32 Utterly Dumb Factoids
Since I’m feeling sorta off-topic today, I thought I’d share with you a few meaningless factoids I ran across… for whatever they’re worth.
- In Kentucky, 50 percent of the people who get married for the first time are teenagers. (And the other 50% are their 40 year old first-cousins?)
- Einstein still couldn’t speak fluently at the age of nine. His parents thought he might be retarded. (But he wasn’t… he just didn’t give a damn.)
- Los Angeles has more automobiles than people. (Does this mean there are a lot of collectors, or a lot of junkyards?)
- You’re more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any other weather. (Try not to harvest honey on a windy day, and you should be okay.)
- An average person laughs about 15 times a day. (YouTube watchers greatly exceed that average.)
- Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas. (Somebody you don’t like? Now you know what to feed ‘em.)
- Penguins, despite the shortness of their legs, can jump as high as 6 feet in the air. (Makes you wonder how high they’d go if they could only fly.)
- The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at night. (So how the heck do we put this to good use?)
- A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’t give her coffee. (A lot of American women feel the same way.)
- The Neanderthal’s brain was bigger than yours is. (Nothing personal, you know.)
- Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants. (Naturally… they won’t even let real ducks into Finland. Same reason)
- Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does. (Now how the hell do you measure a thing like that?)
- You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog. (But on a wet day, you probably smell much better than he does.)
- Only 55 percent of all Americans know that the sun is a star. (The rest are out getting a tan.)
- The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello. (Aw, that ruins everything.)
- Even if you cut off a cockroach’s head, it can continue to live for several weeks. (So better start early.)
- Most American car horns honk in the key of F. (Seems appropriate… that’s so you can give other drivers the F-honk.)
- Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head. (I do the same every time I sit down to listen to it.)
- A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana. (Tried by his peers, no doubt.)
- About 70 percent of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money. (Just? Just?)
- It’s against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas. (They’re tired of people living hand to mouth.)
- Some toothpastes contain antifreeze. (To warm up your smile I’d guess.)
- Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns. (And this was the guy who invented psychotherapy!)
- Millie the White House dog, when the first George Bush was in office, earned more than 4 times as much as the President did in 1991. (Four times more effective on the job?)
- Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific. (The birds have been making deposits for centuries, so by the time humans started exporting the stuff, the island was several feet deep in birdshit. True fact.)
- There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones. (That’s not hard to believe – just check out your neighbors’ lawns.)
- Most lipstick contains fish scales. (But don’t try sniffing her lips before you kiss her. Might be misunderstood.)
- Mosquitoes have teeth. (Duh…)
- Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray. (Thanks, I’ll look out for that.)
- The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley. (And Jesus wasn’t even a westerner – born, raised and died in the middle east.)
- When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food. (And good riddance, too.)
- Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark. (Now we know how he was able to persist through 10,000 failures.)
Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles
Ah, the old reliable ‘List Post’. Darren Rouse of Problogger puts this as Day #2 in his “31 Days to Build a Better Blog.” They are easy and can be a lot of fun, especially when you add your own running commentary. This is where you can let your personality shine.
And yes, you do have a warped sense of humor, my friend. I loved this post!
All the best from Toronto,
Russ
Better look out… you may have been contaminated by all that weird viewpoint stuff. But hey, what’s a little warpage between friends anyway.
Seriously though, sometimes a bent way of seeing things is more useful than you’d expect. Just yesterday my wife and I were at a meeting of the Japanese retirees club in Chiang Mai, and a group of Thai musicians from the university were demonstrating the old traditional instruments and their folk music. A professor was explaining that the themes they played were short, but that they’d play through them again and again, taking off on endless variations, so no two performances were ever the same twice. Sounded like a description of jazz to me, so I raised my hand.
“Do you play any newer music,” I asked. “For instance Beatles tunes or the like?” Of course everybody thought that was funny, but the professor actually gave a sensible answer.
“The instruments are made for non-western scales, which don’t include sharps and flats, so really they can’t.”
Thus we all ended up learning something interesting and useful. And that – I keep telling myself – is why I do it… because it’s so educational. Who says education has to be boring?