July 15, 2016

Horse 2136 - 79 Pointless Facts On Clickbaity Fact Friday. You Won't Believe No.18

1. A note which excuses a student from classes, lectures and exams is called an ægrotat.
2. The concept of the Singer Sewing Machine, the name for the band The Beatles and the wish that one's four little children would live in a nation where they would be judged by the content of their character, were all reportedly the subject of dreams.
3. John Glenn famously saw thousands of little stars when he went into space. They later turned out to be particles of urine which had been vented from his spacecraft.
4. The two chemicals which primarily cause bad breath are appropriately called Putrizeine and Cadaverine.
5. Caprification is the artificial pollination of cultivated figs by wasps.
6. The Aston Martins which finished 1-2 in the 1959 Le Mans 24 Hour Race were both only finished on the Wednesday morning before the race. Their shakedown was the drive from Birmingham, across England and then across France.
7. The British Dyslexia Research Centre is rather amusingly and ironically based in the city of Reading.
8. The most frequently landed on square in the game of Monopoly is Jail.
9. The Mazda motor company is named after a Zoroastrian god.
10. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is shaped like an upside down catenary. A catenary has all points in tension and upside down, it means that all points are in compression; which is perfect for maintaining the strength of a bridge.
11. Unlike the United States where just about every second advertisement on telly seems to be a drug advert, Direct To Consumer advertising of drugs in Australia is illegal. It is also illegal to advertise drugs directly to consumers in the EU.
12. The device which is used to light Russian space rockets is made of wood and is basically the equivalent of giant matches.
13. The tradition in Hawaii is that ladies wear a flower above their left ear to indicate that they are married or otherwise not available. This means that the lady in the Hawaiian Airlines logo, is probably married.
14. There was a separatist movement in Western Australia to create a new territory called Auralia after the discovery of gold. Women were given the right to vote in the hope that they would dilute the votes of the people of what would be Auralia and Western Australia joined with the rest of the nation in federal as a result.
15. Pandas are not bears but raccoons. This was established only after the genome for the panda was mapped. Also, there are species of nematodes which live in panda poo which if you get infected with, there is no known cure. Don't touch panda poo.
16. Roald Dahl was a poganaphobe: he hated beards. He thought that they were a source of germs and that people who had them, wore them as a mask to hide behind. Mr Twit is kind of based on his hatred of beards.
17. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was Teddy Roosevelt's daughter from his first marriage before his first wife died, was once arrested for smoking a cigar on the roof of the White House.
18. Bacon is lovely.
19. Some of the mortar used in the construction of the Great Wall Of China was made from sticky rice and limes.
20. Abraham Lincoln was playing baseball at the time that he found out that he was the Republican nominee for President.
21. There were only seven American pilots in the Battle Of Britain.
22. The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery and the last house that was still alight was in a street called Pudding Lane.
23. The diarist Samuel Pepys buried documents, wine and cheese in a hole in the ground to prevent them from being lost in the Great Fire of London.
24. Harry S Truman's middle initial didn't stand for anything. It was just S.
25. Homer Simpson, Rocky The Flying Squirrel and Donald Trump all share the middle initial of J.
26. Michael J Fox's middle name is Andrew.
27. In order to obtain a restricted firearms licence in Canada, you need to declare the names of all employment, housemates and mental health issues, that you have had in the last two years.
28. Grease, No and Bird have all been the word.
29. Thomas Midgley, the man who came up with both the idea of putting Lead Napthalate into petrol and Chlorofluorocarbons into refrigerators, and who was probably the single most destructive organism to have ever walked the planet, died in his own invention of pulleys and ropes which he had built after developing paralysis.
30. The same people who popularised the Teddy Bear which was given to the President Teddy Roosevelt, tried unsuccessfully to market a toy which they gave to President William McKinley called the Billy Possum.
31. The word "lettuce" is derived from the Latin word for milk.
32. No answer was ever officially given to the riddle of why a raven is like a writing desk.
33. The campaign to elect Dwight D Eisenhower as Republican presidential nominee happened despite him not actually wanting to run for office. He was a write-in candidate in those states that held primaries; which meant that he was effectively drafted into the Oval Office.
34. The M181 motorway is the only spur motorway of another spur motorway in the UK.
35. The name Parramatta is an aboriginal word which means "the place where the eels lie down"; Parramatta Stadium is also a place where the Eels lie down.
36. Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots and kept a bucket in the sound booth so that he could spit them out when recording the vocal track for Warner Bros cartoons.
37. St Gertrude is the patron saint of cats and therefore by extension, the internet.
38. There is more computing power in even a dumb phone than the entire Apollo space program.
39. Because the kilogram is still defined by the amount of physical stuff in one special object, it is officially the only standard measure in the metric system which is not properly defined.
40. San Marino is the oldest country in the world. It was founded in 301 and has never been part of Italy; nor its precedents.
41. There has not been a mustachioed Prime Minister of Australia since Billy Hughes.
42. The Aztec king Montezuma, whose name coined the unfortunate eponymous Montezuma's Revenge which is a humorous nickname for diahorrea, had a nephew whose name was Cuitlahac which means "piles of excrement".
43. The current Olympic champion in the sport of cricket is the United States.
44. In the world of Star Trek the French language has gone extinct. In the French language version of Star Trek, it is the German language which has gone extinct.
45. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica is -93°C.
46. On the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package, there is a graffiti of the Union Jack. As this flag is always in perpetual shadow, it is the coolest flag in the universe because in the lunar night, temperatures fall to -153°C.
47. The last non-government resident of Downing St was a Mr Chicken.
48. Larry and Freya The Cats became the first residents of Number Ten Downing St who didn't have to move out because the Prime Minister changed.
49. The licence plates on the Volkswagen Beetle on the Beatles' album cover of Abbey Road and the Rolls Royce in the swimming pool on the album cover of Oasis' Be Here Now, are the same.
50. The winning margin between Australia and England in the very first cricket test match in 1877 and the Centenary Test in 1977, was 45 runs, in both
51. I can tell you how to get, how to get to Sesame Street but you will end up in the suburbs on Long Island and not in Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem as the television show of the same name would have you believe.
52. The bones in what is amusingly called the "Snuff Box" in your hands, are the only two bones in the human body which are completely surrounded by blood.
53. In the one episode of A Pup Named Scooby Doo, when it actually turned out to be Red Herring, they still didn't believe Fred.
54. Frogs and Toads, Rabbits and Hares, Moths and Butterflies, are all interchangeable terms.
55. The first case of grand theft auto happened in 1885 when Karl Benz' wife stole the very first motor car and took it on a joyride. As a result, improvements were made in the braking and steering systems.
56. Penicillin, the telephone and most car crashes were all discovered by accident.
57. There are four million serves of Nissin's Cup Noodle always waiting in a warehouse in anticipation of a national emergency in Japan.
58. The particular species of brown bear on the Californian state flag is extinct.
59. All of Uranus's moons have been named after characters in Shakespeare plays.
60. The country which drinks more Coca-Cola per capita is Iceland.
61. On Apollo 10, the Command Module was named Charlie Brown and the Lunar Module was named Snoopy. As Apollo 10 was never intended to land on the moon, Snoopy was sent into orbit around the moon forever.
62. Christopher Columbus' ships, the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, were all built as second rate ships and were never really intended for ocean voyages. Planned obsolescence was evidently alive and well in the fifteenth century.
63. Before the advent of modern English as we know it, all edible fruits in English were called apples. The tradition that Adam and Eve Ate an apple, is borne from the fact that all fruits were apples and those red crunchy things just happened to be the most conducive to painting.
64. Actually, the sun isn't a mass of incandescent gas but an incandescent miasma of plasma.
65. Nobody knows where Genghis Khan is buried.
66. Vikings never had horns on their helmets.
67. The French Air Force and subsequently the RAF adopted roundels as their logos because the Luftwaffe was using the Iron Cross. A red ring was seen to be the opposite of a black cross.
68. In 1888-89, Preston North End won the League and FA Cup Double by never losing a game in the League and never conceding a goal in the Cup.
69. John Lennon was wrong when he said "all you need is love". Clean air, water, clothes, and shelter are also fairly essential to human life.
70. With a cycleway, a footway, eight lanes of traffic and two railway tracks, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is the widest long span bridge in the world.
71. The Gladesville Bridge is the longest concrete arch bridge in the world. Also, there are no fire services up there; so if you break down and your car catches on fire, good luck.
72. There is no X in the Welsh language.
73. Both the number 73 and its transdigit counterpart 37, are Prime.
74. Part of the design requirement for the Citroën 2CV was that it should be able to drive across a field at 40km/h, with a basket of a dozen eggs on the passenger's seat and all of the eggs should remain unbroken.
75. If you are reading this, then you have not seen two passes by Halley's Comet.
76. The most searched for terms in the United Kingdom, immediately after the Brexit referendum were " what is the EU" and "what is the European Union".
77. Caffeine is the world's most popular drug in terms of quantity ingested on a daily basis.
78. The scientific name for the Gorilla is Gorilla Gorilla.
79. Not only is Queen Elizabeth II the longest reigning monarch in history but she is also the most travelled monarch in history.

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