Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, November 15, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
"Kaddara," an opera written by Hakon Borrensen and produced in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1921, is the only opera ever written about an Eskimo.
Washington is the only U.S. state named after a president.
"The Discus Thrower" by Myron, one of the most famous of all Greek statues, is not Greek at all. The statue as we know it today is a restoration assembled in the 19th century from pieces of a Roman copy of the Greek original.
The Roman emperor Commodos collected all the dwarfs, cripples and physically disabled people he could find in the city of Rome and had them brought to the Colosseum, where they were ordered to fight each other to the death with meat cleavers.
Socrates never wrote down a single word of his teachings. The only knowledge we have of his thinking today comes from notes taken by his great student, Plato.
In 1948, Milton Berle's budget for the "Texaco Star Theater," the most popular one-hour show on television, was $15,000 for the entire hour. This is far less than the cost of a one-minute television commercial today.
It has been estimated that 64 percent of all murders by poisoning go undetected.
In ancient China, the punishment for shoplifting or breaking curfew was to brand the offender's forehead with a hot iron. Thieves and people who molested travelers had their noses sliced off. For the crime of damaging municipal property, the ears, hands, feet and kneecaps were cut off. Abduction, armed robbery, treason and adultery were punished by castration. Death by strangulation was the price one paid for murder and for an even more unspeakable crime - drunkenness.
The United States uses about one-fifth of the cement used throughout the world annually.
Each year, approximately 250,000 American husbands are physically attacked and beaten by their wives.