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Fast Facts


Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 1, 2005
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Things you've always never wanted to know

  • Prizefights prior to the turn of the century lasted up to more than 100 rounds (rounds were often determined by knockdowns) - with the fighters using bare knuckles.

  • The Dominique chicken has been widely recognized as part of American folklore and is an excellent farm chicken, but the total population of the breed is fewer than 500 hens.

  • The capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou. This African country is slightly larger than Colorado.

  • Helen Keller (1880-1968), blind and deaf from an early age, developed her sense of smell so finely that she could identify friends by their personal odors.

  • The world's largest building without internal supports is the Goodyear Airship hanger in Akron, Ohio - it has 55 million cubic feet of air. During sudden temperature changes, clouds form near the top of the structure and it rains.

  • In 1929, the USSR decreed a week of five days. In 1932, the USSR decreed a week of six days. By 1940, the seven-day week had been restored.

  • The carpenter who built the first stocks in Boston in 1634, a man named Palmer, was the first to occupy them.When he submitted a bill for 1 pound, 13 schillings, the town elders thought it to be excessive and had Palmer charged with profiteering. He was found guilty, fined 1 pound and sentenced to spend a half-hour in the stocks that he recently constructed.

  • A U.S. television network's dramatic representation of the trial of Nazi judges was sponsored by the natural-gas industry. The word "gas" was excised from the script, but a few "gases" slipped by; those had to be blipped by technicians before the program was broadcast.

  • Photographs of galaxy M-82 showed it to be undergoing an enormous explosion in its core. Jets of hydrogen up to 1,000 light-years long were streaming outward in all directions. The explosion probably had to be going on for 1.5 million years.

  • The cod lays vast numbers of eggs, but fewer than five eggs out of a million hatch and mature.

  • The American army had to abandon its plan to attack the British at Newport, R.I., in 1778, when more than 5,000 militiamen deserted and returned to their homes. Throughout the Revolutionary War, George Washington's soldiers were short-term enlistees at best, and the army was constantly on the point of disintegration.


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