Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in the groin. What a punk.
The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel. He refused the opportunity, having no head, he said, for human problems.
When Hannibal invaded Italy, in the third century B.C.E., his military engineers employed fire and vinegar to smash a path through the Alps. The engineers heated immovable rocks with blazing logs, then poured vinegar over the rocks. The rocks split into fragments that could be pushed aside.
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921, Albert Einstein was not honored for his theory of relativity (published 16 years earlier), but for his lesser-known work on the photoelectric effect.
Peter the Great had his wife's lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. She was forced to keep it in her bedroom.
H. G. Wells wrote of an atomic weapon in "The World Set Free," written in 1914. His name for the device was "atomic bomb."
When a vigilante organization raided a communist bookshop in Oklahoma City in 1940, it seized a number of publications thought to be "advocating violence" and publicly burned them at the city stadium. Among the publications picked for destruction were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The 1969 French novel "La Disparition" ("The Disappearance") does not contain the letter "e," which in French, as in English, is the most commonly used letter. Thirty years earlier, Ernest Vincent Wright, a Californian musician, had written a 50,000-word novel, "Gadsby," without using the letter "e," either.
When her husband was elected president in 1932, Eleanor Roosevelt was editor of the magazine Babies.