I love me some trivia

from The Best Book of Useless Information Ever

One of the country of Liechtenstein's main exports is dental products.

In Tokyo, the cost of placing a three-line classified ad in the newspaper is $3,625 per day.

The annual Notting Hill Carnival is the second largest carnival in the world after Rio de Janeiro's.

In Kenya, people don't drive on the right or left side of the street in particular, just on whichever side is smoother.

Saunas outnumber cars in Finland.

The New York Jets were once unable to find hotel rooms for a game in Indianapolis because they had all been booked up by people attending Gencon, a gaming convention.

Vaimonkanto, or "wife carrying," is a popular sport. The championship games are held annually in Sonkajarvi, Finland.

A helicopter installed the world's largest Olympic torch on top of the Calgary tower. The flame was visible for 10 to 12 miles and required 30,000 cubic feet of natural gas per hour.

Researchers have found that doctors who spend at least three hours a week playing video games make about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery than surgeons who didn't play video games at all.

The only golf course on the island of Tonga has fifteen holes and there's no penalty if a monkey steals your golf ball.

More than 50 percent of people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

The Church of England has appointed its first web pastor to oversee a new parish that will exist only on the net.

Spam filters that catch the word "Cialis" will not allow many work-related emails through because that word is embedded inside the word "specialist."

It took approximately 2.5 million stones to build the Pyramid of Giza, the oldest and largest of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, and the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient World. If you disassembled it, you would get enough stones to encircle the earth with a brick wall twenty inches high.

The rain in New York carries so much acid from pollution that it has killed all the fish in two hundred lakes in the Adirondack State Park.

A coal-mine fire in Haas Canyon, Colorado, was ignited by spontaneous combustion in 1916 and withstood al efforts to put it out. The 900- to 1,700-degree fire was eventually quenched by heat-resistant foam mixed with grout in 2000.

Kevin meets Mr. Lincoln

Very exciting news from the Fort today... The Lincoln Library, recent;ly acquisitioned by ACPL, will be unshadowing the collection this week so members of the public may schedule appointments to go in and view really old, musty and important stuff.



Kevin shows pleasure at getting to speak with the man behind all the brouhaha, none other than Mr. Lincoln himself, looking rather good for having been dead a kaboodle of years. You can almost see the stars in Kevin's eyes and hear the wheels turning in his head as he longs to ask the former president if the press gave news their own spin back in the day the way they do now. Alas, Lincoln cannot speak, so overwhelmed is he by the release of such historically important documents!



(Oh, and those bodies on the floor? We won't go into that right now. Something about protestors, I don't know.)

Useless Info about Animals

From The Ultimate Book of Useless Information

It is illegal in Alaska to give a moose an alcoholic drink.

A full-grown bear can run as fast as a horse over short distances.

The opening to the cave in which a bear hibernates is always on a northern slope.

Shrews and platypuses are the only mammals that are poisonous.

Other than humans, black lemurs are the only primates that may have blue eyes.

Human birth-control pills work on gorillas.

A lion's roar can be heard from five miles away.

Giraffes have no vocal cords.

The dumbest dogs in the world are Afghan hounds.

City dogs live about three years longer than country dogs.

Toy-dog breeds live an average seven years longer than large breeds.

Nose prints are the most reliable way of identifying dogs.

Cats have more than one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

A cat has thirty-two muscles in each ear.

Movie Trivia

From The Amazing Book of Useless Information

Cary Grant was offered the role of James Bond and refused it before the producers offered it to Sean Connery.

David Niven's voice had to be dubbed in on Curse of the Pink Panther by Canadian impersonator Rich Little. Niven was so ill while filming that he could not speak.

Film star Audrey Hepburn was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, and Italian, and was a member of the Dutch Resistance in World War II at age 15.

The longest film title was Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror f the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh-Eating, Hellbound Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D in 1991.

As of December 2007, the Disney film Toy Story 2 is the only film to have more then 100 positive reviews and no negative reviews on the popular film review website www.rottentomatoes.com.

Brad, I'm Mad for You!

Why do I have this obsession with brads?????

For those of you not in the know, brads are those little pieces you put through a hole in a stack of papers and you bend one end to hold the papers together. Scrapbookers and card-makers use them for decoration.

I neither scrapbook nor make cards, but I have purchased many sets of brads for friends who do, because every time I see them I just want to own them!

(See brads here: http://www.bobunny.com/summer09pdfs/11.doubledotbrads.pdf)

I have the same kind of obsession with knobs. Cabinet drawer knobs, dresser drawer knobs, etc. I could see myself getting in over my head for light pulls, too, or other things of that nature.

We won't even talk about beads. And I don't mean Swarovski crystals, either - I like all kinds of beads (except those really obviously cheap plastic ones).

I had a couple of people over last weekend to make soap and went gaga over the mica in the soap kit. I said it was like faerie dust. Little tiny motes of sparkle. Wonderful!

What are some little odd things you go crazy for that make no sense and are maybe not entirely useful and are way too expensive to indulge yourself in?

Insect Trivia

From The Ultimate Book of Useless Information

Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue more than twice as much as to any other single color.

The average caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.

The mayfly lives only six hours, but its eggs take three years to hatch.

Only two animal species wage war on their own kind - ants and humans.

Termites can eat through wood twice as fast when listening to rock music.

Slugs travel at a top speed of .007 miles per hour, can stretch to eleven times their length, and have twenty-seven thousand teeth to help eat their food.

A snail can sleep for three years.

The world's termites outweight the world's humans by ten to one.

Some ribbon worms wil eat themselves if they cannot find food.