Crazy Addictive Trivia

Completely Useless Trivia Lot #1:

• Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark (motivation for light bulb?)
  
• The grapefruit is man-made: a hybrid between the pomelo and the orange.
• The Pentagon is the largest office building in the world.
• Hydrogen hydroxide is commonly known as water.
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.
• Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, with a population of 1000 and a size 108.7acres.
• More money is spent each year on alcohol and cigarettes than on Life insurance.
• The idea of painting a centre white line was first experimented in 1921 in Sutton Coldfield Birmingham, England. Following complaints by residents over reckless driving and several collisions, the Sutton Coldfield Corporation decided to paint the line on Maney Corner in the area of Maney.
• Tiny Tim called his daughter Tulip after his 1968 hit 'Tiptoe through the Tulips'.
• A polar bear's skin is black. Its fur is not white, but actually clear.
• Your foot is nearly the same length as your forearm as measured from the inside of the elbow to the wrist.
• Bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers were all invented by women.
• Orgin of Ebay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. "Echo Bay" didn't refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to Lake Mead, or any real place. "It just sounded cool," Omidyar reportedly said. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So, Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.
• The Angel falls in Venezuela are nearly 20 times taller than Niagara falls.
• The average human produces the same amount of heat as a 100 watt light bulb.
• Taft was the last President with facial hair.
• During the chariot scene in 'Ben Hur' a small red car can be seen in the distance.
• Why are those gossip-hunting spies called eavesdroppers? It is because in Middle English, the water that falls from the eaves of a house was called eavesdrop, and eavesdropper was first used to describe someone who would stand close to a house in order to hear what was going on inside.
• There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
• A total of 382 kg of rock samples were returned to the Earth by the Apollo and Luna programs.
• Maine is the toothpick capital of the world.
• The little plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
• "Dreamt" and "undreamt" are the only English words that end in the letters "mt".
• At one time, Australia had a population of 17,800,000 people compared to 162,774,000 sheep [9.25 : 1 ], and New Zealand had 3,400,000 people compared to 57,000,000 sheep [16.75 : 1].
• Despite common belief, when you are eating shrimp 'tails' and lobster 'tails', you are in fact eating the abdomen of the creature. The real tail is made up of the inedible fins at the end of the abdomen. Also despite common belief, the 'vein' running down the back of shrimp 'tails' is not a vein, but is the intestines of the shrimp.
• Turkeys often look up at the sky during a rainstorm. Unfortunately some have been known to drown as a result.
• Manholes are round so that the covers don't accidentally fall into the holes.
• More toilets flush during the half time of the superbowl than at any other time.
• 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.
• Sophia Loren's sister was once married to the son of the Italian dictator, Mussolini.
• In the United Kingdom Indian restaurants employ more people than steel making, mining and shipbuilding industries put together!
• In the USA an average of 55,700 people are injured by their own jewellery every year.
• Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
• A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
• The continents names all end with the same letter with which they start.
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
• In the movie Titanic, a man with a yellow shirt and a black moustache fell off the boat and drowned. Five minutes later the same exact man was seen playing the violin with two other men. Apparently he cashed in as an extra too.
• McDonald's sell more than 1/3 of all the French fries sold in restaurants in the U.S. each year.
• Edison tried to invent a gun-powder powered engine for a helicopter and instead blew up his lab.
• According to National Geographic, scientists have settled the old dispute over which came first -- the chicken or the egg. They say that reptiles were laying eggs thousands of years before chickens appeared, and the first chicken came from an egg laid by a bird that was not quite a chicken.
• The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language.
• There is a town in West Virginia USA called Looneyville.
• So far in the twentieth century, two objects have hit the earth's surface with enough force to destroy a medium size city. By pure luck both have landed in sparsely populated Siberia.
• The mathematician Cardano was imprisoned for doing the horoscope of Jesus Christ.
• Fleas can live for months without food.
• By age 60, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
• Every time you step forward, you use fifty four muscles.
• The 'Alligator Pear' is better known as the avocado.
• The library of congress contains 327 miles of bookshelves.
• Conception occurs more in December than any other month.