FastFacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, October 14, 2005
Things you've always never wanted to know
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.
A computer gets infected with a virus every five seconds.
The yo-yo was originally a weapon used in the Philippine jungles.
Queen Victoria eased the discomfort of her menstrual cramps by having her doctor supply her with marijuana.
Betsy Ross is the only real person to ever have been the head on a Pez.
It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7 percent of the world's population is drunk.
You need 42 coffee beans to make one shot of espresso.
The first Lifesaver was peppermint.
There are seven points on the crown of the Statue of Liberty.
By age 65, an average American has watched the equivalent of nine years of uninterrupted television screening, viewing more than 20,000 commercials each year.
Almost 425,000 hot dogs and buns and 160,000 hamburgers and cheeseburgers were served at Woodstock '99.
In 1996, Kermit the Frog delivered the commencement address at Southampton College in New York.
Walt Disney holds the record for the most Oscar nominations with 64.
Three thousand tubs of Cool Whip cream were used to make the world's largest flag cake at the Statue Of Liberty in 1997.
The game Monopoly was banned in the Soviet Union.
Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president born in a hospital.
The average car horn beeps in the key of F.
The most common color on a state flag is blue.
The letter "X" begins the fewest words in the English language.
Autophobes avoid referring to themselves.
If kept in dim lighting or in running water, a goldfish will lose its color.
The pilot in the first fatal plane crash was Orville Wright.
The Virgin Mary has made the most appearances on the cover of Time magazine.
During World War II, the Oscar statuettes were made of plaster.
Abraham Lincoln was watching the play "Our American Cousin" when he was assassinated.
Morphine was named for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
An ostrich egg can make 11 1/2 omelets.
A sneeze can travel as fast as 100 mph.
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 mph 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 average American's vocabulary is 10,000 words.