David Fickes - Really Interesting Stuff You Dont Need to Know: 1,500 Fascinating Facts

Really Interesting Stuff You Dont Need to Know

1,500 Fascinating Facts

David Fickes

Really Interesting Stuff You Dont Need to Know Copyright 2019 by David Fickes. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: 2019

Introduction

By nature, I tend to collect trivia without trying. Until relatively recently, I had never sought out trivia; however, after creating a holiday trivia presentation for a community party and then showing it at one of our fitness studios spinning classes, I found myself creating weekly trivia. The cycling clients enjoyed the diversion of answering questions while they exercised, so I continued.

I have tried to ensure that the information is as accurate as possible, and to retain its accuracy, I have also tried to avoid facts that can quickly change with time. This book is intended for people who prefer to read interesting facts rather than quiz themselves with questions and answers. Since the information isnt in a question and answer format, it also allows different types of facts that arent as well suited for a quiz format.

There are 1,500 fascinating facts covering a wide range of topics including animals, arts, history, literature, miscellaneous, movies, science and nature, sports, television, U.S. geography, U.S. presidents, and world geography. This is book 1 of my Really Interesting Stuff series; I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, look for other books in the series.

Contents

Facts 1-250

1) Based on oxygen usage, the jellyfish is the most efficient swimmer of any animal. Jellyfish use 48% less oxygen than any other known animal; they never stop moving.

2) Cambodia has the most public holidays of any country with 28.

3) O.J. Simpson was an early choice to play the title role in The Terminator before Arnold Schwarzenegger got the part. Director James Cameron thought he was too likable among other things.

4) Damascus, Syria is widely regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world; it has been inhabited for at least 11,000 years.

5) Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president.

6) One million dollars in $100 bills weighs about 20.4 pounds.

7) Due to inflation, Argentina has changed the value of its currency by a factor of 10 trillion since 1970.

8) You would get vitamin A poisoning and could die if you ate a polar bears liver. Polar bears have 50-60 times the normal human levels of vitamin A in their liver, and it is about three times the tolerable level that a human can intake.

9) Moscow, Russia has the worlds busiest McDonalds restaurant.

10) New Zealand was the first country to allow women to vote in 1893.

11) The chameleon has the longest tongue relative to its size of any animal.

12) Cats cant taste sweet. They dont have taste receptors for sweet; this applies to all cats domestic and wild.

13) Peter Finch in 1976 for Network and Heath Ledger in 2008 for The Dark Knight are the only two people to win posthumous acting Oscars.

14) Besides his moose strength, Bullwinkle Mooses great talent was that he could remember everything he ever ate.

15) The expression red-letter day derives from an old custom of using red ink on calendars to indicate religious holidays.

16) In Gilligans Island , the S.S. Minnow was named after Newton Minow who was head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sherwood Schwartz, the shows creator, did not care for Minow who had called television Americas vast wasteland, so he named the soon to be shipwrecked ship after him.

17) The word muscle comes from the Latin musculus which means little mouse because a flexed muscle was thought to resemble a mouse.

18) Academy Awards are called Oscars because Margaret Herrick, Academy librarian and future executive director, thought the statue looked like her uncle Oscar.

19) Walnuts, almonds, pecans, and cashews arent technically nuts; they are drupes which also include peaches, plums and cherries. Drupes are a type of fruit where an outer fleshy part surrounds a shell or pit with a seed inside. For some drupes, you eat the fleshy part, and for some, you eat the seed inside.

20) All seven dwarfs except Dopey have a beard.

21) For a few seconds, a horse can generate about 15 hp; for sustained output over hours, a horse can generate about 1 hp.

22) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Dwight Eisenhower were all redheads.

23) With 17 million units sold, the Commodore 64, introduced in 1982 with a 1 MHz processor and 64K of memory, is the biggest selling personal computer model of all time.

24) Gold is the most malleable naturally occurring metal.

25) Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador is closer to the Moon than any other place on Earth. It is 20,548 feet elevation but very close to the equator, so the bulge in the Earth makes it 1.5 miles closer to the Moon than Mount Everest.

26) The jawbone is the hardest bone in the human body.

27) When a woodpeckers beak hits a tree, it experiences 1,000 times the force of gravity.

28) Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president to have been divorced.

29) Glenn Miller received the first ever music gold disc for Chattanooga Choo Choo in 1942.

30) The most common team name for U.S. college football teams is Eagles.

31) Oklahoma City and Indianapolis are the only two state capitals that include the name of the state.

32) The Flintstones in 1960 was the first animated prime time series on U.S. television.

33) Wi-Fi doesnt stand for anything. It doesnt mean wireless fidelity or anything else; it is just a branding name picked by a company hired for the purpose.

34) Humans have about 5 million olfactory receptors; dogs have about 220 million.

35) Mark Twain was the first novelist to present a typed manuscript to their publisher.

36) If the Moon didnt exist, a day on Earth would be 6-8 hours long.

37) Sheep grazed in New Yorks Central Park until 1934; they were moved during the Great Depression for fear they would be eaten.

38) Edith Head has won more Oscars than any other woman; she won eight for costume design.

39) At 10 years old, Tatum ONeal is the youngest competitive Oscar winner ever for Paper Moon (1973).

40) Only Michael Jackson, Madonna, U2, and Weird Al Yankovic have had top 40 hits in each of the last four decades (1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s).

41) Coffee originated in Ethiopia in the 11th century.

42) Abraham Lincolns first choice to lead the Union army was Robert E. Lee.

43) Macys was the first U.S. department store in 1858.

44) Pure water isnt a good conductor of electricity; the impurities in water make it a good conductor.

45) The Bluetooth wireless technology is named after King Harald Bluetooth Gormsson who ruled Denmark in the 10th century.

46) Deion Sanders is the only person to ever play in the Super Bowl and World Series.

47) Elizabeth Taylor was the first film star to earn $1 million for a single film for Cleopatra in 1963.

48) The Ruppells Griffon vulture is the highest-flying bird species ever recorded. They have been spotted at 37,000 feet and have special hemoglobin which makes their oxygen intake more effective.

49) Although he was 73 years old at the time, Frank Sinatra had to be first offered the role of John McClane in Die Hard. The movie is based on the book Nothing Lasts Forever which was a sequel to The Detective which had been made into a movie in 1968 starring Sinatra, so contractually, he had to be offered the role first.