Rafed English

Did You Know? - General Info - Part 17

  • Alma mater means bountiful mother.
  • A Holstein's spots are like fingerprints -- no two cows have the same pattern of spots.
  • Glass flutes do not expand with humidity so their owners are spared the nuisance of tuning them.
  • Jersey (in the Channel Islands, UK) was the only place that the Nazi's occupied in Great Britain during
  • World War II.
  • Top English soccer club Liverpool were formed because their local enemies, Everton, couldn't pay the rent for their stadium. Therefore Liverpool took over at the stadium (Anfield) and became England's top soccer team ever.
  • The male gypsy moth can "smell" the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.
  • 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 "Hallelujah Chorus" fits into the Easter portion of Handel's Messiah, not Christmas.
  • Over 30 million people in the US "suffer" from Diastima. Diastima is having a gap between your front teeth.
  • In 1976 Sarah Caldwell became the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
  • Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike.
  • Reindeer milk has more fat than cow milk.
  • The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.
  • Libya is the only country in the world with a solid, single-colored flag -- it's green.
  • Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language.
  • 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.
  • The original fifty cent piece in Australian decimal currency had around $2.00 worth of silver in it before it was replaced with a less expensive twelve sided coin.
  • "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 realise what is occuring, relax and correct itself. At about that height it hits maximum speed and when it hits the ground it's rib cage absorbs most of the impact. So throw your cat off a building today!"
  • There are eight different sizes of champagne bottle and the largest is called a Nebuchadnezzar (after the Biblical king who put Daniel's three friends into the oven).
  • The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
  • The female ferret is referred to as a `jill'.
  • The word rodent comes from the Latin word `rodere' meaning to gnaw.
  • Australian Rules Football was originally designed to give cricketers something to play during the off season.
  • Alexander the Great was an epileptic.
  • The lead singer of The Knack, famous for "My Sharona," and Jack Kevorkian's lead defense attorney are brothers, Doug & Jeffrey Feiger.
  • Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of "The Boy General" is one of the few women buried at the U.S. Military academy at West Point, New York.
  • "Freelance" comes from a knight whose lance was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to one master.)
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