Unofficial "Interesting but true trivia" thread (1 Viewer)

[Wayne Bundrick]

I was having a hard time believing the thing about the cashews until I found this link. It also has some fun facts about other nuts.

Wow!

Yeah, it's hard to believe. I was curious to know where they are grown, because they're expensive (compared to peanuts). So I looked it up in the encyclopedia and learned all that. The cashew, the mango, and the pistachio are all in the same family that includes poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac.

Sometimes you have to wonder how the cavemen ever figured out that poisonous food items such as the cashew are edible if they're prepared properly.

 

[ace peterson]

Some more baseball trivia coming from memory:

The Chicago Cubs first night game at Wrigley Field was to played on 8-8-88. They played like 4 innings and the game was rained out before they made it past the 5th. So it never counted as an official game. Therefore the first night game played at Wrigley Field was on 8-9-88.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

So they make Quisp and Boo-Berry, But do they still make Fruit Brute or S'Mores?

Car trivia: You already know about the Chevrolet Nova (no vas in spanish). But what about the Ford Pinto (heh heh heh)? Also, Nobody may care but me, But prior to the '77 model year, no car was required to have front disc brakes.

Motorcycle trivia: The company BSA doesn't actually stand for "Bitch stalled again" but For British Steel Amalgomate. Harley-Davidson may be old (1903), Indian may be older (1901), But the first known motorbike was made by Otto Daimler (sp?) in 1864!

Marijuana was legal in all states until 1931 (by 1937 it was a national ban).

Trivia question: I hear Alfred Hitchcock had no navel, Is this true?

 

[Glenn L]

About Alfred Hitchcock's lack of a belly button...
everyone's born with one, of course... but according to this link (bottom of the page), he'd had so many surgeries that it had been sewn up.

 

[DennisHP]

Smallest City Park in the World is in Salem, Oregon

Judge William Waldo, the son of an 1842 pioneer, planted a Sierra Redwood (sequoia gigantea) on the northwest corner of the intersection of Union Street and Summer Street. In 1936, to protect this heritage tree, the Salem City Council declared the site, a twelve foot by twenty foot plot of land to be known as Waldo Park, an official Salem city park. Ripley cited it as World's Smallest Park.

 

[David Von Pein]

What famous "hacker" was originally considered for Arnold Schwarzenegger's part in 1984's The Terminator?

 

[RogerB]

O.J. Simpson (ugh!)

Never in the history of the Indy 500 has a driver with the last name of Smith started the Race.

The earth weighs 13,176,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (13 septillion, 176 sextillion pounds.)

When reading horizontally from Shakespeare's original published copy of Hamlet, the furthest left hand side reads 'I am a homosexual' in the last 14 lines of the book.

During the burning of Atlanta in 'Gone With The Wind', look closely and you'll see the sets from 1933's 'King Kong' burning instead. The producers decided to save money by destroying the Kong sets instead of making new ones to represent Atlanta.

 

[David Von Pein]

Correct RogerB! (OJ)

I'm very close to your Fishers home, Rog!

No Smiths ever, eh? Hmmmm......how many Jones's?

 

[Daren Welsh]

I used to drive by that park in Salem all the time. If it weren't for that park, Summer St. would have 3 traffic lanes on that block.
So this whole snopes.com thing is pretty amusing. I've been browsing it for the past hour now. I came across this horror story that they claim is false. I have to disagree with them. Back in high school, a buddy and I went to MickeyD's for their "2 for $2" chicken sandwich special. My friend just happened to get the raw end of the deal when he bit into one of his sandwiches. I can honestly say that patty was at least 1/3 "pus". Now I can't say what exactly that pus was and I sure hope it wasn't something cancer related, but it was definately not meat. My best guess would be some form of fat, but it's still disgusting.
... just goes to show you can't trust everything you read, even if it's attempting to disprove someone else!

 

[Walt N]

Man, I love those old British bikes. I used to ride around on a Triumph Trident back in the mid-eighties and I wish I still had it just to look at.

BSA was formed when a group of gunsmiths got together in the mid 1800's and the name stands for Birmingham Small Arms. The logo they used shows a piled stack of rifles. They started building motorcycles in the early 1900's to tide them over when the demand for war rifles was small, but WWI was where the company really took off as the British army needed both rifles and motorcycles.

 

[cafink]

So they make Quisp and Boo-Berry, But do they still make Fruit Brute or S'Mores?

PLEASE let me know if you ever find a place where I can get some S'mores cereal!!

 

[Tom Rags]

Here's another baseball one off the top of my head:
Cal Ripken Junior, the all-time leader in HRs at Shortstop :star: , was originally scouted by the Texas Rangers as a pitcher!

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Here's one I can't really confirm.

Pikeville, Kentucky at one time had the most millionaires per square mile.

Funny thing is, I think it's only one square mile (the Bowles Addition).

 

[Eve T]

A cockroach can live up to nine days without it's head before it starves to death.
Most lipstick contains fish scales.
Over 2500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people.
Pinocchio is Italian for "pine eye"
Cat urine glows under a black-light.
A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
It's against the law to pawn your dentures in Las Vegas.
**One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television!**
Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
That's all the ones I'll post for now....that should keep everyone busy.
Peace,
Eve

 

[Leila Dougan]

The University of Texas system is the third-largest landowner in the United States.

The second is defined as being 9,192,631,770 times the time it takes for a cesium-133 atom to swap hyperfine levels in its ground state.

The oldest weapon still in use in the American military arsenal is the Mameluke hilt sword carried by officers in the U.S. Marine Corps. The sword dates back to the Barbary Pirate Wars of 1801-1807. The sword was given to Lt. Presly O'Banen by the ruler of Tripoli for the aid rendered by the Marines in the Mediteranian Fleet.

 

[StephenK]

"The Whole Nine Yards"

During WW2, the P51 Mustang was loaded with 27 Feet of .50 Cal Ammo for its front guns. Hence when you emptied your guns at a target, you gave them "the whole nine yards".

Not sure if this is true, but I've read it more than once, and it sure sounds cool.

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Yes Stephen K, that whole nine yards deal did derive from war usage.

Anybody know any good entomolgy(sp? for word origin) sites?

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

There are about a dozen explanations for the phrase "the whole nine yards" and the P51 Mustang version is no more likely to be true than the others.

It's the capacity of a concrete mixer. (9 cubic yards.) Or a coal truck.

A yard is the horizontal arm on the mast of a sailing ship. Supposedly the ships had three masts each with three yards, so the whole nine yards means full sail.

It's the length of a bolt of fabric. It's the amount of cloth required to make a man's 3 piece suit. It's the amount of cloth used to make a burial shroud. It's the amount of dirt in a large burial plot. It's the length of a full train on a wedding gown. And so on.

 

[Jesse Leonard]

Texas' largest county is Brewster with 6,208 square miles. Connecticut (5,544 Sq Mi), Delaware (2,489 Sq Mi) and Rhode Island (1,545 Sq Mi) can fit inside this county.

Brewster is TINY compared to Alaska's largest, Yukon-Koyukuk. At 157,121 sq miles, you could fit 25.3 of Texas's Brewster counties in it! Now THAT is big!

 

[ChrisMatson]

Did you know that the World's largest organism is a fungus? I took a class on Algae and Fungi in my undergrad days. Here's a link to a BBC story about this fungus in Oregon.