There are several online sources to check out if you share my interest in what could be characterized as “out of the box” facts.” Some of my personal favorites are in the field of etymology. For example, the fact that the original meaning of the word sarcasm is “ripping of flesh.”
Quite by accident, I stumbled upon the ati (all that’s interesting) website. These are among the items that caught my eye:
1. Madame Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive. Researchers wishing to study them must sign a waiver in order to do so.
2. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
3. In the 1960s, the CIA tried to spy on the Kremlin and Russian embassies by turning cats into listening devices. The program, called Acoustic Kitty, involved surgically implanting batteries, microphones and antennae inside cats.
4. There are over 200 corpses on Mount Everest and they are used as way points for climbers.
5. Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham to win a bet against his publisher who thought that he could not complete a book with only 50 words.
6. Two-thirds of the people on Earth have never seen snow.
7. There are more vacant houses than homeless people in the Unites States.
8. The Woolly Mammoth was around when the Egyptian Pyramids were being built.
9. The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime.
10. The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the “General Purpose” vehicle, G.P.
11. The tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body.
12. Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries.
13. Fortune cookies are actually an American invention — Charles Jung created them in 1918.
14. A flea can jump 350 times its body length, the equivalent of a human jumping the length of a football field.
15. The chance of you dying on the way to get lottery tickets is actually greater than your chance of winning.
16. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
17. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down – hence the expression “to get fired.”
18. In an average NFL football game, there are only about 12 minutes of actual play time.
19. If you started with $0.01 and doubled your money every day, it would take 27 days to become a millionaire.
20. In a statue dedicated to a person, if the horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
To check out hundreds of other amazing facts, please click here.
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