Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
taken weekly with a grain of salt
Four out of five American teens do not want to grow up to be president.
A Costa Rican worker who makes baseballs earns about $2,750 a year. The average American professional baseball player earns $2,377,000.
Christian Bale, who plays the title role in the upcoming "Batman Begins," played the role of Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho."
Utility officials in New York City have identified 280 manhole covers, lampposts and service-box lids that are surging with live electricity – some with enough voltage to kill anyone who touches them.
In 1991, the average bra size in the United States was 34B. Today, it's 36C.
The true size of the Earth was known 17.5 centuries before it was circumnavigated. In 230 B.C., the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes worked out its circumference of 25,000 miles by studying shadows cast by the sun at different places on the same day.
Abraham Lincoln's wife, like Lincoln himself, was born in Kentucky. During the Civil War, she was accused of being a spy for the South. Her brothers were members of the Confederate Army.
The British and French armies in World War I did not advance more than three miles at any point on the Western Front in the whole year of 1915. The three miles cost the French army alone 1.5 million men.
Every year, it takes the moon two thousandths of a second longer to circle the Earth than it took in the previous year, as it slowly recedes from Earth. Long before the moon recedes to much more than its present distance, the sun will have to come to the end of its existence as a normal star.
Charles Dickens believed that a good night's sleep was possible only if the bed was aligned from north to south. In this manner, he thought, the magnetic currents would flow straight through the recumbent body.
In the sixth century B.C., a half-mile tunnel was dug on the Aegean island of Samos under the supervision of the Greek architect Eupalinus. Though the tunnel was started at both ends and worked toward the middle, the two halves met only a couple of feet off center. It was a stunning achievement in those days.
The Puritans, considering buttons a vanity, used hooks and eyes.
Ketchup was once sold as a patent medicine. In the 1830s it enjoyed a measure of popularity in the United States as Dr. Miles's Compound Extract of Tomato.
The original name of Los Angeles was El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula – "The Village of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of 'Little Portion.'"
At the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, Richard Blechynden, an Englishman, had a tea concession. On a very hot day, none of the fairgoers were interested in hot tea. In a desperate attempt for business, Blechynden served the tea cold – and invented iced tea.