Fun_People Archive
18 Sep
Much Trivial Trivia
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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 96 16:33:04 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Much Trivial Trivia
Forwarded-by: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: cyerkes <cyerkes@interport.net>
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more
like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will
be about three statute miles away.
The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only
other word with the same number of letters is its plural, namely
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses.
Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the
largest anagrams.
Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los
Angeles de Porciuncula."
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots
The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda
movie "Barbarella.
Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers
to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National
Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of
the RMS Titanic.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin
John Wilkes Booth...and whose shame created the expression for ignominy,
"His name is Mudd."
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II
killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's
Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who
fathered over 160 children.
If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, they need gravity to
swallow.
Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood
donors.
The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the
cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life"
It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog
throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth.
Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents
and then swallows the stomach back down again.
Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode
past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (Formerly of the
Monkees)
Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with
"Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six minutes.
Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous
transatlantic flight.
Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he
had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.
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.
Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on
the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real
name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the
first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.
In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could
be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.
The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.
Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap
formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and
told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since.
Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has
about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the
twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to
realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.
The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass
monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War.
The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey.
When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off... Thus
the saying.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise
it will digest itself.
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the
background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually
talking.
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.
101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon
features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the
entire movie.
'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby
daughter, Ruth.
A whale's penis is called a dork.
Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs
-- it will let you go instantly.
Reindeer like to eat bananas. [in fact, South American Reindeer ate too
many, got fat and were eaten by the puma, until santa came and bred some
for northern climes, etc,etc -cy :)]
Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the sub-atomic particles known as quarks
for a random line in James Joyce, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were
filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A
tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
"Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because
on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos,
actually) to keep from freezing.
© 1996 Peter Langston