USELESS INFO........YOU MAKE THE CALL.

#81

Moronic Facts and Stories Part 2

Need a Hand?
In Narooma, Australia, 16-year-old Gregory Hammond, who was born with only one hand, finished second in a men's 100-meter swim race. That is until officials checked their international rules book. They then declared he had not won any place in the race because the rules firmly state participants must touch the ends of the pool with both hands.

Unlucky
In 1911 Bobby Leach was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Falling the 168 feet, with a crowd of over 25,000 onlookers, he was knocked unconscious, but survived. Twenty-five years later, living in Sydney, Australia, Leach slipped on a fruit peel, broke his leg, and was taken to hospital. There (for reasons not explained) his leg was amputated, and a few days later he died.

Plan Backfired
Fearing his shop could be burglarized, Luis Barraco, a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pawnbroker, bought a trained two-year-old lion to guard the inside of his store at night. And, the very next morning when Barraco opened his shop, he was instantly killed by the lion.

One Mans Trash is Another Mans Treasure
In April of 1995, a very nervous robber held a gun on a clerk in Mainz, Germany, demanding he fill a cloth bag with money. What the fearful thief did wrong was not look closely where the clerk was filling his bag. Instead of money from his open cash drawer, the sharp employee filled it with paper from his trash basket below the drawer, and the satisfied thief left.

Holy Water Gone Wrong
When Julius McNeil, 28, arrived early at a Jackson, Mississippi, church for his brother's baptism, he went inside to wait, fell into the baptismal tank and drowned.

The Reason For All The Redundant Warning Labels
In 1982 Lever Brothers Company began offering Sun Light dishwashing liquid with lemon juice added. This caused some consumers to think it safe to add to iced tea and other beverages. According to Maryland's Poison Center, this resulted in the poisonings of at least 80 people.

Plan Your Vacations!
British customs officials at London's Heathrow Airport became suspicious of Robert Ventham, 22, who had just returned on a flight from Gibraltar, causing them to search his belongings. Sure enough, inside his golf bag they found drugs and he was arrested. But why were authorities suspicious of a young man returning from a golfing vacation? Gibraltar has no golf courses.

Helping the Elderly
An organization in Great Britain, named Age Concern, formed to help the elderly, missed a great opportunity in June of 2000 to help an older man. When Hector McDonald, age 69, applied for one of their job openings, he was told he was too old.

Possibly The Most Useless Fact Ever
Last checked, the car driven the most number of miles, ever, is a 1957 Mercedes-Benz 180D. While being driven for a total of 21 years, it racked up a total of 1,184,880 miles. (They must've kept the oil changed.)

Dont Cheat!
Twenty-year-old Emilio Garcia's first mistake was to date a married woman. His second was to make love to her in her own home, in her upstairs bedroom. His third was to jump naked from that bedroom window as her husband entered the front door. His fourth, final and worst decision was where he had parked his bike upon arrival. Falling from that window, he impaled himself on his own handlebars.

Hypocrites
Literally hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens met for New York City's 'Park on Earth Day' in 1990 to 'exhibit their deep concerns' for Mother Earth's environmental needs. They were so concerned, they left behind 154.3 tons of litter.

She Beat Anorexia!
Marlene Corrigan was a good provider for her daughter. In fact, too good. She fed her all the food she could eat. On November 13, 1996, at age 13, the girl died naked under a sheet on their living room floor, weighing 680 lbs. Her brother said his sister had been unable to get up from the floor for several months; her urine and defecation remains easily verified that.

#82

In the 1400's a law was set forth that a man was not allowed to beat
his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence we have "the rule
of thumb".

Many years ago in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled
"Gentlemen Only... Ladies Forbidden"... and thus the word GOLF entered into
the English language.

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

It is impossible to lick your elbow.

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king in
history:
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs - Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

Question: If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to
go until you would find the letter "A"?
Answer: One thousand

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes.
When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed
firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase... "goodnight, sleep tight."

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a
month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law
with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their
calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which
we know today as the honeymoon.

If pure sodium is dropped into water it will immediately and violently
explode.

Most tropical marine fish could survive in a tank filled with human
blood.

In the average lifetime a person will breath in about 44 pounds of
dust.

People with blue eyes are better able to see in the dark.

In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch or clock is
usually 10:10.

The most dangerous job in the United States is that of an Alaskan Crab
Fisherman.

One gallon of used motor oil can ruin approximately one million gallons
of fresh water.

Maine is closer to Bermuda than Florida!

The octopus' testicles are located in its head.

In 1980, the city of Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the
city.

#83

Where did all of the other thread's in T&W's go?

Can we start a FIVE or SIX letter game?

#84

A roach can live up to nine days without its head.

On average, a movie makes about 5 times more from its video sales than
ticket takings!

Women buy four out of every 10 condoms sold.

The number of births that occur in India each year is higher than the
entire population of Australia.

Womens' hearts beat faster than mens'.

The United States Postal Service handles over forty percent of the
world's mail volume.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

The Bible is the most-shoplifted book in the world.

14% of us eat the watermelon seeds.

The University of Alaska stretches over 4 time zones.

#85

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz is the shortest grammatical sentence in English that contains all of the letters of the alphabet.

#86

Eveready Batteries

He gave the company away to work on model trains.
This foolish man was Joshua L. Cowen. That's him in the 1954 photograph on the right.

Cowen was your typical turn of the century inventor. Lots of ideas - some that worked, some that didn't.

His first major invention was intended to revolutionize photography. He designed a fuse to ignite magnesium powered flashes, but the invention was a dud.

His best customer for his fuses was the U. S. Navy. They didn't want to take pictures with his fuses, however. They bought 24,000 of them in 1898 to detonate underwater mines.

His next creation was the development of little metal tubes that were designed to illuminate flowers in their pots.

These illuminated flower pots were difficult to perfect (if he could have gotten them to dance to music, he would have earned a fortune). Cowen became bored with his flower pot lights and in 1898 gave the project away to one of his salesmen - some guy named Conrad Hubert. Hubert could care less about the lighted flower pots. Instead, he liked the device Cowen developed to operate them - a lightbulb and dry cell battery combination that had a 30 day life.

Hubert took Cowen's battery operated device and developed it into the flashlight. The company that Cowen gave away was named the American Eveready Company, and it earned Hubert nearly six million dollars in two decades (a large sum of money for the turn of the century). When Hubert died, he left behind a $15,000,000 estate, virtually all earned from Cowen's invention.

One would think that Cowen would feel like a real loser for giving an idea like Eveready batteries away for nothing, but he actually came up with a better idea that earned him even more money.

What I failed to mention was that the "L" in Joshua L. Cowen's name stood for Lionel - as in Lionel trains.

When Cowen gave away his flower pot light company, he turned his attention to these small electrical devices.

The first Lionel train that he produced was a flatbed car that ran on batteries.

He sold them as eye catching displays for shop windows. However, people quickly wanted them for their homes, particularly for under the Christmas tree.

By 1906, he had introduced the transformer and famous three rail track. In 1907, he introduced the first locomotive.

The rest is model train history.

Useless? Useful? I™ll leave that for you to decide.

#87

Antarctica's Red-light District.

How would you feel if your mate came home after spending the night with a member of the world's oldest profession? I think it's safe to say that you probably wouldn't be very happy.

Well, for the first time it has been observed that the male specimen of Homo sapiens is not the only species to pay for someone else's services. Yes, it has been scientifically determined that the male Adelie penguin, which lives on Ross Island down in the Antarctic, also pays for the special favors of a female.

I can just picture it now:

The female gets all dolled up and puts on her sexiest skin-tight tuxedo (what else would a penguin wear?). She then heads out for a night on the town. A potential male customer is spotted out in the distance. She sways her hips back and forth and approaches the gentlemen.

œHey, honey. she says in her sexiest Mae West-like voice. œHow would you like me to warm your chilled bones?

The lonely male penguin is attracted to her like steel to a magnet. They agree to terms and do their thing.

Now, I know what you are thinking. (Well, maybe not.) Penguins don't carry cash and they have never been known to carry an American Express card, so just how do they pay?

With stones.

Yes, you read that correctly - stones. Also known as pebbles, cobbles, and rocks. It makes no difference if the payment is sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic. All types of Flinstonian currency are accepted.

Let's get back to reality...

Actually, the Adelie penguins are known to mate for life. At least that is what the male is led to believe.

Every so often, the female wanders off in search of stones to build her nest with. Since there are no trees or grasses to be found in this frozen wasteland, stones make the best nesting material by default. But even stones are difficult to find in this cold climate. Those that do exist are most likely frozen solid in the mud or ice. The stones are of such great value to the penguins that they will steal them from each other, even though they face a high risk of being attacked by the owner of this hard currency (and this currency certainly is hard).

But wait!

The female Adelie penguin has figured out a better way. She exchanges copulations for the stones. The female slips away from her mate and just happens to wander over to the nest of an unpaired male.

Hmmm¦ What could she be thinking?

She goes through the standard courtship procedure. You know, the usual dip of the head and the coy look from the corner of the eye. If the male shows some interest, she will just lie prone as an invitation to mate. Once the mating is over, she picks up her payment (the stone) and heads back home to her unsuspecting mate.

Believe it or not, this is truly serious science. A researcher named Fiona M. Hunter of the University of Cambridge has been studying these cheating penguins for years. (Why anyone would ever want to study in such a cold place is beyond me. I was once offered a complete scholarship to do my graduate work in Antarctica. All the money in the world couldn't get me there. Instead, I decided to stay warm and chose a different college.)

Hunter also observed ten different females who played an even smarter game. Each of these penguins went through the whole mutual courtship routine, picked up their payment, and just left before any hanky panky ever took place. Oddly, the males showed no aggressive behavior for being denied their pleasure. In fact, these same females actually had the nerve to return for more pebbles. One female managed to get 62 stones from one male in just one hour. (Obviously, she was the Pam Anderson of the bird world.)

And her husband was the last to know¦

#88

Germanic languages

subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a still earlier common ancestor, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic and which is believed to have broken from the other Indo-European languages before 500 Although no writing in Proto-Germanic has survived, the language has been substantially reconstructed by using the oldest records that exist of the Germanic tongue.

Linguistic Groups

The Germanic languages today are conventionally divided into three linguistic groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. This division had begun by the 4th cent. The East Germanic group, to which such dead languages as Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic belong, is now extinct. However, the oldest surviving literary text of any Germanic language is in Gothic.

The North Germanic languages, also called Scandinavian languages or Norse, include Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. They are spoken by about 20 million people, chiefly in Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. These modern North Germanic languages are all descendants of Old Norse (see Norse) and have several distinctive grammatical features in common. One is the adding of the definite article to the noun as a suffix. Thus "the book" in English is expressed in Swedish as boken, "book-the" (bok meaning "book" and -en meaning "the" ). Also distinctive is a method of forming the passive voice by adding -s to the end of the verb or, in the case of the present tense, by changing the active ending -r to -s (-st in Icelandic). This is illustrated by the Swedish jag kaller, "I call" ; jag kallas, "I am called" ; jag kallade, "I called" ; jag kallades, "I was called."

The West Germanic languages are English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish. They are spoken as a primary language by about 450 million people throughout the world. Among the dead West Germanic languages are Old Franconian, Old High German, and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) from which Dutch, German, and English respectively developed.

Common Characteristics

Strong evidence for the unity of all the modern Germanic languages can be found in the phenomenon known as the first Germanic sound shift or consonant shift (also called Grimm's law), which set the Germanic subfamily apart from the other members of the Indo-European family. Consisting of a regular shifting of consonants in groups, the sound shift had already occurred by the time adequate records of the various Germanic languages began to be made in the 7th to 9th cent. According to Grimm's law, certain consonant sounds found in the ancient Indo-European languages (such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit) underwent a change in the Germanic tongue. For example, the sounds p, d, t, and k in the former became f, t, th, and h respectively in the latter, as in Latin pater, English father; Latin dent, English tooth; and Latin cornu, English horn.

Before the 8th cent. a second shift of consonants took place in some of the West German dialects. For instance, under certain circumstances, d became t, and t became ss or z, as in English bread, Dutch brood, but German Brot; English foot, Dutch voet, but German Fuss; and English ten, Dutch tien, but German zehn. The dialects in which this second consonant shift took place were the High German dialects, so called because they were spoken in more mountainous areas. Standard modern German arose from these dialects. The West Germanic dialects not affected by the second shift were the Low German dialects of the lowlands, from which Dutch and English evolved.

Also peculiar to the Germanic languages is the recessive accent, whereby the stress usually falls on the first or root syllable of a word, especially a word of Germanic origin. Another distinctive characteristic shared by the Germanic languages is the umlaut, which is a type of vowel change in the root of a word. It is demonstrated in the pairs foot (singular), feet (plural) in English; fot (singular), f¶tter (plural) in Swedish; and Kampf (singular), K¤mpfe (plural) in German.

All Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs; that is, they form the past tense and past participle either by changing the root vowel in the case of strong verbs (as in English lie, lay, lain or ring, rang, rung; German ringen, rang, gerungen) or by adding as an ending -d (or -t) or -ed in the case of weak verbs (as in English care, cared, cared or look, looked, looked; German fragen, fragte, gefragt). Also typically Germanic is the formation of the genitive singular by the addition of -s or -es. Examples are English man, man's; Swedish hund, hunds; German Lehrer, Lehrers or Mann, Mannes. Moreover, the comparison of adjectives in the Germanic languages follows a parallel pattern, as in English: rich, richer, richest; German reich, reicher, reichst; and Swedish rik, rikare, rikast. Lastly, vocabulary furnished evidence of a common origin for the Germanic languages in that a number of the basic words in these languages are similar in form; however, while word similarity may indicate the same original source for a group of languages, it can also be a sign of borrowing.

#89

850 peanuts are needed to make an 18 oz. jar of peanut butter.

#90

Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey.