Rafed English

Did You Know? - General Info - Part 9

  • An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
  • The oldest word in the English language is "town"
  • The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
  • Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
  • Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all crimes of treason.
  • The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
  • There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.
  • After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
  • Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently
  • Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
  • A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if not held on by skin.
  • Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
  • Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
  • The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
  • Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
  • Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
  • A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
  • Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
  • It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
  • Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
  • If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
  • The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
  • There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
  • The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.
  • According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
  • In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
  • 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 "heat" of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.
  • Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand
  • was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.
  • In left hand drive countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car. Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
  • Japan is the third most densely populated country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
  • Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
  • The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
  • Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
  • Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
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