The Promotional Idea Showcase - Fall 2003 - Updated Quarterly

UNQUESTIONABLY STRANGE FACTS!

• In England, it’s illegal to stand within 100 yards of the reigning monarch if you’re not wearing socks.
• Five Jell-O flavors that never really made it were apple, chocolate, cola, coffee and celery.
• Thirty-seven percent of women surveyed preferred shopping to sex. 
• Weird math trivia: 111,111,111 multiplied by itself gives you 12,345,678,987,654,321.
• Over half of all Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace.
• George Washington, father of our country, grew a number of things in his garden. One of them was marijuana. And, the original Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
• Nothing except extremely intense heat can dissolve a diamond.
• The average mole can dig a 300-foot tunnel overnight. 
• Interestingly, the O’Leary house, where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started, was one of the few to survive the blaze.
• Cleopatra was actually Greek, not Egyptian.
• A baby stroller somewhere on the market today bears the instructions “Remove child before folding.” 
• Twenty-two percent of all meals eaten in restaurants include french (or should that be “freedom”?) fries.
• For $10 million tax-free, 25% of those surveyed recently said they’d abandon their friends and family. Another 7% said they’d murder someone. 
• The first country to establish an eight-hour workday was Australia, in 1856. 
• Catfish have over 27,000 tastebuds.
• The word “lethologica” is the state of not being able to remember the word you want. 
• Comforting thought: The average human eats eight spiders in his or her lifetime, generally while asleep. 
• On an average day, Americans eat 24,657,534 hot dogs. And, we’d assume, a near-equal number of buns.
• The shortest war in history took place in 1896, between Zanzibar and England. It lasted 38 minutes.
• Ninety percent of Americans depend on alarm clocks of one sort or another to wake them. 
• A popular holiday gift in Europe is a small figure of a man made of marzipan-almond paste, and with a coin inserted in his rear end; It’s supposed to bring prosperity. 
• Not only does Cuban Premier Fidel Castro hold a law degree and once practiced, but he was also scouted by the Pittsburgh Pirates as a possible pitcher. Gold used in jewelry can be made in four colors – yellow, white, rose and green. 
• Although they’re now being produced again largely as collectibles, “official” metal lunchboxes, intended for schoolkids, stopped being made in 1985, in favor of plastic. The last one featured Rambo.
• The biggest lobster ever caught, in 1934, weighed 42 pounds. That’s a lot of melted butter.
• The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers.
• Despite the legends, the Titanic was not the first ship to use the then-new “SOS” distress signal. It was actually the Niagara, a French vessel, several weeks earlier.
• Fingernails grow more quickly than toenails. 
• It’s illegal to hold bear-wrestling matches or put an ice-cream cone in your back pocket in Alabama. 
• The original eight Monopoly pieces, introduced in 1937, were an iron, purse, lantern, car, thimble, shoe, hat and rocking horse. All were intended to be reminiscent of things most people would have at home.
• No square (not rectangular) piece of dry paper can be folded in half more than seven times. 
• Americans eat over 2.5 billion pounds of pickles annually.
• Birds cannot live in space; they require gravity to swallow. 
• The YKK trademark visible on so many zippers stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha. Now you know.