Fascinating But Irrelevant Facts

Did you know that cows give more milk when they listen to music?

• Fascinating But Irrelevant
  Facts
• More Irrelevant Facts
  to Intrigue You
• Further Fascinating
  Facts to Amuse You

Fascinating But Irrelevant Facts

• Every person has a unique tongue print.
• Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t
  wear pants.*
• In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when
  patients would die.
• Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark.
• ‘Kemo Sabe’
  means ‘soggy shrub’
  in Navajo.
• In Kentucky, 50% of the people who get married for the first time are teenagers.
• Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during WWI.
• Einstein couldn’t
  speak fluently when
  he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
• In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.
• About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they’re still sitting on it.
• You’re more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day that in any other weather.
• An average person laughs about 5 times a day.
• Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have
  recently eaten bananas.
• Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
• The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at night.
• A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 600 mph.
• The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
• The Neanderthal’s
  brain was bigger than yours is.
• A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’tgive her coffee.
• The average bank teller loses about $250 every year.
• In
  1980, there was only one country in the world with no telephones – Bhutan.
• Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
• Women’s
  hearts beat faster
  than men’s.
• Pollsters say that 40% of dog and cat owners carry pictures of the pets in their wallets.
• Bubble gum contains rubber.
• You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog.

More Irrelevant
Facts to Intrigue You

There is something captivating about this interesting, but essentially
useless information.  Here is another batch of irrelevant facts.

• Only 55% of all
  Americans know that the sun is a star.
• The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello.
• Even if you cut off a cockroach’s
  head, it can live for several weeks.
• The world population of chickens is about equal to the number of people.
• Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured iced water over his head.
• About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to
  make more money.
• It’s
  against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
• Some toothpastes contain antifreeze.
• Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.
• Millie, the White House dog, earned
  more than 4 times as much as President Bush in 1999.
• Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the western Pacific.
• Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
• Most lipstick contains fish scales.
• Lee Harvey Oswald’s
  cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992.
• Mosquitoes have teeth.
• Hypnotism is
  banned by public schools in San Diego.
• When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.
• Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.

Further Fascinating Facts to Amuse You

Will and Guy have another selection of trivial information to enthral you.

• A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will
  digest itself.
• A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down
  continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
• A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Why does no one know why?
• During the chariot scene in the film ‘Ben Hur, a small red car can be seen in
  the distance.
• The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game
  of chess is 318,979,564,000. [When I first met Guy he would always beat me at
  chess says Will]
• There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple, and
  silver.
• The name Wendy was made up for the book ‘Peter Pan’. There was never a
  recorded Wendy before.
  
• Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow film down so you could
  see his moves.
• The first CD pressed in the USA was Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’.
• The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
• The phrase ‘Rule of thumb’ is derived from an old English law which
  stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
  [This reminds me that my late mother used to say, ‘Never put anything in
  your ear smaller than your elbow.]’
• By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you cannot sink into
  quicksand. [Remember this when panicking]
• Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery
  than the celery has in it to begin with.
• Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
• Sherlock Holmes never said ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’.
• The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.
• The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often
  stolen from Public Libraries.
• Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because
  passing wind in a spacesuit damages them. Not to mention the other drawback to
  passing gas in such a confined space………………
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

* Rule of thumb.  The tenuous
association between wife beating and rule and thumb presents a fascinating
story within a story.  The commonest meaning of ‘rule of thumb’ has
probably always been, ‘down to experience’.  What seems to have
happened in the 17th century
is that cartoonists and satirists choose to hi-jack this phrase in order to poke fun
at wife beating.  Within their humour the stick was no thicker than a
thumb.

All was uncontroversial with ‘Rule of thumb’ until latter-day 20th century feminists seized on this
derivation, and sought to highlight the nasty wife beating association in
order to whip up support for their feminist movement – metaphorically of
course!

The latest 21st century development is that ‘new man’ wants to pull the
rug from under the feminist argument by pointing out that the derivation of
rule of thumb from the thickness of the wife-beating stick was always fallacious.

Footnote:
Please send us your fascinating but irrelevant facts.