Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, September 20, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
The word "fiasco," meaning failure, is derived from the ancient Italian art of glass blowing. If a Venetian glass blower made a mistake while creating a fine, delicate bottle, the ruined vessel was turned into an ordinary drinking flask, which is known in Italian as a fiasco.
It is estimated that a plastic container can resist decomposition for as long as 50,000 years.
Runners in ancient Greece believed that the spleen was a hindrance to endurance and long-distance running. Consequently they had a vast pharmacopoeia of herbal concoctions especially designed to shrink this organ. Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician, mentioned a certain mushroom that, when burned over the area of the spleen, melted the organ completely.
It is illegal to hunt camels in Arizona ... unless it's coming right for you. Remember, out in the desert, it's kill or be killed.
Dr. John Cohausen wrote a book in 1743 "proving" that one could live to be 115 years old by inhaling the breath of little girls. In his book, Hermippus Redivivus, Dr. Cohausen gave the following prescription: take one pound of gum olibani, 2 ounces of styrae, myrrh and several other herbs, and mix, burn and inhale while at the same time ingesting the exhalations of the nearest girl.
The mortality rate for infectious diseases is lowest between the ages of 5 and 15. After 25, the body is much more susceptible to disease.
In ancient China, doctors were paid when their patients were kept well, not when they were sick. Believing that it was the doctor's job to prevent disease, Chinese doctors often paid the patient if the patient lost his health. Further, if a patient died, a special lantern was hung outside the doctor's house. At each death another lantern was added. Too many of these lanterns were certain to ensure a slow trade.
In During the early 1920s, at the height of the inflation in the German Weimar Republic, one American dollar was equal to 4 trillion German marks.