Saturday, March 22, 2008

Completely Useless Facts

An hour of your life vanished two weeks ago. Poof. There it went. Gone until November. Chances are you didn’t notice outside the fact that it was a little darker than usual when your alarm went off; or, more likely, when your mom opened up the curtain and told you that you were late for school. I was originally going to write something carefully detailing hours in my life that I wish would disappear. But I soon realized that I already did that last year and added a ton of useless blogs about daylight savings time before. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on a few hours we all wish to erase, that is, the hours that I learned all these useless facts. In an effort to pass on tiny bits of knowledge and waste even more hours of your life, here’s some facts that are completely and utterly useless. Enjoy. And if you taught me these, be proud that I remembered them.

John D. Rockefeller was the richest self-made man in human history. Adjusting for inflation, he would be worth 318.3 billion dollars today. At the time of his death in 1937, he was worth 1/65 of the entire GDP of the United States. The all-time richest person in human history however is King Solomon. His gold alone would be worth trillions and he had a vast amount of diamond mines in addition to that.

The phrase "play it again, Sam", made famous by the movie "Casablanca", was never actually said in the movie.
The actual lines from the movie were
"You played it for her, you can play it for me. Play it!".
"Play it, Sam. Play ’As Time Goes By"’.

To continue with misquoted Bogart movies, "We don’t need no stinkin’ badges" is never said in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s, "Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges."

Male opossums have forked penises, which is fortunate because the females have a forked vagina.

The letters U and J did not appear in the English alphabet until the 16th century. Before then, V and I were used in their place respectively, and still maintained the function we’ve come to know today. So next time you want to write to me, spell it with an I please.

The liver of a polar bear contains lethal (to humans) amounts of vitamin A. And while eskimos can’t go around eating polar bear livers, they can eat poisonous (to non eskimos) amounts of Vitamin A. There are stories of the accidentally poisoning explorers because the fish they ate contained so much Vitamin A which they were used to, but the explorers were not.

During the week of April 4th, 1964 the Beatles had twelve songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and they occupied the top five slots, which had never been done and to this day remains a record. They’re also the only artists to have back-to-back-to-back singles at 1. Boyz II Men , Nelly and Outkast have have back-to-back 1’s, but no one else has had a three-peat. Yesterday is the most covered song of all time.

Alaska is technically the westernmost, northernmost, and easternmost state. The Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian.

The first pornographic film was created by Thomas Edison’s assistant

A "tid bit/tit bit" is so called because it used to be a piece of information the newspapers printed for the guys to tell their wives.

The first Tuesday after the Easter break is colloquially called "Tits Tuesday" in London. This is because its typically the first time of year the girls get a chance to sunbathe. As such, the girls tend towards displaying their newly tanned flesh en masse during the weeks after. Hence "tits tuesday" names the first working day after the national holiday and reflects the fact that its the first day of the year men get to appreciate the female form in its resplendent glory. Sunbeds have challenged this "fact", but, it still holds water to a degree.

When you hear about wine meant to be served at room temperature you have to factor in that the standard room temperature is now warmer because of home cooling technology. So to reach room temperature you now need to put your reds into the fridge for about 15 minutes before serving. Oddly enough, White wine should be kept in the fridge and then removed 15 minutes before it is to be served.

Galileo drank a glass of warm blood every night before bed. Not entirely sure if it was room temperature.

The indentation on a person’s upper lip is called the philtrum. According to Jewish mythology, it is caused by angels teaching the unborn baby all the knowledge in the universe and then removing it by touching their lip right before they’re born.

Those angels are total jerks.

The letter J is the only letter to not appear in the periodic table of elements.

My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

"race car" is a palindrome.

A female pig orgasms for 30 minutes.......lucky swine

PIN stands for Personal Identification Number. If you say ’pin number’ you’re actually saying ’personal identification number number’. And if anyone says ’personal pin number’ you can ask them what a ’personal personal identification number number’ is.

Elephants are the only mammals that cannot jump... them and White men.

In the movie Ghostbusters, Peter Venkman was played by Bill Murray.
In the cartoon he was voiced by Lorenzo Music (for a time).
In the Garfield cartoon, Garfield was voiced by Lorenzo Music.
In the Garfield movie, Garfield was voiced by Bill Murray.

A woman has never won an Oscar for best director. Only three have ever been nominated: Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Lina Wertmuller

Voyager 1 is speeding along at about 57,600 kph (35,790 mph).
If it had the speed to escape the Milky Way galaxy, it would do so in approximately 1,296,480,000 years. It will have enough juice to send communications until the year 2020. Once Voyager reaches interstellar space in about 8-10 years, there will be virtually no solar radiation to degrade it meaning it will likely float off into the void long after we are all gone.

Well there you have it. I’m sure you can never use those in anything productive but maybe, just maybe, you’ll be on Jeopardy one day and the Final Jeopardy qurstion will be one of these. You’ll thank me then. Perhaps with a percentage of your winnings, maybe?

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