Information Overload II

Here's some random facts, information, trivia I've been hanging onto that I felt like sharing. This is also a continuation of Information Overload part I.

• Ferdinand Porsche, who later went on to build the famous sports cars bearing his own name, designed the original 1936 Volkswagen.
• More than 100,000 family dogs are killed each year in car accidents. As a result, a manufacturer in the eastern United States has developed a car restraint designed specifically for dogs riding in the car.
• Phobia: allodoxaphobia Fear of: opinions.
• The world’s first electric traffic light signal was installed 75 years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 105th St.
• The Mitsubishi Eclipse, also sold as the Eagle Talon and Plymouth Laser, was named after an English racehorse from the 1700s that won 26 races.
• In June 1974 the mystery of Jack Nicholson's birth came to light. Jack's "sister" June was in fact Jack's mother. Jack, born on 22 April 1937, had been the illegitimate child of 17-year-old June Nicholson. Nicholson had spent his life up to age 37 assuming that his biological mother, June, was his sister, and that his maternal grandmother, Ethel May, was his mother. Even on their deathbeds, neither June nor Ethel May had offered up the truth.
• The arctic Lion's Mane Jellyfish is considered to be the longest known living animal; the biggest specimen discovered had a bell (body) with a diameter of 2.3 m (7 feet 6 inches) and the tentacles reached 36.5 m (120 feet).
• During the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, sausages were associated with the Lupercalia festival. The early Catholic Church outlawed the Lupercalia Festival and made eating sausage a sin. For this reason, the Roman emperor Constantine banned the eating of sausages.
• Human fingers do not contain any muscles other than the small muscles attached to each hair follicle, which contract to make the hairs stand on end, causing goose bumps. The muscles that move the finger joints are in the palm and forearm. The long tendons that deliver motion from the forearm muscles may be observed to move underneath the skin at the wrist and on the back of the hand.
• >Ghosts appear in 4 Shakespearian plays; Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth.
• John Milton used 8,000 different words in his poem, "Paradise Lost."
• A Hindu temple dedicated to the rat goddess Karni Mata in Deshnoke, India, houses more than 20,000 rats.
• Hoover Dam is 726 feet tall and 660 feet thick at its base. Enough rock was excavated in its construction to build the Great Wall of China. Contrary to old wives' tales, no workers were buried in the dam's concrete.
• There are 1,792 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
• Banana plants are the largest plants on earth without a woody stem. They are actually giant herbs of the same family as lilies, orchids and palms.
• >Bilbo Baggins was born on September 22 1290.
• Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator. It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
• Almonds and pistachios are the only nuts mentioned in the Bible.
• Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer are the three angels mentioned by name in the Bible.
• You're more likely to be a target for mosquitoes if you consume bananas.
• A recent study indicates when men crave food, they tend to crave fat and salt. When women crave food, they tend to desire chocolate.
• Chocolate syrup was used for blood in the famous 45 second shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho, which actually took 7 days to shoot.
• More than 100 years ago, the felt hat makers of England used mercury to stabilize wool. Most of them eventually became poisoned by the fumes, as demonstrated by the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Breathing mercury's fumes over a long period of time will cause erethism, a disorder characterized by nervousness, irritability, and strange personality changes.
• Frank Baum named "Oz" after a file cabinet in his office. One cabinet was labeled "A to N," and the second was labeled "O to Z."
• "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson was the first video to air on MTV by a black artist.
• C3P0 is the first character to speak in Star Wars.
• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
• A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
• After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
• About one-tenth of the earth's surface is permanently covered with ice.
• Australia is the only country that is also a continent.
• Canada is an Indian word meaning 'Big Village'.
• Europe has no deserts - it is the only continent without one.
• A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.
• Cannibalism, eating human flesh, is also called anthropophagy.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
• The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21.5% oxygen, .5% argon and other gases.
• All the moons of the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman mythology, except the moons of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters.
• Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.
• Only 55% of all Americans know that the sun is a star.
• What we call the sky is merely the limit of our vision into the atmosphere. The sky, like the horizon, is always as far away as one can see.
• According to the Kinsey Institute, the biggest erect penis on record measures 13 inches. The smallest tops off at 1 3/4 inches.
• An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
• Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
• A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
• Barbers at one time combined shaving and haircutting with bloodletting and pulling teeth. The white stripes on a field of red that spiral down a barber pole represent the bandages used in the bloodletting.
• Catholic Popes who died during sex: Leo VII (936-9) died of a heart attack, John VII (955-64) was bludgeoned to death by the husband of the woman he was with at the time, John XIII (965-72) was also murdered by a jealous husband, Pope Paul II (1467-71) allegedly died while being sodomized by a page boy.
• Forty-six US federal agencies have officers with the authority to carry firearms and arrest people.
• Hans Christian Andersen, Cher, Tom Cruise, Albert Einstein, Whoopie Goldberg, Greg Louganis, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Gen. George S. Patton, are (were) all dyslexics.
• A pineapple is a berry.
• Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.
• Ginger has been clinically demonstrated to work twice as well as Dramamine for fighting motion sickness, with no side effects.
• Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
• The most abundant metal in the Earth's crust is aluminum.
• On a clear night in the Northern Hemisphere the naked eye can discern some 5000 stars.
• Seven suicides are recorded in the Bible.
• The seven virtues are prudence, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope and charity.