Random strange trivia/unusual facts !

this one got my head going.
for you to be here now, reading this your ancestors had to crawl out of the soup of creation avoid being eaten, destroyed by earthquakes, meteors,fire,dinasours, god knows what else for millions of years.

[edit on 28-10-2008 by mad bloke]

reply to post by mad bloke


Madbloke~that one certainly makes you think!
Cheers Karl

The sense of smell of an ant is just as good as a dog's is.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead".

The tongue of a mature Blue Whale has approximately the same mass as that of an entire adult elephant.

23% of all photocopier faults world-wide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their bottoms.

In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

One quarter of all creatures on the planet are beetles.

Giant squids have eyes as big as watermelons.

It's against the law for monsters to enter the town of Urbana, Illinios in the U.S.A.

Seaweed is used to thicken icecream.

Out of 20000 species of bees, only 4 make honey.

You use over 70 muscles to say one word.

Lobsters have pale blue blood.

Plants that are not cared for will cry for help, a thirsty plant will make a high-pitched sound that is too high for us to hear.

Snakes have one lung.

In Switzerland, it's against the law to slam your car door.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

Koala bears are excellent swimmers.

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.

More people are killed each year by coconuts than by sharks.

About 80% of women wear the wrong size bra.

Sri Lanka has the world's highest number of public holidays.

The Pima tribe in Arizona has the highest rate of diabetes in the world.

Four sunken nuclear submarines sit at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The age of a fish can be determined by reading rings on bones in the fish's head.

Cats spend about 70% of a day sleeping.

Tennis was once called "sphairistike".

Swiss people eat more chocolate than any other person in the world.

There are 160 words for camel in Arabic.

Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.

The first picture of a kangaroo was seen in England in 1773.

Fossils of sea creatures have been found at Mount Everest.

The Oscar Awards were held twice in 1930.

More money is spent on gardening than on any other hobby.

There are 92 known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea.

The Iolani Palace of Oahu is the only royal palace in the United states.

Peanuts grow underground.

Mexico City sinks several inches every year.

Lobster used to be poor people's food.

Rain travels approximately 8 mph.

In some parts of Argentina they speak Welsh.

All owls lay pure white eggs.

Only about 10% of lightning bolts strike the ocean.

There are about 600 different shapes of pasta worldwide.

Tipping in Iceland is considered an insult.

A Goldfish kept in a dark room will eventually turn white.

Nepal has an airline company called Buddha Air.

Armadillos can walk under water.

There is a town in Canada called Dildo.

Saudi Arabia is the only country named after its ruling family.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four years old.

Peru has more pyramids than Egypt.

The original game of Monopoly was circular.

Nutmeg is very poisonous if injected intravenously.

A yellow fly swatter will kill more flies than any other color
(flies are blind to the color yellow).

Great little video containing some very impressive facts:
www.wearechange.org...

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Stuffing cats down your trousers will make an impression on the Lady's.

Originally posted by whaaa
Stuffing cats down your trousers will make an impression on the Lady's.

I´ll have to try that one......are you sure it works?

Originally posted by karl 12

Originally posted by whaaa
Stuffing cats down your trousers will make an impression on the Lady's.

I´ll have to try that one......are you sure it works?

Waaa, I tried it and it doesn´t work.

I'm well impressed.

Did you take pictures?

ps Thanks - I've found this thread very interesting.

The race known as Vulcans on the Star Trek Series were named after a stove made by the Vulcan Company.

Originally posted by Wally Conley
The race known as Vulcans on the Star Trek Series were named after a stove made by the Vulcan Company.

Aha,good one~also

*The live long and prosper sign by Star Trek's Mr Spock is the sign that jewish priests (cohenim) used whilst saying certain prayers.

*Screwdrivers were first used to help knights put on armour.

*Venetian blinds were invented in Japan.

*20% of all road accidents in Sweden involve an Elk.

*In 1776,Croatia was the first country to recognize the United States.

*Leonardo Da Vinci invented an alarm clock that woke the sleeper by rubbing his feet.

*Jodie Foster was mauled by a lion when she was a child.

*There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.

*Our hearing is less sharp after eating too much.

*The Hydrochloric acid in the human stomach is strong enough to dissolve a nail.

*A new born kangeroo is small enough to fit in a teaspoon.

*14 million people were killed in World War One,20 million died in the flu epidemic that followed it.

*The distance between an alligator's eyes ,in inches, is equivalent to it's length in feet.

*Elephants are not afraid of mice.

*Emus cannot walk backwards.

*A giraffe's erect penis is four feet long.

*A Chamois goat can balance on a point of rock the size of a £1 coin.

*Bats have sex in the air.

*A cow's only sweat glands are in it's nose

*The ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait at their tables.

*The colour red has been found to promote the hunger reflex in humans.This is why so many fast food establishments use the colour in their logos and decor.

*Sharks, in their 400 million years on earth, have shown an extraordinary ability to resist cancer and other diseases. This has raised hopes among medical researchers that the oceans' most feared predator might turn out to be the cancer patient's best friend.

*The risk of a heart attack is higher on a Monday than on any other day of the week.

*90 degrees below zero your breathe will freeze in mid air and fall to the ground.

*The best way for a man to know whether he will go bald is to look at his mother's father.

*The average person opens the fridge 22 times a day.

*83% of people hit by lightning are men.

*When you sneeze your heart stops.

*More people are allergic to cow's milk than to any other food.

*A rat's performance in a maze can be improved by playing Mozart to it.

*The pupils in goats and sheeps eyes are rectangular.

*All the pet hampsters in the world are descended from one female wild golden hampster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.

*Beaver teeth are so sharp that Native Americans once used them as knife blades.

*Rabbits have been known to reach speeds of 47 MPH.

*Cats cannot taste sweet food.

*Deer sleep for only 5 minutes a day.

*The skin of a hippotamus is nearly bulletproof.

*Kiwis are the only bird that hunt by smell....and the only birds that have nostrils at the end of their bill.

*Giraffes have no vocal cords.

*There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on earth.

*A moth has no stomach.

*The only food cockroaches will not eat is cucumber.

*A red sponge can be broken into a thousand pieces but still reconstitute itself.

*If a lobster loses an eye it can grow another one.

*Whales increase their weight 30,000,000,000 times in their first 2 years.

*The albatross can sleep in flight.

*A pigeon cannot lay an egg unless she sees another pigeon,if another pigeon isn't available her own reflection in a mirror will do.

*A female mosquito can produce 150,000,000 young in one year.

*A leech has 32 brains.

*Insects shiver when they are cold.

*A silkworm has 11 brains but only uses 5 of them.

*The aphid's reproductive cycle is so fast that females are born pregnant.

*The bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissable in an American court.

*The polar bear is the only mammal with hair on the soles of it's feet.

*Snails only mate once in a lifetime but it can take up to 12 hours.

*Pecans are the only food that astronauts can take untreated into space.

*Traditionaly a groom must carry a bride over the threshold to protect her from being possessed by the evil spirits that hang around in doorways.

*Syphillis was known as the French disease in Italy and the English disease in France.

*Rabbits love licorice.

*The decibel was named after Alexander Graham Bell.

*In Britain ,31 people have died since 1996 because they watered their Christmas trees whilst their fairy lights were still plugged in.

*Early Greek and Roman physicians beleived the only way to grow a good crop of Basil was to curse loudly whilst scattering the seeds.

*There was once a town in West Virginia called '6'.

*A can of Spam is opened every four seconds.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Interesting Animal facts:

*An experiment with rhesus macaques revealed that they would "pay" to look at pictures of the faces and bottoms of high-ranking females, by forfeiting their usual reward of a glass of cherry juice. With low-ranking females, however, the researchers had to bribe them with an even larger glass of juice before they would pay any attention.

*The male deep-sea anglerfish is much smaller than the female. But he has giant eyes to look for a suitable female and enormous nostrils to sniff out her pheromones.
Having found her, he latches onto her with his teeth and then starts to disappear. Scales, bones, blood vessels all merge into those of the female. After a few weeks, all that's left of the male are the testes hanging off the female's side, supplying her with his genes.

*If diversity and adaptability are the measuring sticks for success, then beetles are the most successful animals on the planet. There are 350,000 known species, with up to eight million more out there waiting for names: new species are being discovered at an average rate of one an hour. If you lined up all animal and plant species in a row, every fifth species would be a beetle. There are about 750,000,000,000,000,000 individual beetles going about their business right now.

*Catfish are swimming tongues: they have more taste buds than any other creature. Their entire bodies are covered with them. A six-inch catfish may have more than a quarter of a million taste buds, not just in its mouth and gills, but on its whiskers, fins, back, belly, sides and tail. The channel catfish has the best sense of taste of any vertebrate and is able to detect less than a hundredth of a teaspoonful of a substance in an Olympic swimming pool full of water.

*The modern cheetah population can be traced back to a single African group of 500 animals that survived the last ice age. Genetically, this means all living cheetahs are as close as identical twins. They are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity because the female needs to be chased by several males before she can ovulate. Akbar the Great, the 16th-century Mogul emperor, kept more than 1,000 cheetahs but managed only one litter. The next cheetah born in captivity wasn't until 1956.

*Nowadays, "everybody knows" that eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, but this has never been proved. No one has ever seen an eel spawn or die there. Careful scientists prefer to call the Sargasso Sea the eel's "presumed" breeding ground. Young eels have been found there, but not live adults or their eggs. Not one eel has been bred in captivity. When you catch an eel, its reproductive system shuts down completely, as if deliberately keeping the secret.

*The male blanket octopus takes sexual discretion to a whole new level. He is 40,000 times smaller than the female and his technique involves tearing off his mating arm, placing it somewhere on her body and then swimming off to die.
Given that this is roughly equivalent to a herring nudging a blue whale, it's unlikely she's even aware of him. Meanwhile, his disengaged arm crawls into her gill slit, where it can live for as long as month, until her eggs are mature. She then retrieves it, tears it open like a packet of café sugar and sprinkles the sperm over her eggs.

*The nocturnal, flightless kakapo from New Zealand is one of the world's rarest birds. As well as being easy prey for rats and dogs, its mating ritual does them no favours. The male constructs a mating court on top of a mountain, excavating several shallow "bowls" connected by a series of tracks, which he keeps scrupulously clean. Every evening, he hunkers down in each of his bowls in turn, pumps up a special air sac and emits a sequence of low-frequency "booms" that can be heard three miles away.
It may take him months to attract a female, during which time he can lose half his body weight. Some females shuffle 20 miles. If both are still in the mood, they mate for 10 minutes and then she walks home again and tries not to get eaten.

*Spiders' silk is five times stronger than steel and 30 times more stretchy than nylon. An average spider will spin more than four miles of silk in a lifetime and this can be collected and woven into garments. However, the spiders' predatory nature makes them tricky to farm: put 10,000 spiders in a sealed room and you will eventually end up with a single enormously fat spider. (Despite their reputation, female black widows only eat one in ten of their mates, although they can get through twenty five partners in one day.)

*Tardigrades are plump, microscopic creatures that fall somewhere between worms and insects. Also known as water bears or moss piglets, they are the toughest animals on the planet. If their water supply dries out, they dry out, too. All life processes come to a complete stop and they become totally inert. In this "dead" state, tardigrades are practically indestructible: they have been frozen to within a degree of absolute zero (-272°C) and heated to temperatures of 151°C. They have been immersed in chemicals and squeezed by pressures six times greater than those at the bottom of the ocean: but, like living granules of instant coffee, with one drop of water they come back to life - even a century later.

*When walruses find a clam, they hold it firm in their lips, create a vacuum around it and use their tongue like a piston to extract the soft tissue. As a special treat, they hoover up seagulls from underneath or suck the brains of seal pups out through their nostrils. Walruses have a sucking power three times stronger than the average Dyson vacuum cleaner, which explains why their stomachs are full of small pebbles.

*The Asian giant hornets of Japan, also known as the Yak Killer, are the super-predators of the wasp family. They are enormous - like flying thumbs, with a quarter-inch sting. Their venom is strong enough to dissolve human tissue and they kill more than 50 people a year. But the Japanese get their own back in style: they serve the larvae raw as hornet sashimi and deep-fry the adults, which are reputed to taste like sweet prawns.

en.wikipedia.org...

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Abraham Lincoln's mother died when the family dairy cow ate poisonous mushrooms and Mrs Lincoln drank the milk.

Because of the rotation of the earth an object can be thrown father if it is thrown West.

Elvis Presley never gave an encore.

Nanotechnology has produced a guitar no bigger than a blood cell.The guitar,10 micrometers long,has strings that can be strummed.

Goldfish can suffer motion sickness.

Seven per cent of the entire Irish barley crop goes into making Guiness.

The U.S. has never lost a war in which mules were used.

American Vogue ran into trouble when it published a recipe that recommended using horse lard to cook tastier French Fries.

In a scientific study children were told to imagine that they were wearing heavy mittens.The temperature of their fingerprints went up.

Pepper was sold in individual grains during Elizabethan times.

Americans eat approximately 20 billion pickles every year.

Pumpkins were once recommended for removing freckles.

Mark Wahlberg has a third nipple which was airbrushed out of the Calvin Klein underwear ads.

The distress term Mayday comes from the French term m'aidez meaning 'help me'.

X ray technology has shown that there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the one thats visible.

Watermelons which are 92 per cent water originated from the Kalahari desert in Africa.

Mozart never went to school.

Pope Paul IV was so outraged when he saw the naked bodies on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel that he ordered Michaelangelo to paint garments on them.

Columbia University is the second largest landowner(after the catholic church)in New York city.

Hot water freezes quicker than cold water.

The tango originated as a practical dance between two men.

Every U.S. president with a beard has been a Republican.

The last time American green cards were actualy green was 1964.

At the deepest point of the ocean (11.034 km) an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.

About 10 million bacteria live in one gram of soil.

Only 13.5 per cent of scientists are women.

If you were locked in a completely sealed room you'd die of Carbon Dioxide poisoning before you'd die of Oxygen deprivation.

Counting how many times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds and then adding forty to that number will tell you roughly what the outside temperature is in Farenheit.

The oldest living thing in the world is a creosote bush in South Western California which is more than 11,000 years old.

Henry Fonda,David Niven,Uri Geller,Chris De Burgh,The Duke of Windsor,Napoleon Bonapart,James Joyce,John F. Kennedy,Benito Mussolini,
Leo Tolstoy,H.G. Wells,Grouch Marx,Mike Tyson and Sir Richard Branson all lost their virginity to prostitutes.

If you slowly pour a handful of salt into a totaly full glass of water it will not overflow.In fact the water level will go down.

James Madison (1809-1817) was the first U.S. president to wear long trousers;all the previous presidents had worn knee breeches.

Couples who marry in January,February or March have the highest divorce rate.

90 per cent of movies released in the United States are porn films.

The average woman uses about 6 pounds of lipstick during her lifetime.

The Queen can or could drive legaly without taking a driving test.

Over 1000 planets the size of the Earth could fit inside the sun.

All the moons of the solar system are named after Greek and Roman mythology,except the moons of Uranus which are named after Shakespearean characters.

When the Americans sent a man into space,they spent a million dollars developing a pen that could write upside down in conditions of zero gravity.The Russians used a pencil.

Hilary Swank is Rob Lowe's sister in law.

Natalie Portman has never revealed her true surname as she wants to protect her family's privacy.

The average iceberg weighs 20 million tons.

Most orchids are bisexual.

The most abundant metal in the Earth's crust is Alluminium.The Chinese were using Alluminium to make things as early as AD 300.Western civilisation didn't rediscover it until 1827.

You can figure out which way is South if you are near a tree stump.The growth rings are wider on the South side.

There are 10 million bacteria in a litre of milk-thats equivalent to the population of Greece.

The Siberian Larch accounts for more than 20 per cent of the world's trees.

1 in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.

1 out of 5 pieces of the world's garbage is generated in the U.S.

There has never been a sex change operation performed in Ireland.

The Christmas holidays are the busiest time in plastic surgeon's offices.

Pablo Picasso was abandoned by the midwife just after his birth because she thought he was stillborn.He was saved by an Uncle.

Michael Jackson owns the rights to the South Carolina state anthem.

Marlon Brando's occupation on his passport was 'shepherd'.

There are 2 credit cards for every person in the U.S.

97 per cent of paper money in the U.S. contains traces of coc aine.

Woodpecker scalps,porpoise teeth and giraffe tails have all been used as money.

During World War 2,W.C. Fields kept $50,000 in Germany 'just in case the little b*stard wins'.

The Chinese ideogram for trouble shows two women living under one roof.

Dirty snow melts quicker than clean snow.

82 per cent of workers on the Panama Canal suffered from Malaria.

Mucophagy is the medical term for snot eating,the consumption of the nasal mucus obtained from nose picking.

There is no single word for the back of the knee.

Genghis Kahn's calvalry only rode female horses so soldiers could drink their milk.

Cuckoo clocks come from the Black Forest in Germany -not Switzerland.

Chewing gum whilst peeling onions will keep you from crying.

South American Gauchos put raw steak under their saddles before starting a days riding to tenderize the meat.

The warrior tribes of Ethiopia used to hang the testicles of those they killed in battle on the ends of their spears.

The girls of the Tiwi tribe of the South Pacific are married at birth.

1 kg of lemons contains more sugar that 1 kg of strawberries.

Ludwig Van Beethoven was once arrested for vagrancy.

Salvador Dali once arrived at an art exhibition in a limousine filled with turnips.

The poorest country in the world is Mozambique-Switzerland is the richest.

At the nearest point,Russia and America are less than 4 km apart.

Jolly green giant translated into Arabic means 'intimidating green ogre'.

When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa,they used their standard packaging with the cute baby on the label.Unfortunately they were obliged to change it when they discovered that,in Africa,the standard practise is to put pictures of the contents on foods.

Sharwoods launched it's Bundh sauces without realizing that,in Punjabi,the word Bundh is perilously close to a word meaning arse.

Axl Rose used to earn $8 per hour for smoking cigarettes for a science experimentat U.C.L.A.

Fidel Castro was voted Cuba's best schoolboy athlete in 1944.

Black lemurs are the only primates,other than humans,that might have blue eyes.

The female starfish produces 2 million eggs a year-99 per cent of these are eaten by other fish.

New Zealand is the only country that contains every type of climate in the world.

No president of the U.S. was an only child.

Slugs can fertilise their own eggs.

A green fly born on a Sunday can be a grandparent on a Wednesday.

If a cockroach breaks a leg it can grow another one.

A typical bed houses over 6 billion dust mites.

The average bee yields only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in it's life.

To keep from being separated while sleeping,sea otters tie themselves together with kelp.

All clams start out as males;some decide to become females at some point in their lives.

Sharks will eat anything except something in the vicinity of where they give birth.This is the only way nature protects them from accidentaly eating their own babies.

In the original story of Cinderella her slippers were made of gold (not glass) and her stepsisters were beautiful on the outside but their ugliness lay within.

There are just 6 grams of gold in an Olympic gold medal.

In the 1500s,1 out of every 25 coffins was found to have scratch marks on the inside.

In ancient Greece,tossing an apple to a girl was a traditional proposal of marriage.Catching it meant she accepted.

George I,King of England from 1714-1727 was German and couldn't speak a word of English.

Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

During WW2,it was against the law in Germany to name a horse Adolf.

Between 1839 and 1853,Nicaragua had 396 different rulers.

The Pentagon has twice as many toilets as necessary because in the 1940s when it was built,Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites.

Fewer than one per cent of the Carribean Islands are inhabited.

Tasmania has the cleanest air in the inhabited world.

Homosexuality remained on the American psychiatric association's list of mental illnesses until 1973.

Cleopatra wrote a book on cosmetics-one of the ingredients was burnt mice.

Adolf Hitler's mother considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.

In ancient China,doctors only got paid if the patient stayed in good health.If the patient's health deteriorated,sometimes the doctor had to pay him.

Albert Einstein was once offered the presidency of Israel.He declined saying he had no head for problems.

In 1939,the American Nazi party had 200,000 members.

In the latter part of the 18th century,Prussian surgeons treated stutterers by snipping off portions of their toungues.

Elthelred the unready,King of England in the 10th Century,spent his wedding night in bed with his wife and his mother in law.

Emperor Calligula once decided to go to war against the Roman God of the sea Poseidon and ordered his soldiers to throw their spears into the water.

One third of all fresh water in the world is in Canada.

Coca Cola is Africa's largest private sector employer.

One species of shark is so competitive that babies fight each other within the womb until only one is left to be born alive.

The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.

When the air force was conducting test runs and breaking the sound barrier,fields of turkeys dropped dead.

Bluebirds cannot see the colour blue.

The tenrac,a Madagasgan insectivore has 22-24 nipples.

A mouse has more bones than a man. Mouse 225, man 206.

Lions cannot roar until they reach the age of two.

Mice will nurse babies that are not their own.

When a horned toad is angry,it squirts blood from it's eyes.

The vagina and the eye are self cleaning organs.

It takes about 200,000 frowns to make a permanent wrinkle.

Every year,100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens.

Clark Gable was listed on his birth certificate as a girl.

It would take about 200 million Hydrogen atoms to cover the full stop at the end of this sentence.

Originally posted by karl 12
*Elephants are not afraid of mice.

Yes they are.

Originally posted by karl 12
*Emus cannot walk backwards.

Neither can a Kangaroo, it's on the ANZAC and Aussie army symbol, the soldiers can't walk back, won't back down.



Roswell.

[edit on 24/11/2008 by roswell1]

reply to post by roswell1


Ah ha good one
Will have to scratch the mice/elephant one !

Found these very interesting facts about life in 1500's England:

*Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June.
However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.


*Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.
The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water,then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children.
Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying,Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water.


*Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals
would slip and fall off the roof.
Hence the saying .It's raining cats and dogs.


*There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house.
This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed.
Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection.That's how canopy beds came into existence.


*The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt.
Hence the saying, Dirt poor.
The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside.
A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway.Hence the saying a thresh hold = threshold.


*In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.
Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot.
They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme,Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old..


*Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off.
It was a sign of wealth that a man could, bring home the bacon.
They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat..


*Those with money had plates made of pewter.
Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leak onto the food, causing lead poisoning death.
This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.


*Bread was divided according to status.
Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.


*Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky.
The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.
They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up.
Hence the custom of holding a wake.


*England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people.
So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave.
When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive.
So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse,lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be quite literaly 'saved by the bell'.

Karl, thanks for all that information. Now I can seem real smart when trying to impress the honeys down at my local beer joint;

not only will I be brutally handsome but sound edumacated too.

Life is good!!

Oh yeah, my trivial fact for the day is....

Walking around with your fly open all the time is a good way to be mistaken for the town drunk.

[edit on 26-11-2008 by whaaa]

Originally posted by whaaa
Walking around with your fly open all the time is a good way to be mistaken for the town drunk.

Whaaa good post-thats a very wise observation.

Good luck pulling all those foxy chicks with your intimate knowledge of all this nonsensical,useless trivia.
Let me know how you got on-I might try it.

A fly landing on the side of a ship makes it list 1/10 of an atom

Polar bears are the only land animal not detectable on heat radar.

A rainbow is actually a full circle, you only see the arch because of the horizon.

Water naturally moves in a spiral.

Bats can't fly off the ground, they have to launch themselves from a platform.

The shortest president elected was Madison at 5'4.

A group of unicorns is called a blessing.

Originally posted by karl 12

L
'Puffs' tissues didnt sell well in Germany because 'Puff' in German means brothel.


[edit on 01/24/07 by karl 12]

Somehow,I think that should be a selling point.:w: