The Promotional Idea Showcase - Winter 2003 - Updated Quarterly

UNQUESTIONABLY STRANGE FACTS!

• The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime-time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
• Women blink almost twice as much as men.
• If you could drive through space at 75 mph, it would take 142 years to reach the sun and 38 million years to reach the next closest solar system.
• According to physics, if you fire a beam of anything that travels faster than light, it will travel before you fire it.
• Believable facts #17: Los Angeles has about 500,000 more cars than people.
• It takes 17 muscles to smile, 43 to frown.
• Spain, Portugal and Algeria are the top three cork-producing countries in the world.
• Actor Bela “Dracula” Lugosi pantomimed the scenes of the demon dancing in the Disney film Fantasia.
• A whip-crack is actually a tiny sonic boom. The whip’s tip moves so quickly it breaks the sound barrier.
• Banana oil has nothing to do with bananas. It’s a petroleum by-product.
• Based on an iSwag survey, teenagers wearing Britney Spears-logoed merchandise were three times more likely to go to summer school than those who don’t.
• The longest word that can be typed using only the letters from one row of the keyboard is “typewriter.”
• One 75-watt light bulb provides more light than three 25-watt bulbs.
• The revolution notwithstanding, Marie-Augustin Marquis de Peiler spent 50 years in jail for whistling at Marie Antoinette.
• If you start with one coin in one square of a chessboard, then double the number of coins in each successive square, you’ll need 18,446,744,973,709,551,661 coins to fill all 64 squares.
• The first “hello” badge ever worn at an event was in 1880 at the first annual Telephone Operators Convention.
• The childhood rhyme “Ring Around the Rosey” is actually about the plague.
• Maximum weight for a golf ball is 1.62 ounces.
• In Thailand, it’s illegal to step on money.
• Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms daily.
• Neither the USA’s or Netherland’s national anthems mention their countries once.
• A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle; in the air, a skein.
• There are more English-speaking people in China than in the U.S.
• The average American eats at McDonald’s 1,811 times during their lifetime.
• You can actually buy dog-ear cement to help train the ears of certain breeds to bend thecorrect way.
• About 230 marriage licenses are issued each day in Las Vegas.
• In 1935, Jesse Owens, the track star best known for humiliating Hitler’s “master race” at the 1936 Olympics, broke four world records in 45 minutes.
• Daniel Boone detested coonskin caps and never wore one.
• Natural gas has no odor; it’s chemically added so people can detect leaks.
• Humorist, a champion English racehorse in the 1920s, had only one lung.
• Restaurants as we know them today were created by the French after the revolution (theirs, not ours) to provide jobs for those who had been cooks and wait-staff for the aristocracy.
• Only 45% of drivers consistently keep to the posted speed limit. Forty-four percent of male drivers tailgate to speed up the car ahead of them.
• People who work at night generally weigh more than people who work days.
• Robert E. Lee is still the only person to have graduated from West Point without any demerits.
• Whales have the slowest metabolism of any animal.
• Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride in a train; Garfield the first to use the telephone: Teddy Roosevelt the first to ride in a car.
• Garfish have green bones
• Only about 5% of all the salt mined on earth ends up in shakers. Most is used for industrial purposes.