Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
John Milton wanted to reform politics with poetry. When he realized that this was impossible, he gave up his long-held dream of being a superlative poet and chose instead to devote himself almost exclusively to writing revolutionary manifestoes in prose, which he did for more than a score of years. After the Restoration, he returned to poetry and wrote "Paradise Lost."
In 1800, more than one in every five Americans lived in the state of Virginia.
At Versailles, during the reign of Louis XIV, it was considered gauche to knock on a door with the knuckles. Instead one scratched with the little finger of the left hand and for this purpose courtiers let that particular nail grow long.
In Elizabethan England, the spoon was such a novelty, such a prized rarity, that people carried their own folding spoons to banquets.
More than half a million Americans died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Better get your shots! Oh, wait ... sorry.
The amount of play money printed each year for use in the Parker Brothers game Monopoly totals more than the amount of real currency issued annually by the U.S. Government.
The oboe is considered the most difficult of all woodwind instruments to play correctly.
Verdi wrote the opera "Aida" at the request of the khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal.
If a car is moving at 55 miles per hour it will travel 56 feet on average before the driver can shift a foot from the accelerator to the brake.
The average smoker - the smoker who inhales one and a half packs of cigarettes a day - smokes 10,950 cigarettes a year. A heavy smoker may smoke as many as 30,000 cigarettes a year, a nonstop chain smoker as many as 40,000.
The Hessian soldiers hired by the British to fight the colonists during the Revolutionary War were paid about 25 cents a day.