• A “2 by 4″ is really 1 1/2 by 3 1/2.
• A “Blue Moon” is the second full moon in a calendar month (it is rarely blue).
• A “hairbreadth away” is 1/48 of an inch.
• A “jiffy” is actually a proper time unit for 1/100th of a second
• A “quidnunc” is a person who is eager to know the latest news and gossip.
• A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it’s own weight each year.
• A 1.5 oz. milk chocolate bar has only 220 calories. A 1.75 oz. serving of potato chips has 230 calories.
• A 10-gallon hat actually only holds about 3/4 gallon.
• A 14-year old French girl had extraordinary electrical power. With a gentle touch she could knock over heavy pieces of furniture and people in physical contact with her received an electrical shock.
• A 17 year old girl from Miami, Florida started to sneeze on 4th January’66 ant continued till 8th June’66.
• A 6 pound sea-hare can lay 40,000eggs in a single minute.
• A 7-year study, which concluded in the summer of 2000, found that 33 U.S. deaths were caused by rottweilers, pit bulls were responsible for 27 deaths.
• A acre of coffee trees can produce up to 10,000 pounds of coffee cherries. That amounts to approximately 2000 pounds of beans after hulling or milling.
• A B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.
• A Baboon called “Jackie” became a private in the South African army in World War I.
• A bat is the only mammal that flies.
• A bathometer is an instrument for indicating the depth of the sea beneath a moving vessel.
• A bean has more DNA per cell than a human cell
• A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11 km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 liters) of nectar, or it could just sit down on and enjoy that honey properly.
• A beaver’s teeth never stop growing.
• A bibliophile is a collector of rare books. A bibliopole is a seller of rare books.
• A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.
• A Blue Earth, Minnesota, law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless monitored by a parent.
• A blue whales heart only beats nine times per minute.
• A body decomposes four times as fast in water than on land.
• A Boeing 747’s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.
• A bowling pin only needs to tilt 7.5 degrees to fall.
• A broken clock is right at least twice a day.
• A butterfly can look at you through 12,000 eyes.
• A Californian doctor has set the record of eating 17 bananas in two minutes.
• A Canadian tattoo artist had 4,831 tattoos on his body.
• A capon is a castrated rooster.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A cat has 4 rows of whiskers.
• A cat uses it’s whiskers to determine if a space is too small to squeeze through.
• A chameleon can move its eyes in two directions at the same time.
• A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.
• A Cheetah at full speed takes strides of 8 meters.
• A cheetah is the fastest animal, clocked in at: 70mph.
• A chef’s hat is tall and balloons at the top so as to counteract the intense heat in the kitchen. The unique shape allows air to circulate around the scalp, keeping the head cool.
• A Chicago law forbids eating in a place that is on fire.
• A chicken who just lost its head can run the length of a football field before dropping dead.
• A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can’t.
• A citizen of Calcutta, India , grew the fingernails on his left hand to a length of 76 inches.
• A cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are known as fingers.
• A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
• A cockroaches favorite food is the glue on the back of stamps.
• A company, Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song “Happy Birthday”.
• A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.
• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
• A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
• A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.
• A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
• A crocodiles tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.
• A cucumber is 96% water.
• A Dalmatian is the only dog that can get gout.
• A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year.
• A decree declares that anyone caught stealing soap must wash himself with it until it is all used up.
• A dentist invented the Electric Chair.
• A device invented sometime around the time of the birth of Jesus as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero is used today as a rotating sprinkler.
• A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. A quarter has 119.
• A dog can hear high frequency sounds, which a human ear cannot.
• A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule will not.
• A dragonfly can fly 25 mph.
• A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
• A dragonfly is also known as “devil’s darning needle”, “horse stinger” and “devil’s steelyard”.
• A Fag is to work hard or to tire by strenuous activity and cigarettes are sometimes called Fags
• A fagot is a bundle of sticks or a bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be shaped by rolling or hammering at high temperature.
• A father Emperor penguin withstands the Antarctic cold for 60 days or more to protect his eggs, which he keeps on his feet, covered with a feathered flap. During this entire time he doesn’t eat a thing. Most father penguins lose about 25 pounds while they wait for their babies to hatch. Afterward, they feed the chicks a special liquid from their throats. When the mother penguins return to care for the young, the fathers go to sea to eat and rest.
• A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. He will not eat until his young are born, which may take several weeks.
• A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
• A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.
• A female swine or sow will always have an even number of teats or nipples.
• A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
• A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
• A fish’s memory span is 3 seconds.
• A five and a half year old weighing 250 pounds was exhibited at a meeting of the Physical Society of Vienna on December 4, 1894. She ate a normal diet and was otherwise in good health. The problem: she wasn’t able to sweat.
• A flea can jump 350 times is own body length. (say..you jumping the length of a soccer field)thanx seraph
• A flock of sheep grazed during Woodrow Wilson’s term. Their wool was sold to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.
• A fly always jumps backwards for a quick getaway when you try to hit it.
• A fly hums in the middle octave, key F.
• A foal is a baby horse.
• A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.
• A full-grown bear can run as fast as a horse.
• A full-grown pumpkin has about 15 miles of roots.
• A ghost writer pens an anonymous book.
• A giant squid has eyes that can grow up to 20 inches in diameter. (Now think of how big your computer screen is..)
• A giraffe and rat can go longer without water than a camel can.
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue. i know some people who can do some amazing stuff too.
• A goldfish has a memory span of 3 seconds.
• A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Mathematician Edward Kasner supposedly asked his nephew Milton Sirotta to suggest a name for the number, and he came up with this word.
• A grasshopper needs a minimum temperature of 62 degrees Fahrenheit in order to be able to hop.
• A group od geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group in the air is a skein.
• A group of crows is called a murder.
• A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.
• A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.
• A healthy (non-colorblind) human eye can distinguish between 500 shades of gray.
• A healthy individual releases 3.5 oz. of gas in a single flatulent emission, or about 17 oz. in a day.
• A hedgehog’s heart beats 190 times a minute on average and drops to only 20 beats per minute during hibernation.
• A hedgehog’s skin is so tough that when they get run over, its entrails come out of its mouth and its ass.
• A herd of forty-five thirsty, rambunctious elephants stampeded into a brewery in Midnapore, where they smashed vats and slurped up beer in a bender that went on for two days.
• A hinny is the offspring of a female donkey.
• A hippopotamus can run faster than a man can.
• A Holstein’s spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.
• A honey bee must tap two million flowers to make one pound of honey
• A honey bee travels an estimated 43,000 miles to gather one pound of honey. A pound of honey consists of 29,184 drops.
• A honeybee can fly at fifteen miles per hour.
• A horse can sleep standing up.
• A Horse has 18 more bones than a Human.
• A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
• A human has a bone just after the spine ends, which helps proves that humans once had tails (possibly).
• A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated.
• A human’s scent membrane in the nose is about the size of a postage stamp. A dog’s is about the size of a handkerchief. It’s olfactory lobe is also 4 times that of a humanThanx liz chell
• A humming bird flaps its wings up to 90 times in one second or over 5000 times a minute.
• A hummingbird weighs less than a penny
• A jellyfish is 95 percent water, and humans around 70%
• A jellyfish is 95% water.
• A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.
• A kangaroo can jump up to 3 meters high and leap up to 8 meters.
• A kangaroo can’t jump unless it’s tail is touching the ground.
• A Kentucky statute states, “No female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she is escorted by at least two officers or unless she be armed with a club.” Later, an amendment proposed: “The provisions of this statute shall not apply to any female weighing less than sixty pounds nor exceeding 200 pounds; nor shall it apply to female horses.”
• A large swarm of locusts can eat 80,000 tons of corn a day.
• A leech is a worm that feeds on blood. It will pierce its victim’s skin, fill itself with three to four times its own body weight in blood, and will not feed again for months. Leeches were once used by doctors to drain “bad blood” from sick patients.
• A lions roar can be heard from five miles away.
• A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
• A magic potion or charm thought to arouse sexual love, especially toward a specific person, is known as a “philter.”
• A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.
• A male moth can smell a female moth from 100 yards away.
• A man and woman in Mexico city were engaged for 67 yrs and finally married at the age of 82 yrs.
• A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years
• A Manatee (Dugong) has very slow-clotting blood, and important in finding out about haemophilia.
• A manned rocket can reach the moon in less time than it used to take to travel the length of England by stagecoach.
• A mark twain, a nautical measurement of depth, is equal to twelve feet.
• A McDonald’s straw will hold 7.7 ml, or just over one-and-a-half teaspoons of whatever you are drinking.
• A Michigan law states that a wife’s hair legally belongs to her husband.
• A millipede has 4 legs on each segment of its body.
• A mockingbird has been known to change its tune 87 times over a span minute span.
• A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.
• A mongoose is not a goose but more like a meercat, which is not a cat but more like a prairie dog, which is not a dog but more like a ground squirrel.
• A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
• A mosquito will become restless and start flying around if there is an increase of carbon dioxide in the surrounding air
• A mother in Sydney, Australia, gave birth to twins 56 days apart and in different years; one was born in 17th December’1952 and the other on 10th February’1953.
• A mule is a crossbreed between a male donkey and a female horse. A hinnie is yada yada a female donkey and a male horse.
• A murder is committed in the US every 23 minutes, which makes about 22852 murders each year.

Strange But True Facts (Part 1)

Strange But True Facts (Part 2)

Strange But True Facts (Part 3)

Strange But True Facts (Part 4)

• 0 Comments

• A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.
• A normal cow’s stomach has four compartments: the rumen, the recticulum (storage area), the omasum (where water is absorbed), and the abomasum ( the only compartment with digestive juices).
• A notch in a tree will remain the same distance from the ground as the tree grows.
• A panagram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. For example: Pack my red box with five dozen quality jugs.
• A peanut is not a nut or a pea, it’s a legume.
• A penguin swims at a speed of approximately 15 miles per hour.
• A perfect game in baseball is one in which the same player pitches the entire game without allowing any player of the opposing team to reach first base -by any means.
• A person afflicted with hexadectylism has six fingers or six toes on one or both hands and feet.
• A person has to travel west to get from Los Angeles, CA to Reno, NV.
• A person who is lost in the woods and starving can obtain nourishment by chewing on his shoes. Leather has enough nutritional value to sustain life for a short time.
• A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
• A piano leg went through the floor of the white house in 1948 during President Truman’s term.
• A pied-billed grebe is called a peebeegeebee by birdwatchers.
• A pig is the only animal than can get sunburned.
• A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
• A pineapple is a berry.
• A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.
• A polar bears skin is black. Its fur is actually clear, but like snow it appears white.
• A pole vaulter, when he lands, may absorb up to 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch on the joints of his tubular thigh bones.
• A polecat is not a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.
• A poll of 3,000 Americans found that for 41 percent, the thing they’re most afraid of is speaking before a group of people. 32 percent stated they were afraid of heights.
• A porpoise swims slowly in a circle as it sleeps.
• A Portsmouth, Ohio law ranks baseball players with “vagrants, thieves and other suspicious characters.”
• A pound of grasshoppers is three times as nutritious as a pound of beef.
• A pregnant goldfish is called a twit
• A quarter of raw potato placed in each shoe at night will keep the leather soft and the shoes smelling fresh and clean.
• A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.
• A queen bee lays about 1,500 eggs on an average day.
• A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
• A rat can go without water longer than a camel can.
• A rattlesnake’s fangs fold inward when its mouth is closed so it doesn’t bite itself.
• A recent study indicates when men crave food, they tend to crave fat and salt. When women crave food, they tend to desire chocolate.
• A Red Giant(a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on earth
• A rhinoceros horn is made of compacted hair.
• A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’t give her coffee.
• A scientific report form the University of California found that the steam rising from a cup of coffee contains the same amounts of antioxidants as three oranges. The antioxidants are heterocyclic compounds which prevents cancer and heart disease. It’s good for you!
• A scientist who weighed people immediately before and after death concluded that the human soul weighs 21 gms.
• A scrum in rugby is equivalent of a hockey face-off, except that it involves all playing the forward position on both teams.
• A SEAL’s weapon of choice is the Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine gun.
• A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.
• A shark can grow a new set of teeth in a week.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A shrimp’s heart is in its head.
• A single drop of water contains one hundred billion billion atoms.
• A single share of Coca-Cola stock, purchased in 1919, when the company went public, would have been worth $92,500 in 1997.
• A snail can actually glide over the sharp edge of a knife or razor without harming itself. This has something to do with the mucus it produces.
• A snail can have about 25,000 teeth.
• A snail can sleep for 3 years.
• A snail can travel over a razor blade without cutting itself.
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
• A soccer ball has 32 panels.
• A speleologist studies caves.
• A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.
• A spremologer collects trivia.
• A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.
• A state law in Illinois mandates that all bachelors should be called master, not mister, when addressed by their female counterparts.
• A strand of spider web may be stronger than an equal diameter of steel.
• A study of pet owners found that 66% claimed they allowed their pets to remain in the bedroom during intercourse.
• A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about 110 million tons.
• A ton of potatoes will yield 28.6 gallons of absolute alcohol. Potatoes are an important source for commercial alcohol.
• A total of 63 errors were made in the 1886 World Series.
• A traditional dish from Savolax, called “kalakukko” (fishcock in engl.) is made of white fish and porkfat encased in a baked crust of rye.
• A two-inch garden hose will carry four times as much water as a one-inch hose.
• A type of rabbit can mate 12 hours after giving birth
• A typical American eats 28 pigs in his/her lifetime.
• A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites.
• A typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two miles long.
• A vexillologist is an expert in the history of flags
• A volcano can shoot its debris as high as 50km into the sky.
• A vulture will never attack a human or animal that is moving.
• A whale’s penis is called a dork.
• A whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.
• A whole library floor of books can be stored on 50 Gigabytes.
• A wind with a speed of 74 miles or more is designated a hurricane.
• A women’s heart beats faster than men.
• A woodchuck only breathes 10 times during hibernation.
• A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.
• A word or sentence that is the same front and back (racecar, kayak) is called a “palindrome”.
• A young lady named Ellen Church convinced Boeing Air Transport that her nursing skills and love of flying would qualify her to assist with the passengers and emergencies. She became the first known stewardess.
• A zebra is white with black stripes.
• ABBA GOLD has been in the UK charts for over 280 weeks, thats over 5 years
• Abdul Kassam Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. Four hundred camels carried the 117,000 volumes.
• Abe Lincoln’s mother died when the family dairy cow ate poisonous mushrooms and Ms. Lincoln drank the milk.
• About 10% of the world’s population is left-handed.
• About 10,000,000 people have the same birthday as you.
• About 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens each year.
• About 20% of bird species have become extinct in the past 200 years, almost all of them because of human activity.
• About 200,000,000 M&Ms are sold each day in the United States.
• About 24% of the total ground area of Los Angeles is said to be committed to automobiles.
• About 55% of all movies are rated R. About 500 movies are made in the US and 800 in India annually.
• About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money.
• About 75% of the people in the U.S. live on 2% land.
• About 80% of the city was burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
• About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they’re still sitting on it.
• About one-tenth of the earth’s surface is permanently covered with ice.
• Abraham Lincoln had to go across the street to the War Department to get news from the battlefield because there was no telegraph in the White House.
• Abraham Lincoln’s ghost is said to haunt the White House.
• Absinthe is another name for the herb wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) and the name of a licorice-anise flavored green liqueur that was created at the end of the 18th century, and manufactured by Henry-Louis Pernod. Called the ‘green Muse’ it became very popular in the 19th century, but was eventually banned in most countries beginning in 1908. The reason is the presence of the toxic oil ‘thujone’ in wormwood, which was one of the main ingredients of Absinthe. Absinthe seemed to cause brain lesions, convulsions, hallucinations and severe mental problems. Thujone was the culprit, along with the fact that Absinthe was manufactured with an alcohol content of 68% or 132 proof.
• Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.
• According to a global survey in 1997 by Durex Condoms Canadians are the world’s fourth worst lovers. The worst three slots belong to South Africa, Russia, and Poland.
• According to a recent survey, more Americans lose their virginity in June than any other month.
• According to an Old English system of time units, a moment is considered to be one and a half minutes.
• According to bar sales across the U.S., here are the top 15 cocktails: 1) Dry martini, 2) Manhattan, 3) Whiskey sour, 4) Bloody Mary, 5) Gimlet, 6) Daiquiri, 7) Tom Collins, 8) Old Fashioned, 9) Margarita, 10) Screwdriver, 11) Bacardi, 12) Stinger, 13) Harvey Wallbanger, 14) Gin & Tonic, and 15) Rum & Coke
• According to Bristol zoo, the Howler monkey’s growl is so loud, it can be heard 5km (3.3 miles for u Americans) away.
• According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
• According to Hammurabi’s Code, the penalty for medical malpractice was to cut off the doctor’s hands.
• According to Hawaiian lore, the earth mother Papa mated with the sky father Wakea to give birth to the Hawaiian Islands.
• According to Illinois state law, it is illegal to speak English. The officially recognized language is “American.”
• According to L. Frank Baum, the name Oz was thought up when he looked at his filing cabinet and noticed one drawer marked A-G, a second tagged H-N, and a third labeled O-Z.
• According to legend, when Burmese women are making beer, they need to avoid having sex or the beer will be bitter.
• According to National Geographic, Mt. Everest grows about 4 millimeters a year: the two tectonic plates of Asia and India, which collided millions of years ago to form the Himalayas, continue to press against each other, causing the Himalyan peaks to grow slightly each year
• According to Playboy, more women talk dirty during sex than men.
• According to Playboy, the most popular sexual aid is erotic literature.
• According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls only come out at night because sunlight would turn them to stone.
• According to statistics, Australian women are the most likely to have sex on the first date.
• According to the 1900 U.S. Census, there were: 596,000 carpenters, 280,000 laundresses, 220,000 blacksmiths, 134,000 tailors, 102,000 shoemakers, 42,000 porters, 37,000 stonecutters, 25,000 millers, 8,000 bootblacks, and 7,000 furriers
• According to the film’s animators, you’ll see 6,469,952 black spots every time you watch 101 Dalmatians.
• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Finnish word SAIPPUAKIVIKAUPPIAS a soapstone seller is the longest known palindrome in any language.
• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the single-seeded fruit of the giant fan palm, or Lodoicea maldivica, can weigh 44 lbs. Commonly known as the double coconut or coco de mer, it is found wild only in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.
• According to the International Labor Organization, a member of the labor force is someone between the age of 15 and 64.
• According to the Kinsey Institute, the biggest erect penis on record measures 13 inches. The smallest tops off at 1 3/4 inches.
• According to the Population Council, people overwhelmingly tend to marry partners who live near them.
• According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the most common job in the United States in the 1890s was a farmer. Today, it’s a salesman.
• According to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, two out of five women in America dye their hair.
• According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the best time to spray household insects is 4:00 p.m. Insects are most vulnerable at this time. (It’s just like its better to water your plants in the early mornings or the evenings)
• According to the United States Postal Service, each person sent on average 689 letters throughout the year of 1996.
• Activated charcoal made from coconut shells is the odor absorbing agent in odor-eating shoe liners.
• Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger bought the first Hummer manufactured for civilian use in 1992. The vehicle weighed in at 6,300 lbs and was 7 feet wide.
• Actress Jayne Mansfield accidentally exhaled her breast out of her dress during the telecast of the Academy Awards in 1957.
• Acupuncture was first used as a medical treatment in 2700 BC by Chinese emperor Shen-Nung.
• Adding sugar to coffee is believed to have started in 1715, in the court of King Louis XIV, the French monarch.
• Adjusting for inflation, Cleopatra, 1963, is the most expensive movie ever made to date (mid-1999). Its budget of $44 million is equivalent to 270 million 1999 dollars.

Strange But True Facts (Part 1)

Strange But True Facts (Part 2)

Strange But True Facts (Part 3)

Strange But True Facts (Part 5) — Coming Soon

• 0 Comments

• Adolf Hitler’s mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
• Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only 1, and i repeat, ONE, testicle.
• Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846.
• Adult bears can run as fast as horses.
• Adult Northwestern American Grizzly Bears can bite through steel as thick as one half inch.
• Advertisements for coffee in London in 1657 claimed that the beverage was a cure for scurvy, gout and other ills.
• Africa’s 8,000-year brewing history began with ancient Egyptian commercial brewing dynasties and still includes handmade tribal beers.
• After Canada and Mexico, Russia is the nearest neighbor to the United States. Siberia’s easternmost point is just 56 miles from Alaska. In fact, in the middle of the Bering Strait, Russia’s Big Diomede Island and the U.S.’s Little Diomede Island are only two miles apart.
• After his death in 896, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up and tried for various crimes.
• After six months at the off-Broadway New York Shakespeare Festival Theater, Hair opened at the Biltmore Theater in New York, in 1968. It was the first rock-musical to play on the Great White Way.
• After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
• After the decaffeinating process, processing companies no longer throw the caffeine away; they sell it to pharmaceutical companies.
• After the sun, the closest star to Earth is 25,000,000,000,000 miles away.
• After they are roasted, and when the coffee beans begin to cool, they release about 700 chemical substances that make up the vaporizing aromas.
• Air pollution may contribute to two percent of all deaths in the US, some 50,000 cases per year. A nine-year study of US cities showed a strong correlation between death rates and periods of significant pollution.
• Airbags are deployed at a rate of two-hundred miles per hour.
• Al Capone’s business card said he was a furniture dealer.
• Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were once roommates.
• Alaska, with 8, is the US state with the most national park sites.
• Alaska’s borders make it the farthest state east, west and north. Its Aleutian Islands extends across the 180th meridian, which puts the islands chain’s end in the eastern hemisphere.
• Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin both married their first cousins (Elsa Löwenthal and Emma Wedgewood, respectively).
• Alekthophilia is the love of chickens.
• Alexander Graham Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf.
• Alexander H. Stephens was Jefferson Davis’s Vice President of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
• Alfalfa sprouts and feta cheese contain bacteria that could be harmful to small children and pregnant women.
• Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
• Alfred Hitchcock directed the first talking film ever made in England. It was called Blackmail and was made in 1931.
• All 17 children of Queen Anne died before her.
• All clams start out as males; some decide to become females at some point in their lives.
• All elephants walk on tip-toe because the back portion of their foot is made of no bone just fat.
• All gondolas in Venice, Italy must be painted black, unless they belong to a high official.
• All mammals have tongues.
• All mammals, except man and monkey are color blind.
• All nude people in your house must be registered in Kentucky.
• All of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs.
• All of the clocks in the movie “Pulp Fiction” are stuck on 4:20.
• All of the proceeds from James Barrie’s book Peter Pan were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.
• All of the roles in Shakespeare’s plays were originally acted by men and boys. In England at that time, it wasn’t proper for females to appear on stage.
• All of the stars comprising the Milky Way galaxy revolve around the center of the galaxy once every 200 million years or so.
• All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.
• All polar bears are left-handed.
• All porcupines can float in water.
• All pyrimids were bright white.
• All snakes on the island of Tasmania are poisonous.
• All snow crystals are hexagonal.
• All the chemicals in a human body combined are estimated to be worth about 6.25 euro.
• All the coal, oil, gas, and wood on Earth would only keep the Sun burning for a few days.
• 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.
• All the proceeds earned from James M. Barrie’s book “Peter Pan” were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for the Sick Children in London.
• All the swans in England are property of the Queen.
• All the world’s main alphabets have developed from an alphabet invented 3,600 years ago in the Middle East. It was known as the North Semitic Alphabet.
• All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize ‘this’ was the day of the changeover.
• All U.S. Presidents have worn glasses, some of them just didn’t like to be seen with them in public.
• All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn’t like being seen wearing them in public.
• All words ever spoken by human beings on 5 Exabytes.
• Alligators can live for more than 100 years.
• Almonds and pistachios are the only nuts mentioned in the Bible.
• Almonds are members of the peach family.
• Almonds are part of the peach family.
• Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.
• Almost without exception, cows are milked from the right side. The reason is because most farmers have been right-handed since the start of the dairy business and it’s easier for a right-handed milker to work from the right side.
• Although Argentina’s name means “Land of Silver,” there is actually very little silver there. It was misnamed by explorers who thought they saw silver there.
• Although construction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg started in 1015, it was not until 1439 that the spire was completed.
• Although explorers brought potatoes back from the New World in the early 1500s, Europeans were afraid to eat them for fear that the spuds would give them leprosy. It wasn’t until Louis XVI, who was looking for a cheap food source for his starving subjects, served them at the royal table that people were convinced potatoes were safe to eat.
• Although identified with Scotland, bagpipes are actually a very ancient instrument, introduced into the British Isles by the Romans.
• Although not named in the New Testament, tradition names the two thieves crucified at the same time as Jesus as Dismas and Gestas.
• Although the Pony Express was one of the most famous chapters in U.S. history, it only lasted one year, from 1860-61.
• Amazon ants (red ants found in the western U.S.) steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. The slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who cannot do anything but fight. They depend completely on their slaves for survival.
• Amelia Earhart designed the first lightweight luggage for air travel.
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
• American and Russian space flights have always included chocolate.
• American car horns beep in the tone of F.
• American chocolate manufacturers use about 1.5 billion pounds of milk -only surpassed by the cheese and ice cream industries.
• Americans are responsible for about 1/5 of the world’s garbage annually. On average, that’s 3 pounds a day per person.
• Americans consume 42 tons of aspirin per day.
• Americans consumed over 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001, which is almost half of the total world’s production.
• Americans drink about five billion bottles and cans of soda, and about a billion and a half pounds of coffee every year.
• Americans drink over a billion pounds of coffee every year and around five million bottles of soda.
• Americans eat more bananas than any other fruit: a total of 11 billion a year.
• Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
• Americans spend approximately $25 billion each year on beer.
• Americans spend more than $5 billion a year on cosmetics, toiletries, beauty parlors and barber shops.
• Americans spent an estimated $267 billion dining out in 1993.
• Americans spent over $360 million in 1982 to avoid having bad breath.
• Americans use about 100 million pounds of tea leaves every year.
• Americans use over 16, 000 tons of aspirin a year.
• Americans, on average, eat 18 acres of pizza in one day.
• America’s first nudist organization was founded in 1929, by 3 men.
• America’s first stock exchange was the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, established in 1791.
• Among primitive people the soul normally is said to escape through the mouth or nose. In the Celebes, when a person is very sick, his friends will often attach fish hooks in certain places. If the soul tries to escape, it gets hooked.
• Among transsexuals who choose sex-change operations, females who elect to become males are reportedly happier and better adjusted after the procedures than males who elect to become female.
• Among words consisting only of Roman numeral letters, the “highest scoring” words in English are MIMIC (2,102) and IMMIX (2012).
• An adult lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away, and warns off intruders or reunites scattered members of the pride.
• An adult male ostrich, the world’s largest bird, can weigh up to 345 pounds.
• An adult porcupine has approximately 30,000 quills on its body, which are replaced every year.
• An African American chef in Albany, NY is thought to have been the inventor of potato chips sometime in 1865. Unfortunately, nobody knows his name.
• An albatross can sleep while it flies. It apparently dozes while cruising at 25 mph.
• An American cow called Fawn was not afraid of flying. In May 1963, she was swept up by a tornado and carried half a mile, only to land safely in another farmer’s field. Five years later, another tornado carried her over a bus. She survived this too, and lived to the ripe old age of 25.
• An American urologist bought Napoleon’s penis for $40,000.
• An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
• An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
• An ant can survive for up to two days underwater.
• An ant’s sense of smell is as good as a Dog’s.
• An apple tree is at its prime when its about 50 years old. The United States produces about 100 million barrels of apples a year. That’s a lot of old trees.
• An apple, onion, and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavor are caused by their smell. To prove this you can pinch your nose and take a bite from each. They will all taste sweet.
• An arabica coffee tree can produce up to 12 pounds of coffee a year, depending on soil and climate.
• An area of the Sun’s surface the size of a postage stamp shines with the power of 1,500,000 candles.
• An artificial hand , with fingers moved by cogwheels and levers, was designed in 1551 by Frenchman Ambroise Paré. It worked so well that a handless cavalryman was able to grasp the reins of his horse.
• An Athens legislator named Solon passed a law in the 6th century that let fathers sell their fornicating daughters into slavery.
• An average ear of corn has 800 kernels, arranged in 16 rows.
• An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
• An average human scalp has 100,00 hairs.
• An average person drinks about 16,000 gallons of wate during his life time.
• An average person laughs about 5 times a day.
• An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
• An average pig squeals at a range from 100 to 115 decibels.
• An average secretary’s left hand does 56% of the typing.
• An eagle can kill a young deer and fly away with it.
• An ear of corn always has an even number of rows because of the genetic formula which divides the cells.
• An ear of corn averages 800 kernels in 16 rows.
• An earthquake on Dec. 16, 1811 sent the Mississippi River backwards.
• An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
• An elephant can smell water 3 miles away.
• An elephant could carry up to 2 gallons of water in its trunk.
• An elephant has 4 knees
• An elephant may consume 500 pounds of hay and 60 gallons of water in a single day.
• An elephant’s trunk contains more than 50,000 muscles.
• An Estee Lauder perfume called “Country Mist” had disappointing sales in Germany where the word “Mist” was slang for manure!
• An estimated $1 million is lost at race tracks each year by people who lose or carelessly throw away winning tickets.
• An etiquette writer of the 1840’s advised, “Ladies may wipe their lips on the tablecloth, but not blow their noses on it.”
• An eyelash lives about 5 months.
• An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
• An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
• An insect exerts so much energy in one hour of flying that it may lose as much as a third of its total body weight.
• An Octopus has 3 hearts!
• An old law in Bellingham, Washington made it illegal for a woman to take more than 3 steps backwards while dancing.
• An ordinance in Newcastle, Wyoming, specifically bans couples from having sex while standing inside a store’s walk-in-meat freezer!
• An ostrich egg can make approx. eleven and a half omelets.
• An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
• An ounce of gold can be beaten up into a sheet covering 9.3 sq. meters, or drawn into 80.5 kms(50 miles) of wire.
• An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long.
• An owl cannot move it’s eyeballs in its eye sockets.
• An oyster can change it’s sex a number of times during its life.
• An oyster can change its sex once every seven days.
• Anagrams amused the ancient Greeks, Romans and Hebrews, and were popular during the Middle Ages.

Strange But True Facts (Part 1)

Strange But True Facts (Part 2)

Strange But True Facts (Part 4) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 5) — Coming Soon

• 0 Comments

• Ancient Chinese artists freely painted scenes of nakedness and sex. However, they would absolutely never depict a bare female foot.
• Ancient Chinese artists would never paint pictures of women’s feet.
• Ancient Egyptian priests would pluck every hair from their bodies.
• Ancient Egyptians believed that “Bast” was the mother of all cats on Earth. They also believed that cats were sacred animals.
• Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the death of their cats.
• Andorra, a tiny country on the border between France and Spain, has the longest average lifespan: 83.49 years.
• Andrew Jackson spent most of his adult life with a bullet no more than two inches away from his heart as a result of a duel he fought before becoming President.
• Andrew Johnson, was the only self-educated tailor. He is the only President to make his own clothes as well as his cabinet’s.
• Andy Warhol based his 1964 series of silk portraits of Marilyn Monroe on a still photo from the 1952 movie Niagra.
• Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stone’s emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the ‘Sticky Fingers’ album.
• Animal gestation periods: the shortest is the American opossum, which bears its young 12 to 13 days after conception; the longest is the Asiatic elephant, taking 608 days, or just over 20 months.
• Animals that lay eggs don’t have belly buttons.
• Anne Boleyn had three breasts.
• Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I’s mother, had six fingers on one hand.
• Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, had an extra finger on her left hand.
• Annually, approximately 46 millions Cokes, five million pounds of French fries, and seven million hamburgers are consumed at Walt Disney World Resort.
• Another law in Helena, Montana, mandates that a woman can’t dance on a table in a saloon or bar unless she has on at least three pounds, two ounces of clothing.
• Another name for your pinky finger is Wanus
• Antarctica has only one ATM machine.
• Antarctica is the only continent without any reptiles or snakes.
• Antarctica is visited by over 10,000 tourists a year.
• Anteaters prefer termites to ants.
• Anthropologists use a standard height of 4 feet 11 inches to determine if a group of people are pygmies. The average adult male must be less than 59 inches in height.
• Ants are social insects and live in colonies which may have as many as 500,000 individuals.
• Ants can live completely submerged underwater for up to 2 days.
• Ants don’t sleep.
• Ants make up 1/10 of the total world animal tissue
• Any free-moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere, because of it’s surface tension.
• Any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th in it.
• Anyone could come to Andrew Jackson’s public parties at the White House. At his last one, a wheel of cheese weighing 1,400 lbs. was eaten in two hours. The White House smelled of cheese for weeks.
• Aphids are born pregnant without the benefit of sex. Aphids can give birth 10 days after being born themselves.
• Apparently 1/3 of people with alarm clocks hit the ’snooze’ button every morning, and from 25-34 age group, it is over 1/2. (r u 1 of them?)
• Apparently there’s a law stating that if a Kurtatchi woman of the Soloman Islands unintentionally reveals her genitals, it can be expected and will be understood if any nearby man sexually assaults her.
• Apparently, according to Playtex, the best selling bra sizes these days are 34B and 36B.
• Apparently, I misspelled it…it’s “Sinterklaas.” Thanks to the unnamed person from Holland who corrected me.
• Apple pie was brought to England from France sometime around 1066 by William the Conqueror. It made it to America when the Pilgrims arrived.
• Apple pits contain cyanide.
• Apples are more effecient than caffeine for waking you up in the morning.
• Approximate number of facial expressions dogs can make: 100.
• Approximately 125 people die in the United States from an anaphylaxis to foods each year.
• Approximately 20% of Americans have a passport.
• Approximately 200 pets are buried in a pet cemetery out of the thousands of pets that die each day.
• Approximately 25,000 workers died during the building of the Panama Canal, and approximately 20,000 of them contracted malaria and yellow fever.
• Approximately 40,000 tons of meteoric dust hits the Earth each year.
• Approximately 850 peanuts make a 18 oz jar of peanut butter.
• Approximately one out of four injuries by athletes involve the wrist and hand.
• Arabic numerals are not really Arabic; they were invented in India.
• Argentineans eat more meat than any other nation in the world an average of 10 ounces per person per day.
• Aristedes won the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.
• Armadillos along with humans are the other creatures that can contract leprosy.
• Armadillos can be house broken.
• Armadillos can have up to four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
• Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
• Army doctor D.W. Bliss attended to two presidents after they were shot by assassins. In 1865 he was one of the 16 doctors who tried to save Abraham Lincoln. In 1881 he supervised the care of James Garfield.
• Around 2,000 left-handed people die annually due to improper use of equipment designed only for right handed people.
• Around 22% of Americans are teenagers.
• Around the 16th century the Yo-Yo was used by Philipinos to stun prey from trees.
• Arrowroot, an antidote for poisoned arrows, is used as a thickener in cooking.
• As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. For example, journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped.
• As bananas ripen, the starch in the fruit turns to sugar. Therefore, the riper the banana the sweeter it will taste.
• As late as 1820, the universe was thought to be 6,000 years old. It is now thought to be between 15 and 20 billion years old.
• As mentioned, the first Fords used Dodge engines. Many ford vehicles now use Nissan engines, especially in Mini-vans.
• As much as 80% of microwaves from mobile phones are absorbed by YOUR HEAD! visit microshield
• As of 14.10.2003, only 0.6% of people actually sign the guestbook. Its true. Over 120,000 visitors. Yes, the statistic did go down.
• As of 1996, Hee Haw holds the record for the longest running weekly first-run syndicated show in the history of television. It spanned over 4 decades, from the late ’60s to the early ’90s, airing every Saturday night at 7:00.
• As of 2004, there are two men for every woman in the United Arab Emirates.
• As of Dec. 31, 2000, the number of climbers summiting Mt. Everest reached 1314, and the number of deaths on the mountain reached 167.
• As specified by the Christian church, the canonical hours are matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline.
• Aspirin was the first drug offered as a water-soluble tablet in 1900.
• Aspirin went on sale as the first pharmaceutical drug in 1899, after Felix Hoffman, a German chemist at the drug company Bayer, successfully modified Salicylic Acid, a compound found in willow bark to produce Aspirin.
• Assuming that all the offspring survived, 190,000,000,000,000,000,000 flies could be produced in four months by the offspring of a single pair of flies.
• Astronaut John Glenn ate the first meal in space when he ate pureed applesauce squeezed from a tube aboard Friendship 7 in 1962.
• Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper was so relaxed on the morning of his launch into space in May 1963 that he fell asleep in his space capsule while waiting for blastoff.
• Astronaut Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon with his left foot.
• Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
• Astronauts become between two and three inches taller when in space.
• Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.
• Astronauts grow taller in space
• At 188 decibels, the whistle of the blue whale is the loudest sound produced by any animal.
• At 4,145 miles, the Nile River is the longest in the world.
• At -40 degrees fahrenheit,a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour breathing.
• At 840,000 square miles, Greenland is the largest island in the world. It is three times the size of Texas. By comparison, Iceland is only 39,800 square miles.
• At age 47, the Rolling Stones’ bassist, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with 13-year old Mandy Smith, with her mother’s blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after, Bill’s 30-year-old son Stephen married Mandy’s mother, age 46. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father’s father-in-law and his own grandpa.
• At age seventy, 73% of men are still potent.
• At Andrew Jackson’s funeral in 1845, his pet parrot had to be removed because it was swearing.
• At Arkansas State University two people cannot hold hands while standing in a doorway unless they belong to a union.
• At birth, a panda is smaller than a mouse and weighs about four ounces.
• At birth, bear cubs weigh between 1/2 1 pound.
• At its center, the sun has a density of over a hundred times that of water, and a temperature of 10-20 million degrees Celsius.
• At Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida, on June 26, 1985, organist Wilbur Snapp played “Three Blind Mice” following a call by umpire Keith O’Connor. The umpire was not amused, and saw to it that Mr. Snapp was ejected from the game.
• At one time in India, a fiance was required to deflower his future bride if she died before the wedding. The girl could not be cremated until this ritual was carried out in front of the village priest.
• At one time the earth consisted of one land mass and a huge body of water. Geologists today call the land Pangaea (from the Greek words “all land”), while the water was called Panthalassa (from the Greek words “all sea”). Between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea split into two parts: Laurasia, which consisted of North America, Europe and Asia; and Gondwanaland, which consisted of Africa, South America, India, Antarctica and Australia.
• At one time, there was a law in India that forbade lower-caste people from casting their shadows on a member of the Brahman (the upper class).
• At one time, Venus de Milo had arms.
• At sea level there are 2,000 pounds of air pressure on each square foot of your body area.
• At the age of 26, Michelangelo began sculpting his monumental statue of David. He finished it seventeen months later, in January, 1504.
• At the beginning of the year 2001 all Canadian cigarette packaging will depict graphic images of rotting teeth and deteriorating organs.
• At the distance at which our sun is located from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Earth and the rest of our solar system are moving at a speed of about 170 miles per second around the center.
• At the end of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life”, an ultrasonic whistle, audible only to dogs, was recorded by Paul McCartney for his Shetland sheepdog.
• At the end of WWII the Germans had more planes than the start of the war.
• At the height of its power (400 BC) the Greek city of Sparta had 500,000 slaves and only 25,000 citizens.
• At the time of the U.S. Revolutionary War, Philadelphia was the second largest English-speaking city in the world, surpassed only by London.
• At Will’s first competition he competes with the sword, and after his first victory Jeff gives a little speech which recieves no response until one of Will’s friends cheers. this was a mistake none of the extras spoke english and so missed their cue to start cheering, and needed a reminder from one of the lead actors. This scene was going to be shot but the director decided this was better than what they had planned.
• Attila the Hun (invader of Europe; 406-453), Felix Faure (French President; 1841-1899), and Pope Leo VIII (d 963-965) all died while having sex.
• Audrey Hepburn’s real name was Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston.
• August 9, 1173 marked the first day of construction on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was completed sometime in 1370 after two building stoppages. In 1178, when the tower was three stories tall, construction was halted for unknown reasons. It wasn’t until 1272 that construction resumed, and that lasted until 1278 (the tower was seven stories at that point). In 1360, construction of the belfry that would eventually hold seven bells began.
• Aunt Jemima pancake flour, invented in 1889, was the first ready-mix food to be sold commercially.
• Australia has no native monkeys. (in the wild)
• Australia is a major exporter of camels
• Australia is the only country that is also a continent.
• Australian termites have been known to build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.
• Australians consume 60% more coffee than tea, a sixfold increase since 1940.
• Australia’s box jellyfish has toxins more potent than the venom in cobras, and is one of the most dangerous jellyfish in the world
• Average calories burned daily by the sled dogs running in Alaska’s annual Iditarod race: 10,000.
• Average length of a coat hanger when straightened: 44 inches.
• Average number of eggs laid by the female American Oyster per year: 500 million. Usually only one oyster out of the bunch reaches maturity.
• Average number of hummingbirds required to create the weight of 1 ounce: 18.
• Average number of squirts from a cow’s udder needed to yield a gallon of milk : 345.
• Avocados have the highest calories of any fruit at 167 calories per hundred grams.
• Aztec emperor Montezuma drank 50 golden goblets of hot chocolate every day. It was thick, dyed red and flavored with chili peppers.
• Aztec emperor Montezuma had nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant “plenty of excrement.”
• Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day. So they sacrificed 15,000 men a year to appease their sun god, Huitzilopochtli. Most of the victims were prisoners taken in wars, which were sometimes started solely to round up sacrificial victims.

Strange But True Facts (Part 1)

Strange But True Facts (Part 3) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 4) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 5) — Coming Soon

• 0 Comments

• More Monopoly money is printed yearly than real money throughout the world.
• Penguins are not found in the North Pole
• People photocopying their buttocks are the cause of 23% of all photocopier errors worldwide.
• A dentist invented the Electric Chair.
• Rudolf the Red-nosed reindeer was actually created as a promotional figure for Montgommery Wards department stores.
• A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
• Percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% Percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
• A whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.
• About 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens each year.
• About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they’re still sitting on it.
• Alexander Graham Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf .
• The “O” when used as a prefix in Irish surnames means “descendant of.”
• Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
• Cockroaches break wind every 15 minutes.
• Charlie Brown’s dad was a barber.
• Fish scales are an ingredient in most lipsticks.
• Frank Baum, the writer of “The Wizrd of OZ”, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence “Oz.”
• The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp (a variety of the marijuana plant) paper
• On average, every chocolate bar contains at least three insect legs.
• Up until the early 20th century, New Jersey and Wisconsin had laws allowing the castration of epileptics
• “A motion to table a motion to reconsider a vote to table an appeal of a ruling that a point of order was not in order against a motion to table another point of order against a motion to bring to a vote the motion to call up the resolution that would institute a rules change.”
• “Adcomsubordcomphibspac” is the longest acronym. It is a Navy term standing for Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command.
• “Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, La Allah Il Allah, La Allah Il Allah U Mohammed Rassul Allah” is heard by more people than any other sound of the human voice. This is the prayer recited by muezzins from each of the four corners of the prayer tower as Moslems all over the world face toward Mecca and kneel at sunset. It means: “God is great. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”
• “Almost” is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
• “Aromatherapy” is a term coined by French chemist René Maurice Gattefossé in the 1920’s to describe the practice of using essential oils taken from plants, flowers, roots, seeds, etc., in healing.
• “Asthma” and “isthmi” are the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels between.
• “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson was the first video to air on MTV by a black artist.
• “Conservationalists” & “Conversationalists” (18 letters) are the longest non-scientific transposals (word formed from another by changing its letters).
• “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.
• “Duff” is the decaying organic matter found on a forest floor.
• “Fickleheaded” and “fiddledeedee” are the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.
• “Flushable” toilets were in use in ancient Rome.
• “Fortnight” is a contraction of “fourteen nights.” In the US “two weeks” is more commonly used.
• “Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
• “Four” is the only number whose number of letters in the name equals the number.
• “Hang on Sloopy” is the official rock song of Ohio.
• “Happy Birthday” was the first song to be performed in outer space, sung by the Apollo IX astronauts on March 8, 1969.
• “”Kemo Sabe, meaning an all knowing one, is actually a mispronunciation by Native American of the Spanish phrase, Quien lo Sabe, meaning one who knows.”
• The lunula is the half-moon shaped pale area at the bottom of finger nails.
• “Ma is as selfless as I am” can be read the same way backwards. If you take away all the spaces you can see that all the letters can be spelled out both ways.
• “Mad About You” star Paul Reiser plays the piano on the show’s theme song.
• “One thousand” contains the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A.
• “Ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.
• “Rhythms” is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u.
• “Second string,” meaning “replacement or backup,” comes from the middle ages. An archer always carried a second string in case the one on his bow broke.
• “Speak of the Devil” is short for “Speak of the Devil and he shall come”. It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That’s why when you’re talking about someone and they show up people say “Speak of the Devil.”
• “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.
• “Tautonyms” are scientific names for which the genus and species are the same.
• “Taxi” is spelled exactly the same in English, French, German, Swedish, Portuguese, and Dutch.
• “Teh” means “cool” in Thai. (Pronounced “tay”).
• “The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” is said to be the toughest tongue twister in English.
• “THEREIN” is a seven-letter word that contains thirteen words spelled using consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein.
• “Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.”
• $203,000,000 is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.
• 1 and 2 are the only numbers where they are values of the numbers of the factors they have.
• 1 in 5,000 north Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue.
• 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of lemons contain more sugar than 1 kg of strawberries.
• 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire are strung across the Unites States.
• 1.7 litres of saliva is produced each day. In Discovery Channel, its a quart.
• 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
• 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria
• 11% of the world is left-handed.
• 111, 111, 111 X 111, 111, 111 = 12, 345, 678, 987, 654, 321
• 1200 equals 1 pound (72 rupees).
• 123,000,000 cars are being driven on highways in the United States.
• 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the United States.
• 1959’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.
• 2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end in 2 or 5.
• 203 million dollars is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.
• 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next hour.
• 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks.
• 25% of a human’s bones are in its feet.
• 259200 people die every day.
• 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is “a meaningless existential hell.”
• 3% of all mammals are monogamous
• 315 entries in Webster’s 1996 dictionary were misspelled.
• 315 words in the 1996 Webster’s dictionary were mispelled.
• 4 tablespoons of ketchup has about the same amount of nutrition as a ripe tomato.
• 40% of all people who come to a party snoop in your medicine cabinet.
• 40% of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.
• 43.7% of all statistics are made up right on the spot
• 48% of astronauts experience motion sickness.
• 52% of Americans drink coffee.
• 55.1% of all US prisoners are in prison for drug offenses.
• 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball games each year
• 67 million pounds of pesticides and about 3 million tons of fertilizer are used annually on lawns in the US.
• 78 rpm albums, used prior to 1948, were only capable of recording for four minutes. It wasn’t until later that year that Columbia Records introduced 33 rpm albums capable of playing 23 minutes per side.
• 80% of animals on earth are insects.
• 80% of arrested criminals are male.
• In Disney’s Fantasia, the Sorcerer to whom Mickey played an apprentice was named Yensid, which is Disney spelled backward.
• By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
• One in ten people live on an island.
• 84% of a raw apple is water.
• It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.
• 85% of men who die of heartattacks during intercourse, are found to have been cheating on their wives.
• 85,000,000 tons of paper are used in the United States each year.
• 28% of Africa is classified as wilderness. In North America, its 38%.
• Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
• Sherlock Holmes NEVER said “Elementary, my dear Watson”, Humphrey Bogart NEVER said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, and they NEVER said “Beam me up, Scotty” on Star Trek.
• 90% of bird species are monogamous; only 3% of animals are.
• 90% of New York City cab drivers are recently arrived immigrants.
• 98% of all murders and rapes are by a close family member or friend of the victim.
• 98% of the weight of water is made up from oxygen.
• 99% of the pumpkins sold in the US end up as jack-o-lanterns.

Strange But True Facts (Part 2) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 3) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 4) — Coming Soon

Strange But True Facts (Part 5) — Coming Soon

• 1 Comment

• A fine of $25 can be levied for flirting. This old law specifically prohibits men from turning around on any city street and looking “at a woman in that way.” A second conviction for a crime of this magnitude calls for the violating male to be forced to wear a “pair of horse-blinders” wherever and whenever he goes outside for a stroll.
• A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline.
• A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket.
• Before the enactment of the 1978 law that made it mandatory for dog owners in New York City to clean up after their pets, approximately 40 million pounds of dog excrement were deposited on the streets every year.
• Citizens may not greet each other by “putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers”.
• Donkeys are not allowed to sleep in bathtubs in Brooklyn, N.Y.
• In Carmel, N.Y., a man can’t go outside while wearing a jacket and pants that do not match.
• In Greene, New York, During a concert, it is illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalks.
• In New York, you can teach your pet parrot to speak, but not to squawk.
• In New York City you need a permit to transport carbonated beverages.
• In New York City it is illegal for a man to give ‘The Standard Lear’ to a woman. Violators are forced to wear horse blinders.
• In New York City, it’s illegal to throw swill into the street.
• In New York City it’s illegal to shake a dust mop out a window.
• In New York State it is still illegal to shoot a rabbit from a moving trolley car.
• In Ocean City, New York It is illegal to eat in the street in residential neighborhoods, and the only beverage you can drink on the beach is water in a clear plastic bottle.
• In Ocean City New York, It is illegal for men to go topless in the center of town.
• In Staten Island, New York, It is illegal for a father to call his son a “faggot” or “queer” in an effort to curb “girlie behavior.”
• In Staten Island, New York, You may only water your lawn if the hose is held in your hand.
• In Tonawanda, New York homeless people may not start a fire in the park unless they intend to cook food.
• It is against the law to throw a ball at someone’s head for fun.
• It is illegal for a woman to be on the street wearing “body hugging clothing.”
• It is illegal to jump off the Empire State building.
• It’s illegal in New York to start any kind of public performance, show, play, game or what have you, until after 1:05 p.m.
• Jaywalking is legal, as long as it’s not diagonal. That is, you can cross the street out of the crosswalk, but you can’t cross a street diagonally.
• Members of nine New York Indian tribes are exempt from the city’s eight percent parking tax.
• New York and a handful of other states require that toilets be evenly divided among men and women in public theaters or arenas.
• You may not smoke within 100 feet of the entrance to a public building.

• Women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business.
• New York City may be the theater capital of the country, but it’s illegal to have a puppet show in your window and a violation can land you in the snoozer for 30 days.
• New Yorkers cannot dissolve a marriage for irreconcilable differences, unless they both agree to it.
• Ocean City: It is illegal to eat in the street in residential neighborhoods, and the only beverage you can drink on the beach is water in a clear plastic bottle.
• Slippers are not to be worn after 10:00 P.M.
• Staten Island: You may only water your lawn if the hose is held in your hand.

• The New York City Transit Authority has ruled that women can ride the city subways topless. New York law dictates that if a man can be somewhere without a shirt, a woman gets the same right. The decision came after arrests of women testing the ordinance on the subways. A transit police spokesman said they would comply with the new rule, but “if they were violating any other rules, like sitting on a subway bench topless smoking a cigarette, then we would take action.” Smoking is not allowed in the subways.
• The New York State Senate passed a resolution to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 1955 world championship and expressed a longing that someday the Dodgers will return to “their one and only true home.”
• The penalty for jumping off a building is death.
• To cut down on its once-horrific graffiti problem, New York City several years ago made it illegal to carry an open can of spray paint.
• While riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

• 0 Comments

• 1 Comment

• 1 Comment

The DVD region code identifies a DVD’s compatibility with the players typically sold in a particular region.

Region 0 (or “region free”) is compatible with DVD players from any region.

The majority of all current titles play only in one specific region unless otherwise noted. DVDs sold by Amazon.co.uk are encoded for Region 2 or Region 0. Region 2 DVDs may not work on DVD players in other countries.

Region 1 DVDs sold by Marketplace sellers

Region 1 discs are intended for use with standard DVD players in North America (Canada and the USA). In most instances they can also be played on compatible “multi-region” DVD players (also known as “chipped” or “region-free” players).

They also require an NTSC-compatible television. NTSC is the standard picture format in North America, and differs from the PAL format adopted in Britain and Europe. Region 1 DVDs are usually presented in NTSC format, so you should ensure that your TV is capable of reading the NTSC signal before purchasing Region 1 DVDs.

Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE)

Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE) has been added by some film studios (specifically Warner and Columbia) to selected Region 1 DVDs, with the intention of preventing these discs from playing on some multi-region DVD players. We are therefore unable to guarantee that all Region 1 discs will be compatible with all multi-region players.

Global DVD region countries

This is not a definitive list and is intended only as a guide.

Region 1 – US, US Territories and Canada

American Samoa, Canada, Guam, Palau, Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands, Puerto Rico, Micronesia, United States, U.S. Virgin Islands

Region 2 – UK, Europe, Japan, South Africa and Middle East

Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Yemen, Yugoslavia

Region 3 – Southeast and East Asia

Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Phillipines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam

Region 4 – Australia, New Zealand, Central and South America

Antigua, Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Barbuda, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Falkland Islands, French Guiana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, New Guinea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad, Tobago, Uruguay

Region 5 – Former Soviet Union, Indian sub-continent, Africa, North Korea and Mongolia

Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, India, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, St. Helena, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Region 6 – China

China

Region 7 – Reserved for future use

Region 8 – International Territories (ships, planes, etc)

• 0 Comments

“The word hack doesn’t really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of other hacker words, most notably random.”

Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

An important secondary meaning of hack is ‘a creative practical joke’. This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures, but here are some examples of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and ‘interviewed’ the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.

While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the ‘Fiendish Fourteen’) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts — large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.

The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of ‘WASHINGTON’, the word ‘CALTECH’ was flashed. Another stunt showed the word ‘HUSKIES’, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver — nature’s engineer — as a mascot.)

After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: “Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant.” The Washington student body president remarked: “No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed.”

This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the direction sheets constituted a form of programming.

Here is another classic hack:

On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard’s second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters ‘MIT’ appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.

The Boston Globe later reported: “If you want to know the truth, MIT won The Game.”

The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.

This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise, publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected). The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and contained no explosives.

Harvard president Derek Bok commented: “They have an awful lot of clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again.” President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there were.”

The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have happened. Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere, though retold as history, have the characteristics of what Jan Brunvand has called ‘urban folklore’ Perhaps the best known of these is the legend of the infamous trolley-car hack, an alleged incident in which engineering students are said to have welded a trolley car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions of this have been recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but at least one very detailed version set at CMU.

Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical extensively; the interested reader is referred to his delightful pictorial compendium The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery, and Pranks (MIT Museum, 1990; ISBN 0-917027-03-5). The Institute has a World Wide Web page at http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html. There is a sequel entitled Is This The Way To Baker House?. The Caltech Alumni Association has published two similar books titled Legends of Caltech and More Legends of Caltech.

Here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks:

Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in ‘master mode’ (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its ‘privilege level’ byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.

Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official ‘level 1 SIDR’ (a bug report with an intended urgency of ‘needs to be fixed yesterday’). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as ‘Security SIDR’, and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.

The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn’t realize the severity of the problem, or didn’t assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch.

Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.

They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Friar Tuck’. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as ‘ghost jobs’ (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another’s statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.

One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following:

• Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job.
• Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor.
• The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a ‘lace card’ (card with all positions punched). These would usually jam in the punch.
• The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
• The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver… after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually.

Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and killed them… and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:

!X id1id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack!  Pray save me!

id1: Off (aborted)

id2: Fear not, friend Robin!  I shall rout the Sheriff

     of Nottingham's men!

id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.

Finally, the system programmers did the latter — only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the kernel file, in Unix terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at boot time (this is similar to the way Windows viruses propagate).

The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this problem.

It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola’s management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against either of them.

Finally, here is a wonderful hack story for the new millennium:

1990’s addition to the hallowed tradition of April Fool RFCs was RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. This sketched a method for transmitting IP packets via carrier pigeons.

Eleven years later, on 28 April 2001, the Bergen Linux User’s Group successfully demonstrated CPIP (Carrier Pigeon IP) between two Linux machines running on opposite sides of a small mountain in Bergen, Norway. Their network stack used printers to hex-dump packets onto paper, pigeons to transport the paper, and OCR software to read the dumps at the other end and feed them to the receiving machine’s network layer.

Here is the actual log of the ping command they successfully executed. Note the exceptional packet times.

Script started on Sat Apr 28 11:24:09 2001
vegard@gyversalen:~$ /sbin/ifconfig tun0
tun0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:10.0.3.2  P-t-P:10.0.3.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:150  Metric:1
          RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0
          RX bytes:88 (88.0 b)  TX bytes:168 (168.0 b)

vegard@gyversalen:~$ ping -i 450 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms

— 10.0.3.1 ping statistics —
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
vegard@gyversalen:~$ exit

Script done on Sat Apr 28 14:14:28 2001

A web page documenting the event, with pictures, is at http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/. In the finest Internet tradition, all software involved was open-source; the custom parts are available for download from the site.

While all acknowledged the magnitude of this achievement, some debate ensued over whether BLUG’s implementation was properly conformant to the RFC. It seems they had not used the duct tape specified in 1149 to attach messages to pigeon legs, but instead employed other methods less objectionable to the pigeons. The debate was properly resolved when it was pointed out that the duct-tape specification was not prefixed by a MUST, and was thus a recommendation rather than a requirement.

The perpetrators finished their preliminary writeup in this wise: “Now, we’re waiting for someone to write other implementations, so that we can do interoperability tests, and maybe we finally can get the RFC into the standards track… ”.

The logical next step should be an implementation of RFC2549.

• 1 Comment