion.

• In the 1964 presidential election, one electoral college member protested Lyndon Johnson's nomination by submitting a vote for Donald Duck.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• Cubicles gained office-popularity in the early 1920s as a way of cutting costs during the Great Depression.

• Three out of 10 Americans will eat dog at some point in their life, knowingly, or unknowingly.

• In Haiti, having a mirror in your house is considered bad luck.

• The original Pac-Man was almost blue, but a bug in the demo version set up for the head of hardware development at Atari led to its present-day color.

• The first commercially available television sets weighed over 700 pounds.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• The longest, continually operated weblog (blog) has been updated at least once a day since 1996.

• The first email ever sent read, "this should be working."

• If you were to take all the newspapers printed in the U.S. any give day and lay the sheets out edge to edge, you could cover an area the size of New York City.

• Worldwide, more men have ear piercings than women.

• Sharks prefer the taste of human flesh over fish due to the varying structures of a human's hemoglobin.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• The emotions of love and hate are triggered by the same chemical in the brain.

• September 25 was declared "Astronaut Day" by an act of congress in 1969.

• Cats can't see the color red.

• Left-handed people are three times more likely to be late than right-handed people.

• There are approximately 10,000 microscopic organisms between your monitor and your face.

• Commercials advertising feminine hygiene products were considered indecent and were not allowed to be aired on TV until the 1970s.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• More people are killed by falling coconuts than sky diving accidents.

• George Washington was a self-avowed atheist.

• Per capita, Washington, D.C. has more interns than any other city in the world.

• The average American drinks eight gallons of hard liquor each year.

• People with blue eyes can see better in dim light than people with brown eyes.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• Renowned cyclist Lance Armstrong uses 11 different pedaling techniques, each of which utilize different muscle groups, allowing the muscles not in use to rest.

• 22 percent of Americans say they feel less safe when they see a police officer on the street.

• Anthropomorphic fish make an appearance in 13 percent of movies with speaking animals. Only in two percent, do they play a major role in the plot.

• Bottlenose dolphin pods will attack, and often kill, members of their group that exhibit pedophiliac tendencies.

• Since the invention of the typewriter, overall handwriting legibility in the world has declined 68.2 percent.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• Elmo's fish Dorothy has died and been replaced six times since debuting on Sesame Street.

• The most-purchased item at Office Depot is a 1.69 oz. bag of plain M&M's.

• Kamchatkan has the fewest alphabetic characters of any language still natively spoken.

• Due to a minor complication during surgery, musician Neil Young had only one of his tonsils removed as a child.

• For their 10-year anniversary in 1931, White Castle hamburgers gave away thousands of "White Castle Knights" membership cards. One of the benefits bestowed upon the bearer was 5¢ hamburgers for life. While only eight cards are known to still exist today, White Castle continues to honor them.

zdestiny · Senior Member Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 55

• In comic books, there are approximately 20 super-villains for every super-hero.

• According to FAA statistical records, 23A is the safest seat in a commercial airplane accident.

• For reasons that are not yet understood, vegetarian mothers are about five percent more likely to deliver twins than their meat-eating counterparts.

• Humans have the thickest eyelids in the animal kingdom.

• Until 1922, Flag Day was celebrated on the first Wednesday following the second Sunday in June.

natasha · Newbie Joined: 02 Mar 2007 Posts: 4

Nice topic!

Some are hard to even imagine.