· A peanut is not a nut. It is a legume.

· There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, more Italians in New York City than in Rome, and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv.

· The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. It was typed on a Remington in 1875 by Mark Twain himself. Twain, however, wished to withhold the fact. He did not want to write testimonials, he said, or answer questions concerning the operation of the "newfangled thing."

· The human eyes can perceive more than 1 million simultaneous visual impressions and are able to discriminate among nearly 8 million gradations of color.

· John Wilkes Booth was the greatest matinee idol of his era. Though history books rarely mention it, the man who shot Lincoln was beloved and familiar to thousands of theater-goers and was especially popular with women, from whom he received a hundred fan letters a week. In fact, it was Booth's familiarity with the layout of Ford's Theater öö he had played there many times öö and his friendliness with the stagehands that allowed him to penetrate the security guard so easily the night of the shooting.

· The Oscar film trophy is named after Oscar Pierce, a wealthy Texas farmer. Before the trophy had any name at all, Pierce's niece, then serving as librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, commented that the statue reminded her of her Uncle Oscar. A newspaper columnist overheard the chance remark and subsequently wrote that "employees have affectionately dubbed their famous statuette ÎOscar'." The name stuck.

· The word Nazi was actually an abbreviation. The party's full name was the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

· Pirates believed that piercing the ears and wearing an earring improved eyesight. This idea, scoffed at for centuries, has been reevaluated in light of acupuncture theory. The point on the lobe where the ear was pierced corresponds to the auricular acupuncture point controlling the eyes.