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- Approximately sixty circus performers have been shot from cannons. At last report, thirty-one of these have been killed.
- The Boeing 767 aircraft is a collection of 3.1 million parts from 800 different suppliers around the world: fuselage parts from Japan, center wing section from Southern California, flaps from Italy.
- A man irate about his income tax paid Uncle Sam with a plaster of Paris check that weighed several pounds. He wasn't all that bright, because once the government cashed the check, it was returned to him and he had to keep it for five years for his records.
- On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the clock tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.
- Parker Brothers prints about 50 billion dollars worth of Monopoly money in one year.
- Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes originally had pads on his hands and feet but Bill Waterson (the creator) found them too distracting and removed them.
- It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace".
- Charlie Brown's father was a barber.
- Lucy and Linus (who where brother and sister) had another little brother named Rerun. (He sometimes played left-field on Charlie Brown's baseball team, [when he could find it!]).
- In the name of art, Chris Burden arranged to be shot by a friend while another person photographed the event. He sold the series of pictures to an art dealer. He made $1750 on the deal, but his hospital bill was $84,000.
- In Britain’s House of Commons, the government and opposition sides of the House are separated by two red lines. The distance between the lines is two swords’ lengths, a reminder of just how seriously the Brits used to take their politics.
- The surface area of an average-sized brick is 79 cm squared.
- In the kingdom of Bhutan, all citizens officially become a year older on New Year's Day.
- The diameter of the wire in a standard paper clip is 1 millimeter - or about 0.04 inch.
- People generally say there are 365 days in a year. By a year, I mean this is the time period it takes the earth to travel around the sun: 365 days. Actually, however, it takes the Earth 365.25 days to make this trip. In other words, for every year we gain one-fourth of a day and every for years we gain an extra day. If nothing was done about this, our calendar would move backwards one full day every four years in relation to our seasons.
- November 29 is National Sinky Day; a day to eat over one's sink and worship it.
- Public typists work at typewriters charging about 14 cents per page. On a good day, a public typist earns about $3.50.
- On average, there are 333 squares of toilet paper on a roll.
- Halloween isn't an established holiday by law. It is traditional that Halloween is Oct. 31 no matter what day of the week it falls on. Halloween dates from 837 when Pope Gregory IV instituted All Saints or All Hallows Day on Nov. 1 to take the place of an earlier festival known as the Peace of the Martyrs. The day was set aside to honor all saints, known and unknown. Halloween then is a shortened form of All Hallows Eve - the evening before All Hallows Day. Certainly, you have a choice of celebrating it on Oct. 30, Saturday, if you wish. Many of the area parties will be held then rather than on Sunday. It's probably appropriate to say some people equate Halloween with the occult or Satanism and don't approve of it at all.
- The numbers on opposite sides of a die always add up to 7.
- In 1979, Namco released Pac-Man, the most popular arcade game of all time. Over 300,000 units were sold worldwide. More than 100,000 units are sold in the United States alone. Originally named Puck Man, the game was retitled after executives saw the potential for vandals to scratch out part of the letter P on the game's marquee, which might discourage parents from letting their children play. Pac-Man became the first video game to be popular with both males and females.
- Elizabeth Goose, who lived in Massachusetts in the late 1600's, is credited by some with the nursery rhymes read to us as children. However, most of those rhymes existed before her time in the form of satirical poems and drinking songs. Some were based on actual events or characters. Charles Perrault, a Frenchman, published a collection of these rhymes in 1697 and an illustration accompanying the text showed an old woman telling stories, with the words "Mother Goose" appearing behind her. The book was eventually published in England and the United States and more rhymes were added with each new publication. It wasn't until the 1800's that a relative of Mrs. Goose claimed the stories originated with Elizabeth.
- If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birth place is listed as a post office box in Albuquerque.
- The St. Louis Gateway Arch had a projected death toll while it was being built. No one died.
- The Hoover Dam was built to last 2,000 years. The concrete in it will not even be fully cured for another 500 years.
- The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes on stage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.
- The Chinese national anthem is called "the march of volunteers."
- "The Tale of Genji", a Japanese work from the early eleventh century, is considered by many scholars to be the world's first full novel. The novel was written by a woman: Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki.
- The reason wheels seem to spin backwards on a camera is because when you film something, you are really taking a series of still images and then replaying them so fast that the eye is fooled into thinking it is a continuous stream of images. The eye can see about 12-14 frames per second. Because of a physical law called the Nyquist Sampling Theorem you need to display frames twice as fast as the eye can see to fool it into seeing it as a continuous movie (Nyquist showed mathematically why that is true). So, imagine you have a wheel that is spinning exactly once every second. If you took a picture at the same rate, it would look like it is standing still. That's because it rotates exactly once every time you take a picture. Now take a picture just a little bit faster than 1 per second. Now every time you take a picture, the wheel has not quite made it all the way around; maybe it will have gone 350 degrees around, so it's 10 degrees behind the first frame. The next frame it will have gone another 350 degrees, making it now 20 degrees behind the first frame, and so on. When you play the film back, it will look like the wheel is moving backwards, even though you know it was going forwards. The opposite effect happens when you take pictures a bit slower than the rotation rate. It gets more complicated when the wheel does not rotate at a constant rate, like when a car accelerates. The next time you watch TV or go to the movies, watch the wheels as a car speeds up. You might see the wheel appear to go backwards, them stop, then go forwards, all while the car is moving forwards.
- The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.