Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
The largest known bicep is the right bicep of an American, Denis Sester, which measures 30 inches when cold. He built up his amazing muscles by performing arm curls with a 150-pound bucket of sand. As a youngster he wrestled 400-pound hogs on his parents' farm to get fit.
President William Howard Taft weighed 350 pounds. He once got stuck in a bathtub in the White House, and someone was called in to pull him out. The new tub, specific to his dimensions, was so big that when it was delivered, four White House workmen climbed into it and had their picture taken.
The number 37, which cannot be wholly divided by any number except itself and one, will wholly divide the numbers 111, and thus 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888 and 999.
Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage" by Americans during World War I. And in their denunciation of all things German, some Americans actually kicked dachshunds.
In 1971, in English mental asylums, there was a ratio of 35 women to one man. In prisons in England, however, this ratio was reversed.
A study of the common cold, made by two epidemiologists at the University of Michigan, disclosed that the incidence of colds was greater among the better educated.
As a reward for snatching a boy from the path of an oncoming railroad locomotive, the teenage Thomas Edison was offered telegram lessons by the boy's grateful father. Edison quickly became one of the best and fastest telegraphers in the United States.
At the close of the 15th century, the University of Paris boasted 50 colleges and 20,000 students.
Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair.
The British put a statue of President George Washington up in London's Trafalgar Square. Washington, with help from the French fleet, overthrew British rule in the colonies.