The Promotional Idea Showcase - Summer 2001 - Updated Quarterly

UNQUESTIONABLY STRANGE FACTS!

The following nuggets, drawn from various sources, are unquestionably strange, weird, bizarre, trivial, outlandish and occasionally even a little upsetting. They’re also all true. We offer them as a possibility for a fun (or serious) offbeat inspiration or an ingredient in one or more of your upcoming promotions. Your counselor can help you select appropriate or related products.

  • Two out of every three people in the United States age 40 or over are grandparents.
  • Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing up.
  • In Florida (where else?), women can be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer. So can the salon owners who let them.
  • In Connecticut, you can be stopped by the police for riding a bike over 65 mph.
  • The venom in a harvestman (aka/daddy longlegs) spider is more poisonous than the black widow’s. However, their jaws don’t open wide enough to allow them to bite humans. 
  • The sound produced by cracking your knuckles is actually a bubble of gas
    bursting.
  • A full-grown pumpkin has approximately 15 miles of roots. 
  • Roughly five miles of sky has been lost since 1958, and it’s still shrinking.
  • Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward.
  • Three ounces of watermelon seeds contain about 460 calories.
  • The producers of Casablanca, one of the film classics, originally wanted to cast Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan in the roles immortalized by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
  • Snoopy, of Peanuts fame, was actually one of eight puppies. Before you ask, the others were Belle, Marbles, Ugly Olaf, Rover, Andy, Molly and Spike.
  • JFK was the first American president born in the 20th century.
  • Most car horns are in the key of F or B-flat.
  • If you reduced the Earth’s population to 100 people, the breakdown would be:
    57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western hemisphere, eight Africans; 51 females, 49 males; 70 non-Whites, 30 Whites; 70 non-Christians, 30 Christians; One would own a computer; 70 would be illiterate, 50 would be malnourished; one would be near death, one near birth; 80 would live in substandard housing; and one would be college-educated. Perhaps most telling: 50% of the wealth would be in the hands of only six people, all of whom would be U.S. citizens.
  • The average American will eat a total of about 35,000 (yes, that’s thousand) cookies in his or her lifetime.
  • One in five married men proposed on one knee, and 6% proposed on the phone.
  • A third of all the ice cream sold in the world is vanilla.
  • In an average day, 2,005,479 Americans suffer from heartburn.
  • The word “cleave” is the only one in the English language that has two synonyms that are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
  • The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters.
  • Maine is the only state with a one-syllable name.
  • The first recorded contraceptive in history was crocodile dung, used by the ancient Egyptians.
  • The Southern tip of downtown Manhattan is mostly landfill. 
  • A sunken Russian sub off the coast of Bermuda holds 16 live nuclear warheads.
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