Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
Since 1495, no 25-year period has been without war.
During the Battle of Waterloo, Lord Uxbridge had his horse shot from under him nine times.
Chevy Chase was a battle that took place on the English-Scottish border in 1388.
The 16th-century Escorial palace of King Phillip II of Spain had 1,200 doors.
The tall chef's hat is called a "toque." During the 16th and 17th centuries, toques came in all shapes: berets, stocking caps and even pointed hats with tassels. During the 18th century the tall hat came into use to show order of importance among the kitchen staff.
The tomato is the world's most popular fruit. The scientific term for the common tomato is lycopersicon lycopersicum, which mean "wolf peach." It is a cousin of the eggplant, red pepper, ground cherry, potato, and the highly-toxic belladonna, also known as the nightshade or solanaccae. There are more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes.
Coffee is the world's most popular stimulant: four out of five Americans drink it, consuming more than 400 million cups a day. Consumption in Scandinavian countries is more than 12 kilograms (26 pounds) per capita. With more than 25 million people employed in the industry, coffee is second only to oil in world trade.
The Bible is still the world's best selling book.
Johannes Gutenberg is often credited as the inventor of the printing press in 1454. However, the Chinese actually printed from movable type in 1040 but later discarded the method.
The first Oxford English Dictionary was published in April 1928, 50 years after it was started. It consisted of 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes. The latest edition fills 22,000 pages, includes 33,000 Shakespeare quotations and is bound in 20 volumes - all of which is available on a single CD.
In 1975, Emil Matalik put himself forward as U.S. presidential candidate. He advocated a maximum of one animal and one tree per family because he believed that there were too many animals and plant life on earth. Louis Abalofia also put himself forward: His campaign poster featured a photo of him in the nude with the slogan "I have nothing to hide." In the 1860s, financier George Francis Train ran for office with one item: the introduction of a new calendar based on his birth date.
The words "electronic mail" might sound new, but the term was introduced 30 years ago. Queen Elizabeth of Britain sent her first e-mail in 1976.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet. Seriously, don't bother checking. What did I tell you?
Lightning strikes men about seven times more often than it does women.
In the years at the dangerous border between adolescence and adulthood, about three men die for every woman, according to a new University of Michigan study of the ratio of male-to-female mortality rates in 20 nations, including the United States