Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill was an ailing septuagenarian; Roosevelt, very ill, maintained a brittle contact with life; Roosevelt's chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, was dying of cancer. Only Stalin was in good health.
Two gallons of beer were included in the weekly ration for each child in the children's hospital in Norwich, England, in 1632.
Lobsters do feel pain when boiled alive. That's what that high-pitched scream is all about. By soaking them in salt water before cooking, however, you can anesthetize them.
A 4-inch abalone can grip a rock with a force of 400 pounds. Two grown men are incapable of prying it up. An abalone is a mollusk.
The star Antares is 60,000 times larger than our sun. If our sun were the size of a softball, the star Antares would be as large as a house.
When we look at the farthest visible star we are looking 4 billion years into the past - the light from that star, traveling at about 186,000 miles per second, has taken that many years to reach us.
James O'Neill, father of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, acted in the play "The Count of Monte Cristo" no less than 5,352 times - an average of one performance a day every day for 14 years. "I believe," O'Neill once said, "that I should have lost my memory and mind altogether had I continued to keep up the strain."
In the 1936 Swaythling Cup Match in table tennis, Alex Ehrlich of Poland and Paneth Farcas of Romania volleyed for two hours and 12 minutes on the opening serve.
A person who suffers an accident on a motorcycle has a 90 percent chance of injury or death. A person involved in an automobile crash has only a 10 percent chance of the same. Motorcycles account for 4 percent of all licensed vehicles in America yet are involved in 8 percent of all accidents.