FastFacts

Things you've always never wanted to know

• Human nails and hair do not grow after death. They are simply the last parts of the body to decompose.

• Almost half of the newspapers in the world are published in the U.S. and Canada.

• Until the 1950s, Tibetans disposed of their dead by taking the body up to a hill, hacking it into little pieces and feeding the remains to the birds.

• Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to visit a foreign country while in office. In November 1906, he sailed on the U.S.S. Louisiana to Panama and Puerto Rico.

• The rings of a tree are always farther apart on the tree's southern side. Woodsmen often read tree rings to find the compass points.

• During midsummer, the radical leaves of the compass plant invariably point precisely north and south.

• In the 18th-century English gambling club, the faro table had a large semicircular section cut out of one of its sides in order to accommodate the enormous stomach of the famous statesman Charles James Fox.

• Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lick their mandibles into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem and, with legs dangling, fall asleep.

• Queen termites live for 50 years.

• Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color.

• The parking meter was invented in Oklahoma City. It was the brainchild of Carl Magee, whose first model appeared in 1935. Early models look almost exactly like modern ones. Few items have changed as little through the years as the parking meter.

• The words naked and nude are not the same. Naked implies unprotected. Nude means unclothed.

• It is illegal to hunt camels in Arizona.