Fastfacts


Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, April 2, 2004

Things you always never wanted to know

  • U.S. military officials want to fill the spider hole that Saddam Hussein used as his final hiding place to prevent it from becoming a tourist attraction.

  • There are 20 million urinals in the United States. Each is flushed an average of 75 times per day - 27,375 times per year - consuming 40,000 gallons of water annually.

  • Los Angeles has the worst roadway bottleneck in the nation: the chronic traffic jam at the Ventura Freeway/ Interstate 405 interchange. Traffic there is bumper-to-bumper for five hours every weekday afternoon. Bottlenecks in Chicago and Phoenix are almost as bad. All told, there are now 233 major bottlenecks on highways throughout the nation.

  • The amount of information stored by humans has doubled in three years, University of California, Berkeley, researchers say. If the new data now being created on the Web, paper and film were all converted to print, it would fill the Library of Congress 500,000 times over.

  • The average American man spends 33 days of his life removing facial hair.

  • Sixty-three percent of Americans shower at least once a day, including 11 percent who shower more than once. Seventy percent of men shower daily, compared with 57 percent of women.

  • When asked to name the invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent of respondents said cell phones. The annual Lemelson-MIT Invention Index survey found that alarm clocks were a close second, at 25 percent, followed by television, 23 percent, and razors, 14 percent.