· The blazer jacket is named for a British ship, H.M.S. Blazer. The ship's captain insisted that his crew always wear blue jackets with metal buttons, even for casual duty.

· In November, 1972, a student skydiver named Bob Hail jumped from his plane and quickly discovered that neither his regular parachute nor his backup chute had opened. He dropped 3,300 feet at a rate of 80 miles per hour and landed on his face. "I screamed," Hail recalled later. "I knew I was dead and that my life was ended right then. There was nothing I could do." A few moments after landing, however, he got up and walked away with nothing worse than a broken nose and some missing teeth. No one has been able to explain how he escaped unhurt.

· The buzzing of flies and bees is not produced by any sound-producing apparatus within the insects' bodies. It is simply the sound of their wings moving up and down and back and forth at a rapid rate.

· The sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" is the shortest English sentence yet devised to include all the letters of the alphabet.

· Cinderella's slipper, many scholars believe, was made of fur, not glass. The word "verre," or "glass," they claim, was incorrectly substituted in early versions of the story for the word "vaire." In medieval French, vaire means "fur."

· The yo-yo originated as a weapon in the Philippine Islands in the 16th century. It weighed 4 pounds and had a 20-foot cord. Louis Marx, the toy maker, introduced it to America in 1929.

· During a severe windstorm or rainstorm, the Empire State Building may sway several feet to either side.

· The Capitol building in Washington has 365 steps to represent every day of the year.