300 things you never knew or cared about…

Came across www.gopzap.com today where this chap has spent a considerable amount of time collecting well over 300 facts that you just never knew about! Absolutely first class…

There are more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in Canada.

It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.

If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create explosion that is equal to an atomic bomb.

To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs – it will let you go instantly.

In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

Every continent begins and ends in the same letter.

Every continent has a city called Rome.

Two thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey.

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

Right handed people live on average nine years longer than left handed people do.

The sentence ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses every letter in the English language.

No president of the United States was an only child.

TYPEWRITER is one of the longest words that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.

If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

The word racecar and kayak are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

A snail can sleep for 3 years.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

China has more English speakers than the United States.

An average chocolate bar has 8 insects’ legs in it.

An average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.
A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because Donald Duck does not wear pants.

STEWARDESSE is one of the longest words typed with only the left hand.

Shakespeare invented the word “assassination” and “bump”.

Marilyn Monroe had six toes.

By the age of 65 an average person will have seen 2,000,000 commercials.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

The longest town name in the world has 167 letters.

In a year the average person walks four miles making his or her bed.

A goldfish’s attention span is three seconds.

A camel has 3 eyelids.

You burn 20 calories per hour chewing gum.

An average American will eat 35,000 cookies during his or her lifetime.

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than for the US Treasury.

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

Only 1 out of 1000 people can lick their elbow.

Most people that read this will try to lick their elbow.

The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work is Alaska.

The cost of raising a medium sized dog to the age of eleven is $6,400.

The average number of people airborne over the US at any given hour is 61,000.

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 years old and lived in China in 1910.

The world’s youngest pope was 11 years old.

The first novel ever written on a typewriter is Tom Sawyer.

If a statue depicting a person on a horse with both front legs in the air, the person died in a battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in a battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

‘I am.’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

Hershey’s Kisses are called Hershey’s Kisses because the machine that makes them looks like it is kissing the conveyor belt.

In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled ‘Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden’ and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.

The number of most children ever born to one mother is 69.

A shark is the only type of fish that can blink with both eyes.

All of the clocks in the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ are stuck at 4:20.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They do not appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds; dogs have only about 10.

DREAMT is the only English word that ends with the letters ‘mt’.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If you are an average American in your whole life you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at a red light.
In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Maine is the only state whose name contains one syllable.

No word in the English language rhymes with the words ‘month’, ‘orange’, ‘silver’, or ‘purple’.

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the parliament building is an American flag.

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

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

An average person falls asleep within seven minutes.

An average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.

The Bible does not say there were three wise men; it only says there were three gifts.

The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.

The longest word that has one syllable in the English language is ‘screeched’.

Microwaves were invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The only word that has 15 letters that can be spelt without repeating a letter is ‘uncopyrightable’.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

There are only four words in the English language which end with ‘dous’; ‘tremendous’, ‘horrendous’, ‘stupendous’, and ‘hazardous’.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

Turtles can breathe through their bottoms.

Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least six feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

The King of Hearts is the only king without a moustache.

Donkeys kill more people annually than planes crash.

No piece of paper can be folded in half more than eight times by human hands.

Starfish have no brains.

Elephants are one of the few mammals that cannot jump.

Catfishes have over 27,000 taste buds.

Fleas can jump 350 times its body length.

Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

The dot over the letter ‘I’ is called a tittle.

Most lipsticks contain fish scales.

A shrimp’s heart is in its head.

During your lifetime, you will eat about 60,000 pounds of food, which is the weight of about 6 elephants.

India’s population will overtake China’s population in tens years time.

A man once floated himself into the air using 142 helium filled balloons tied to a lawn chair. He was later arrested for flying without a license.

Dolphins sleep with one eye open.

The world’s oldest piece of chewing gum is over 9000 years old.

In space astronauts cannot cry properly because there is no gravity, so the tears cannot flow down their faces.

There are more plastic flamingos in the US than real ones.

About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.

More people use blue toothbrushes than red ones.

A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 miles per hour.

Your ribs move about 5 million times a year every time you breathe.

In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons.

Slugs have 4 noses.

Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to watch TV for 3 hours.

Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet.

Owls are one of the only types of birds who can see the color blue.

An average American or Canadian drinks about 600 cans of soda every year.

It was once against the law to slam your car door in a city in Switzerland.

56% of children aged 8 to 16 in the USA have a television in their bedrooms. The old standby punishment of ‘Go to your room!’ is not the same these days.

In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than 50 minutes.

If you keep a Goldfish in a dark room, it will turn white.

A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they cannot find any food.

Cat pee glows under black light.

The Earth is spinning around the sun at 6000 miles per hour.

Light travels 168,000 miles per second.

Jupiter has 61 moons.

The film ‘Titanic’ cost over £113,000,000 ($225,562,330) to make.

One man had hiccups for 56 years.

Human hair or nails keep growing after you die.

There is an official ‘The world is flat’ club in America with 1021 members that really believes such.

Penguins only live in the South Pole, not the north as you often see in badly made Christmas movies.

If a cat has blue eyes and white fur by the time it reaches adult hood there is an 80% chance it will become deaf.

Every day 20 banks are robbed. The average take is $2500.

One car out of every 230 made was stolen last year.

Almost half of the newspapers in the world are published in the US and Canada.

There are over 58 million dogs in the US.

Dogs and cats consume over $11,000,000,000 worth of pet food a year.

Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.

Humans blink over 10,000,000 times a year.

Every second, Americans collectively eat one hundred pounds of chocolate.

There are approximately fifty Bibles sold each minute across the world.

Every year, kids in North America spend close to half a billion dollars on chewing gum.

An earthquake on Dec 16 1811 caused parts of the Mississippi River to flow backwards.

A person uses approximately fifty seven sheets of toilet paper each day.

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

In 32 years, there are about 1 billion seconds.

In England, in the 1880’s, the word ‘Pants’ was considered a dirty word.

The average person laughs 13 times a day.

Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.

It is estimated that millions of trees in the world are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, ‘Gadsby’, which contains over 50,000 words – none of them with the letter E.

Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions.

Every 45 seconds a house catches on fire in the United States.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.

In Kentucky, it is the law that a person must take a bath once a year.

In Singapore, it is illegal to chew gum.

For each human that is alive, there are 10 million ants.

A typical lead pencil can draw a line that is 35 miles long.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

Noel brand Christmas lights feature a label saying ‘for indoor and outdoor use only’.

A man says average 4850 words in 24 hours.

The world’s population is approximately 6.53 billion (2006), India & China represent 36.92% of the world’s populations.

40% of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

315 entries in Webster’s 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.
Ketchup was sold in the 1830’s as a medicine.

There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

The original name for a butterfly was “flutterby”.

In Chinese, the KFC slogan “finger lickin’ good” comes out as “eat your fingers off”.

Brains are more active sleeping than watching TV.

Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans.

The average four year old child asks over four hundred questions a day.

The average person presses the snooze button on their alarm clock three times each morning.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

When the moon is directly overhead, you weight slightly less.

You cannot kill yourself by holding your breath.

Chimps are the only animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror.

Horses cannot vomit.

If you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out.

Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their rear ends.

Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

If the Sun disappeared, it would take 8.3 minutes before the Earth went dark.

Most of the world’s pineapples grow in Hawaii.

Scientists say stupid people laugh more than smart people.

Any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th.

Chewing gum while cutting onions can stop you from crying.

If the planet Saturn was to be put in a bath tub, it would float.

If colorings weren’t added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.

If you feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer, its stomach will explode.

Every time you lick a stamp, you are consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

Barbie’s full name is Barbra Millicent Roberts.

The bubbles in Guiness Beer sink to the bottom rather than float to the top like all other beers. No one knows why.

There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.

The name for Oz in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence ‘Oz’.

If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.

Smelling bananas and/or green apples (smelling, not eating) can help you lose weight.

Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music.

Russians generally answer the phone by saying ‘I’m listening’.

A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.

The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its heads enables it to see all four feet at all times.

If you multiply 526,315,789,473,684,210 with any number you will always find the original number in the result.

The NY phone book had 22 Hitlers before WWII. The NY phone book now has 0 Hitlers after WWII.

The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.

Bulls are colorblind; therefore will usually charge at a matador’s waving cape no matter what color it is – be it red or neon yellow.

The ‘Hundred Years War’ lasted 116 years. (1337-1453)

After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again.

The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.

The magic word ‘Abracadabra’ was originally intended for the specific purpose of curing hay fever.

Dogs and cats, like humans, are either right or left handed.

The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.

Windmills always turn counter clockwise, except for the windmills in Ireland.

The turkey was wrongly named after what was thought to be its country of origin.

It was illegal to sell ET dolls in France because there is a law against selling dolls without human faces.

Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.

There is no mention of Adam and Eve eating an apple in the Bible.

Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day.

The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is ‘Live Free or Die’. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.

It takes 8.5 minutes for light to get from the sun to earth.

Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before you leave.

Four people played Darth Vader: David Prowse was his body, James Earl Jones did the voice, Sebastian Shaw was his face and a fourth person did the breathing.

The sloth (a mammal) moves so slowly that green algae can grow undisturbed on its fur.

There are four cars and eleven light posts on the back of a ten-dollar bill.

You are born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult you only have 206 bones.

There are more beetles than any other kind of creature in the world.

Hummingbirds cannot walk.

Thomas Edison, light bulb inventor, was afraid of the dark.

The Earth weights around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film down so you could see his moves.

Cigarette lighters were invented before matches.

It is a criminal offence to drive around in a dirty car in Russia.

A fully loaded supertanker traveling at normal speed takes at least twenty minutes to stop.

Human birth control pills work on gorillas.

A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.

An average ice berg weights 20,000,000 tons.

The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.

A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

There are more than 50,000 earthquakes throughout the world every year.

A hedgehog’s heart beats 300 times a minute on average.

Over 2500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people.

If the population of the Earth continued to increase at its present rate indefinitely, by 3530 AD the total mass of human flesh and blood would equal the mass of the Earth. By 6826 AD it would equal the mass of the known universe.

Spain literally means ‘the land of rabbits’.

A lion’s roar can be heard from five miles away.

Earth is the only planet not named after a God.

A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.

Crickets hear through their knees.

There are more nutrients in the cornflake package itself than there are in the actual cornflakes.

The screwdriver was invented before the screw.

On an American one dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the ‘1’ encased in the ‘shield’ and a spider hidden in the front upper right hand corner.

Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.

If you counted 24 hours a day, it would take 31,688 years to reach one trillion.

The lifespan of a taste bud is ten days.

Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.

The province of Alberta in Canada has been completely free of rats since 1905.

The longest US highway is route 6 starting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop, California.

The most used letter in the English alphabet is ‘E’, however, ‘Q’ is the least used.

If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning before you will die of oxygen deprivation.

101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and do not die throughout the movie.

A duck’s quack does not echo. No one knows why.

There are more than 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building.

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

Only female mosquitoes bite.

A species of earthworm in Australia grows up to 10 feet in length.

It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 years old around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is ‘shake’ and the 46th word from the last word is ‘spear’.

A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it is there.

Pogonophobia is the fear of beards.

Hindu men believed it to be unluckily to marry a third time. They could avoid misfortune by marrying a tree first. The tree (his third wife) was then burnt, freeing him to marry again.

The launching mechanism of a carrier ship that helps planes to take off could throw a pickup truck over a mile.

A flush toilet exists that dates back to 2000 BC.

There is about 200 times more gold in the world’s oceans, than has been mined in our entire history.

A hummingbird weights less than a penny.

In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.

Some Eskimos have been known to use refrigerators to keep their food from freezing.

Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.

Over 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.

‘Rhythm’ is the longest English word without vowels.

Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.

Should there be a crash; Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same airplane as a precaution.

Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second.

Forest fires move faster uphill than downhill.

One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.

America once issued a 5 cent bill.

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21 inch tongue.

Humans blink over 10,000,000 times a year.

The world’s population has been increased by 3.1 billion in last 40 years.

When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop including your heart.

3000 cows are required to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.

An average computer user blinks 7 times per minute.

Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button.

Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

40,000 Americans are injured by toilets every year.

An average cow produces 200,000 glasses of milk in their lifetime.

Most of the world’s maple syrup is from Canada.

The first video game in the world was created in 1958.

80% of millionaires drive used cars.

The plague that existed in England (medieval times) still exists today. The chance of getting the plague is close to none. The last time a person died from the plague was in 2005.

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

In your lifetime your produce enough saliva to fill 2 swimming pools.

Bees have five eyes.

Someone dies every 8 seconds for smoking.

The world’s smallest spider is the size of a period.

The NFL makes two super bowl trophies, incase one is destroyed during the celebration.

You have no sense of smell when you are asleep.

A Mexican town had a storm where frogs fell from the sky, in 1997.

An iceberg produces more heat than a lit match.

An airplane in 1963 traveled at 7274 kilometers per hour (faster than a bullet from a rifle).

The chance of being killed in a motorbike crash is 90%.

The chance of being killed in a car crash is 10%.

Sending an entire building through the mail has been illegal in the US since 1916 when a man mailed a 40,000 ton brick house across Utah to avoid high freight rates.

One man won an art contest when his painting was displayed upside down.

An average pigeon can memorize 1200 images.

Coke was invented when two people attempted to create a headache medicine.

The fastest fish in the world can travel at 112 kilometers per hour in water.

Beavers can hold their breaths for up to 45 minutes.

Giraffes sleep for 20 minutes a day.

There is 8760 hours in a year.

For each cigarette you take, you lose 7 seconds of your life.

The distance between the Earth and the Moon is lengthened by 2cm every year. The moon will begin to orbit Venus in several million years.

The color blue makes you hungry.

If the number of cereal packs produced in 24 hours were placed end to end, the line would reach over 200 miles.

Hummingbirds have the ability to fly backwards.

In the year 210AD, a war occurred where an army of 50,000 soldiers defeated an army of 800,000 soldiers.

Ice cream was invented in China, 4000 years ago.

Hot water can freeze faster than cold water.

Apple seeds are poisonous.

Due to the rotation of the Earth, an object can be thrown further if it is thrown west.

The two people which have the recipe for Coca-Cola are not permitted to travel in a vehicle together incase of a crash.

At least 15,000,000 people around the world are born on the same day as you.

Every 60 seconds, 100 people die and 240 people are born.

A Flamingo’s skin color is determined by the food that it eats.

Cows can walk upstairs, but cannot walk downstairs.

The earth is 0.02 degrees hotter during a full moon.

The mind boggles. That wasn’t a fact, it was just…. never mind…

2 thoughts on “300 things you never knew or cared about…

  1. Pingback: More things you didn’t know or care about…

  2. No word in the English language rhymes with the words ‘month’, ‘orange’, ‘silver’, or ‘purple’.
    how about clever.that rhymes with silver?

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