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Fastfacts: Things you always never wanted to know
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Illustration by Holly Randall
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
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A nearly fatal misjudgment marked Pablo Picasso's birth. The midwife, thinking him stillborn, had abandoned him on a table. But his uncle, a cigar-smoking physician, revived him with a blast of needed (albeit smoke-filled) air into his lungs.
The magician's stock word "hocus-pocus" is taken from the name of a mythological sorcerer, Ochus Bochus, who appears in Norse folktales and legends.
In 1976, Jannene Swift, a Los Angeles secretary, officially married a 50-pound rock. The ceremony was witnessed by more than 20 people.
If the coils of a French horn were straightened out, the instrument would be 22 feet long.
The Statue of Liberty's mouth is 3 feet wide.
The top of the tower on the Empire State Building was originally intended (though never used) as a mooring place for dirigibles.
The female knot-tying weaverbird will refuse to mate with a male who has built a shoddy nest. If spurned, the male must take the nest apart and completely rebuild it in order to win the affections of the female.
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