Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
The Chinese city of Chinkiang, now 150 miles inland, was once a seaport. The land has been extended because of silt deposits from the Yangtze River.
The chick of the mallee bird never knows either of its parents. As soon as it burrows out of the mound in which its mother built her nest, the chick is able to fly and is left entirely on its own. No mother mallee has ever been seen with a brood.
One signatory to the Declaration of Independence added his address: Charles Carroll "of Carrollton," Maryland. He wanted to be sure that the British, if they wanted to hang him, knew full well where to look for him.
One reason George Washington's army starved at Valley Forge is that Pennsylvania farmers preferred to sell food to the British for ready cash.
The Apache chieftain Geronimo, after surrendering in 1886 and being imprisoned in Florida and Alabama, became a farmer and a member of the Dutch Reformed Church on a military reservation in Oklahoma.
As penance for a quarrel with Pope Julius II, Michelangelo, in 1505, began a year-long project creating a gigantic bronze portrait of His Holiness. Later, the portrait was melted down for a cannon.
In December of 1916, during World War I, Austrian troops stationed in the Alps started an avalanche when they began firing their cannons. Several thousand soldiers were buried.
The Manhattan cocktail ÷ whiskey and sweet vermouth ÷ was invented by Jennie Jerome, the beautiful New Yorker who was the toast of town until she went to England as the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, in 1874, and gave birth to Winston Churchill.
The oyster is usually ambisexual ÷ it begins life as a male, then becomes a female, then changes back to being a male, then back to being a female ÷ it may go back and forth many times.