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Fast facts


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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
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Things you always never wanted to know

  • When one adds up the number of letters in the names of the playing cards without counting the Joker, the total comes to 52, the precise number of cards in a deck.

  • A "clue" originally meant a ball of thread. This is why one is said to "unravel" the clues of a mystery.

  • A "hendecasyllabic" is an adjective applied to a line of verse of 11 syllables.

  • A caterpillar has more than 2,000 muscles.

  • The Mexican fishing spider attaches itself to a small leaf, floats across a pond as if on a raft and from this vantage point hunts its prey – large tadpoles and small fish.

  • After mating, the female black widow spider turns on her partner and devours him. The female may dispatch as many as 25 suitors a day in this manner.

  • Cats have no ability to taste sweet things.

  • There is no single cat called a panther. The name is commonly applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma and the jaguar. A black panther is really a black leopard.

  • Guinea pigs were first domesticated by the Incas, who used them for food, in sacrifices and as household pets.

  • The human body has 45 miles of nerves.

  • An average man on an average day excretes 2.5 quarts of sweat.

  • A moderately severe sunburn damages the blood vessels to such an extent that it take four to 15 months for them to return to their normal condition.

  • The weight of a carat (200 milligrams), standard unit of measurement for gemstones, is based on the weight of the carob seed, which was once used as a weighing standard by jewelers in Africa and the Middle East. The word "carat" itself is believed to be derived from an Arabic word meaning "bean" or "seed."

  • 1796, the state of Tennessee was called Franklin.


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