The ‘F’ Word And More – It’s Fasab Fact Day!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Don’t be offended by the title.

An ‘F’ word here or there never hurt anyone.

So get stuck into the facts (that’s an ‘F’ word too!)

Enjoy.

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In 2011 approximately one third

of divorce filings in the US

contained the ‘F’ word,

yes, that’s the one

“facebook”.

(See, it wasn’t nearly

as bad as you thought.)

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HOT fact:

The temperature of the Earth’s core is

5500 degrees celsius (9900 degrees fahrenheit).

That is the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

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Getting a silver medal in the Olympics

will make you feel worse than getting a bronze

(because you just missed the gold)

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There is actually a beer brewed

from bananas in some countries

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Out of 44 Presidents of the United States,

32 have served in the military.

15 Presidents served in the Army/Army Reserve,

9 served in state militias,

6 served in the Navy/Naval Reserve

and 2 served in the Continental Army.

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Croatian Josip Belušic invented the speedometer.

(How about that for a fast fact?)

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Answering the call of nature is something

Europeans usually associate with the utmost privacy,

which is why American toilets,

with huge bottom and side gaps,

seem so weird to some foreigners.

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The first webcam was actually created

to monitor a coffee pot at

the University of Cambridge.

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Russian spies used to use hollow coins

to pass messages to each other in the US

and one of these coins made it into circulation.

One day a paperboy dropped the coin

and it split open revealing its coded contents.

The code baffled the FBI and CIA

until a Russian spy defected to the US

and interpreted the note.

It was a welcome message from Moscow

…and it was intended for him.

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In Australia there is a river

called the ‘Never Never River’.

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The toaster in your kitchen

contains a more powerful computer

than the one used by NASA

to send astronauts to the moon.

It only had 64Kbyte of memory

and operated at 0.043MHz.

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After the release of the Top Gun movie in 1986,

the US Navy stated that the number of

young men who wanted to become Naval Aviators

went up by 500 percent.

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Facts From Guppies To Genghis Khan. What More Could You Ask?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Another random selection of facts.

Guppies and Genghis Khan are here, but so are lots of others.

Hope you find something you like.

Enjoy.

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There are 12 imaginary languages

in the Lord of the Rings

 

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Under medieval law, animals could

be tried and sentenced for crimes,

as if they were people.

There are records of farm animals being

tried for injuring or killing people.

 

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Although John Mahoney played Kelsey Grammer’s

father in the great TV series ‘Frasier’,

he is only 15 years older than Kelsey.

 

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The Aztec capital city was called ‘Tenochtitlan’

and it was located in the middle of a lake.

At the time of its discovery by Europeans,

it was bigger than most European cities,

had its own garbage collection and

was said to be very clean.

Today the same place is known as Mexico City

and the lake is mostly drained.

 

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Disney’s ‘Main Street’ and ‘Tomorrowland’

are set in two very special astronomical years.

Main Street is set in 1910 and

Tomorrowland is set in 1986,

these years coincide with

Haley’s Comet appearance.

 

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Probably one of the world’s most widely

distributed and popular freshwater

aquarium fish species is the ‘guppy’,

sometimes also known as the

‘million fish’ or ‘rainbow fish’.

It was named in honor of

Robert John Lechmere Guppy,

a British naturalist who sent specimens

of the species from Trinidad to the

Natural History Museum in London.

 

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Some scholars believe that Genghis Khan

was responsible for up to 40 million deaths.

Some of his campaigns involved killing all

members of a society – men, women, and children,

 

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Up until the early 1930s,

if you were ‘cool’ you were feeling chilly.

However during the jazz era the word ‘cool’

became slang for fashionable in jazz circles,

tenor saxophonist Lester Young is largely

said to have popularized it.

How cool is that?

 

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Those who suffer from type 2 diabetes

are often symptom-free,

meaning they don’t even know that they’ve got it.

This type of diabetes is normally picked up

during eye exams as it could be seen as small

haemorrhages from leaking blood vessels

at the back of the eye.

 

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Edgar Allen Poe once wrote a book called

“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

It was about four shipwreck survivors

who were adrift on a raft for several days

before deciding to eat the cabin boy

whose name was Richard Parker.

Not long after, in 1884, a ship called the Mignonette

ended up sinking and leaving only four survivors.

They decided to eat the cabin boy. 

His name was Richard Parker.

 

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If you were a

Flatulence Smell Reduction Underwear Maker

your job would be engineering underwear

that reduces the typically unpleasant post-fart odor.

 

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According to an interview with George Lucas,

R2-D2 and C-3PO were originally called A-2 and C-3.

R2-D2 was designed by Ralph McQuarrie

and co-developed by John Stears

but actually built by Tony Dyson,

who ran his own studio called

The White Horse Toy Company in the UK.

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A Few Of Today’s Facts Really Stink.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Sorry, but today a few of the facts really do stink.

But you might find them interesting nonetheless.

I hope so anyway.

So here they are.

Enjoy.

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There are 13 ways to spell

the “o” sound in French.

Oh?

 

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In the TV series Star Trek,

The Enterprise’s often seen access tunnels

that they called ‘Jeffries Tubes’

were named after original series

prop master Walter M Jeffries.

 

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Vitamin A is important for vision,

the immune system function,

reproduction and support for the

heart, lungs and kidneys.

According to National Institutes of Health (NIH),

around 28%–37% of the general population

take supplements with vitamin A,

however,

just one sweet potato baked in the skin

has 28,058 international units (IU) of

vitamin A per serving,

which is 561% of the daily recommended value.

 

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In 2002, a man was hit by a truck in Finland

as he was trying to cross highway 8 on his bike.

2 hours later his twin brother was also hit by a truck

while trying to cross highway 8 on his bike.

They died within 1.5 km of each other, 2 hours apart.

 

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The US Air Force once experimented with a

Boeing 747 mounted with an anti-missile defense system

that they hoped could track and shoot down

enemy missiles from hundreds of miles away.

Technically called the YAL-1 Airborne Laser

the project was eventually cancelled.

 

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The Aztecs are the Aztecs at all.

The name Aztec was actually made up by Europeans,

the name they called themselves was the ‘Mexica’.

 

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It is estimated that the inhabitants

of medieval London, both human and animal,

produced fifty tons of excrement a day.

As a matter of fact, during the fourteenth century,

Sherborne Lane in East London was so disgusting

that it was officially known as Shiteburn Lane.

 

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The reason around 99% of the population

tend to need glasses, especially for reading,

as they get older is not because

their arms get shorter, but because

the lens in the eyes slowly loses

its focusing ability with age.

 

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Translated as the “Swimming Car”, 

the Volkswagen Schwimmwagen is an

amphibious four-wheel drive off-roader,

used extensively by the German Wehrmacht

and the Waffen-SS during WWII.

The Type 166 is the most numerous and

mass-produced amphibious car in history.

 

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Think you have a bad job?

It could be worse.

You could be a Breath Odor Evaluator.

These are people hired by mint and

toothpaste companies to keep smelling

bad breath until the minty freshness appears.

 

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But these people have it made

compared to Dog Breath Sniffers,

who do the same job, only for dogs.

Phew!!!

 

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Stanley Kubrick hated traveling and

was a little afraid of airplanes.

For that reason,

even though set mostly in Vietnam,

Full Metal Jacket was fully shot in London.

The abandoned Beckton Gas Works that were used

to shoot the major battle scenes are still there today.

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Make Sure You Smile – It’s Fact Day.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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It’s not that the facts today are particularly funny, in fact some of them are the exact opposite.

But if you are in Milan and reading this post I bet you are smiling anyway.

Find out why.

Enjoy.

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Trakr, a German shepherd survivor detection dog,

made history when he became the dog that found the

last survivor of the World Trade Center attack on September 11.

For his accomplishments, Trakr was named

one of history’s most heroic animals by Time.

Trakr died in 2009 at age fourteen.

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75% of the world’s population

speaks more than one language,

but 75% of the world’s population

speak no English.

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Having a pet makes you happier

because petting an animal

releases oxytocin in our brains,

which is sometimes known as

the “cuddle hormone”.

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The eyes blink on an average of

17 times per minute,

that’s 14,280 times per day

or 5.2 million times a year.

 

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In the early Middle Ages,

Europeans divided the day

into seven hours of equal length and,

because summer days are longer than winter ones,

a winter hour was about sixty minutes,

but a summer one was about 150 minutes.

A little bit confusing I think.

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Trampolines contribute to at least

two deaths and numerous serious injuries

each year.

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Giacomo Casanova was an 18th century

Italian adventurer and nobleman famous for

his numerous elaborate affairs with women.

Today, if a man is referred to as a ‘Casanova’,

it can mean anything from an

attentive seducer to a mere lecher.

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In January 2012, dozens of turtles

were found dead in Keystone Heights, Florida,

at the end of Pinon Road.

No one, including the

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission,

has been able to figure out what happened.  

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The most powerful non-nuclear bomb

ever created by the US military is the

Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb,

better known as ‘MOAB’.

It is also more popularly known as

the “Mother of All Bombs”.

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Charles Dickens’s house had a secret door

in the form of a fake bookcase.

The fake books on its shelves included

titles such as ‘The Life of a Cat’

in 9 volumes of course.

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Ford’s F-150 has been the best-selling

vehicle in America for the past 33 years

and the best-selling truck since 1977.

Ford have sold over 34,000,000 of them

since they started production in 1948.

Last year alone they sold 753,851,

which is an incredible 2,065 a day,

or one every 35 seconds.

If you parked every Ford F-150

ever made side by side,

they would stretch for 49,802 miles (80,150 km),

the equivalent to twice around the Equator.

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The first black astronaut was Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.,

but he died before he could travel to space.

The first black astronaut in space

(spending more then 28 days there)

was Guion Bluford in 1983.

He was inducted into the

International Space Hall of Fame in 1997 and into

the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2010.

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The world’s greatest disaster suffered

as a result of animal attacks on humans

happened on Ramree Island during WWII.

The island is infested with saltwater crocodiles

and nearly 500 Japanese troops were eaten alive there.

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When Star Wars: A New Hope was

first being shown in movie theaters

France was still executing people by guillotine.

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Ending today’s facts on a happy note,

if you want to visit Milan, Italy,

make sure to smile all the time as the

Italian city has imposed a ban on frowning.

It is a legal requirement to smile at all times,

except during funerals or hospital visits.

If you don’t you can face a fine.

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Silly Statistics!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Mark Twain is famous for having said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Well, just to prove you can have a bit of fun with statistics have a look at this set of nonsense that came to me in an email a while ago.

They are a complete reversal of the usual figures which continually highlight the increasing world population and the problems that will cause in the future.

These numbers look at the world if it was scaled down to just one hundred people.

It might make you think or it might not.

But it is a new way of looking at population statistics, so I hope you enjoy them anyway.

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 If The World

Was Scaled Down

To Only 100 People

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SEVEN

would have a college degree

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TWENTY-TWO

would own a computer

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TWENTY-SIX

would be children

 

THIRTEEN

of those children would live in poverty

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SEVENTY-FOUR

would be adults

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EIGHT

of those adults would be 65 years or older

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FIFTY FIFTY

There would be an equal

number of males and females

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There would be

SIXTY

Asians,

FIFTEEN

Africans,

FOURTEEN

people from the Americas,

and

ELEVEN

Europeans

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SEVENTEEN

wouldn’t be able to read or write

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TWENTY-THREE

wouldn’t have any shelter

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ONE

would be dying of starvation

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FIFTEEN

would be undernourished

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TWENTY-ONE

would be overweight

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THIRTEEN

wouldn’t have access to clean water

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FIFTY-ONE

would live in cities

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TWENTY-TWO

wouldn’t have electricity

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Of those that do have electricity,

most would only use it for light at night

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SIXTEEN

wouldn’t have toilets

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SEVENTY-FIVE

would be cell phone users

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THIRTY

would be active internet users

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FORTY-EIGHT

would live on less than $2 per day

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SEVEN

people would own an automobile

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THIRTY

would be employed in Agriculture

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FIVE

would own 32% of the wealth

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The poorest

THIRTY-THREE

people would only receive 3% of the income

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By the end of the year

ONE

person would die and

TWO

new people would be born.

 

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