Most Amazing Facts

So You Think You Know Everything?

Here are Will and Guy’s collection of interesting facts about common objects.  Some are funny, others make
us scratch our heads.  We imagine a stand-up comic firing off these jokes like machine gun bullets.

Amazing Facts
sent in by John Franklin*

• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
• A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• A ‘jiffy’
  is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A snail can sleep for three years.
• Al Capone’s
  business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• An ostrich’s
  eye is bigger than its brain.
• Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t
  appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
• Butterflies taste
  with their feet.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
• ‘Dreamt’
  is the only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt’.
• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history
  not to have a full moon.
• In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
• If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of
  reproduction.

More Strange Facts and
One-liners

Facts are stupid things. Ronald Reagan

• If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
• It’s
  impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented
  the scissors.
• Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
• Rubber bands last
  longer when refrigerated.
• ‘Stewardesses’
  is the longest word typed with only the left hand and ‘lollipop’
  with your right.
• The average person’s
  left hand does 56% of the typing.
• The cruise liner, QE2,
  moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
• The sentence: ‘The quick brown
  fox jumps over the lazy dog’,
  uses every letter of the alphabet.
• The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
• The words ‘racecar’, ‘kayak’
  and ‘level’
  are
  palindromes.  They read the same whether you read them left to right or right to left.
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: ‘abstemious’
  and ‘
  facetious.’
• There’s
  no
  Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
• TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’
  room during a dance.
• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.
• Now you know everything.

Footnote:
Please send us your most amazing
facts

Urban Myths

Strange facts are fertile area for people to plant half truths and urban myths.
Will and Guy try to weed out such ‘Strange Facts’.  Here are some examples,
if you see more then do let us know.

• On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over
  the Parliament building is an American flag.  (Thanks to Jim for exposing
  this as a myth)

* Jokes Sent by John Franklin
As we have mentioned elsewhere, Will and I were teacher’s
– way back.  John Franklin was one of our colleagues.  John was a teacher’s
teacher, utterly professional
and liked and respected by all the pupils who were fortunate enough to be in his class.