A Japanese company hired a soothsayer to throw dice to help determine on which floor of the two 110-story World Trade Center they should have their offices on.

9% Of Americans report being in the prescence of a ghost.

A baby in Florida was named Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James.

A Canadian Tour company offers a two-day course in igloo building.
(Source: www.canoe.ca)

A Canadian, Troy Hurtubise, spent $100,000 and almost went bankrupt building a RoboCop style suit so that he could withstand a bear attack.
(Source: ABC News)

A nihilist believes in nothing.

A notaphile collects bank notes.

A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.

According to ancient chinese astrologers, 70% of omens are bad.

Airports that are at higher altitudes require a longer airstrip due to lower air density.
(Source: Calgary International Airport)

Austria was the very first country to ever use postcards.

Blue is the favorite color of 80% of Americans.

California has issued 6 drivers licenses to people named Jesus Christ.

Deaf people have safer driving records on average than hearing people in the U.S.A.

Five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
(Source: www.date.com)

Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, appeared in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. His original name was Jumpman, but was changed to Mario to honor the Nintendo of America's landlord, Mario Segali.

Approximately sixty circus performers have been shot from cannons. At last report, thirty-one of these have been killed.

The Boeing 767 aircraft is a collection of 3.1 million parts from 800 different suppliers around the world: fuselage parts from Japan, center wing section from Southern California, flaps from Italy.

A man irate about his income tax paid Uncle Sam with a plaster of Paris check that weighed several pounds. He wasn't all that bright, because once the government cashed the check, it was returned to him and he had to keep it for five years for his records.

On the new hundred dollar bill the time on the clock tower of Independence Hall is 4:10.

Parker Brothers prints about 50 billion dollars worth of Monopoly money in one year.

Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes originally had pads on his hands and feet but Bill Waterson (the creator) found them too distracting and removed them.

It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace".

Charlie Brown's father was a barber.

Lucy and Linus (who where brother and sister) had another little brother named Rerun. (He sometimes played left-field on Charlie Brown's baseball team, [when he could find it!]).

In the name of art, Chris Burden arranged to be shot by a friend while another person photographed the event. He sold the series of pictures to an art dealer. He made $1750 on the deal, but his hospital bill was $84,000.

In Britain’s House of Commons, the government and opposition sides of the House are separated by two red lines. The distance between the lines is two swords’ lengths, a reminder of just how seriously the Brits used to take their politics.

The surface area of an average-sized brick is 79 cm squared.

In the kingdom of Bhutan, all citizens officially become a year older on New Year's Day.

The diameter of the wire in a standard paper clip is 1 millimeter - or about 0.04 inch.

People generally say there are 365 days in a year. By a year, I mean this is the time period it takes the earth to travel around the sun: 365 days. Actually, however, it takes the Earth 365.25 days to make this trip. In other words, for every year we gain one-fourth of a day and every for years we gain an extra day. If nothing was done about this, our calendar would move backwards one full day every four years in relation to our seasons.

November 29 is National Sinky Day; a day to eat over one's sink and worship it.

Public typists work at typewriters charging about 14 cents per page. On a good day, a public typist earns about $3.50.

On average, there are 333 squares of toilet paper on a roll.

Halloween isn't an established holiday by law. It is traditional that Halloween is Oct. 31 no matter what day of the week it falls on. Halloween dates from 837 when Pope Gregory IV instituted All Saints or All Hallows Day on Nov. 1 to take the place of an earlier festival known as the Peace of the Martyrs. The day was set aside to honor all saints, known and unknown. Halloween then is a shortened form of All Hallows Eve - the evening before All Hallows Day. Certainly, you have a choice of celebrating it on Oct. 30, Saturday, if you wish. Many of the area parties will be held then rather than on Sunday. It's probably appropriate to say some people equate Halloween with the occult or Satanism and don't approve of it at all.

The numbers on opposite sides of a die always add up to 7.

In 1979, Namco released Pac-Man, the most popular arcade game of all time. Over 300,000 units were sold worldwide. More than 100,000 units are sold in the United States alone. Originally named Puck Man, the game was retitled after executives saw the potential for vandals to scratch out part of the letter P on the game's marquee, which might discourage parents from letting their children play. Pac-Man became the first video game to be popular with both males and females.

Elizabeth Goose, who lived in Massachusetts in the late 1600's, is credited by some with the nursery rhymes read to us as children. However, most of those rhymes existed before her time in the form of satirical poems and drinking songs. Some were based on actual events or characters. Charles Perrault, a Frenchman, published a collection of these rhymes in 1697 and an illustration accompanying the text showed an old woman telling stories, with the words "Mother Goose" appearing behind her. The book was eventually published in England and the United States and more rhymes were added with each new publication. It wasn't until the 1800's that a relative of Mrs. Goose claimed the stories originated with Elizabeth.

If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birth place is listed as a post office box in Albuquerque.

The St. Louis Gateway Arch had a projected death toll while it was being built. No one died.

The Hoover Dam was built to last 2,000 years. The concrete in it will not even be fully cured for another 500 years.

The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes on stage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.

The Chinese national anthem is called "the march of volunteers."

"The Tale of Genji", a Japanese work from the early eleventh century, is considered by many scholars to be the world's first full novel. The novel was written by a woman: Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki.

The reason wheels seem to spin backwards on a camera is because when you film something, you are really taking a series of still images and then replaying them so fast that the eye is fooled into thinking it is a continuous stream of images. The eye can see about 12-14 frames per second. Because of a physical law called the Nyquist Sampling Theorem you need to display frames twice as fast as the eye can see to fool it into seeing it as a continuous movie (Nyquist showed mathematically why that is true). So, imagine you have a wheel that is spinning exactly once every second. If you took a picture at the same rate, it would look like it is standing still. That's because it rotates exactly once every time you take a picture. Now take a picture just a little bit faster than 1 per second. Now every time you take a picture, the wheel has not quite made it all the way around; maybe it will have gone 350 degrees around, so it's 10 degrees behind the first frame. The next frame it will have gone another 350 degrees, making it now 20 degrees behind the first frame, and so on. When you play the film back, it will look like the wheel is moving backwards, even though you know it was going forwards. The opposite effect happens when you take pictures a bit slower than the rotation rate. It gets more complicated when the wheel does not rotate at a constant rate, like when a car accelerates. The next time you watch TV or go to the movies, watch the wheels as a car speeds up. You might see the wheel appear to go backwards, them stop, then go forwards, all while the car is moving forwards.

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

The founder of JC PENNY had the last name of "cash"

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (U.S. Navy) coined the term "computer bug" - she was working on one of the first electronic computers in the 1940s when she found a moth had shorted out two vacuum tubes.

note: These are as of about mid-2000, so they may not be very accurate today...
34% of American schoolteachers plan to quit within 5 years.
1/3 of American high school seniors cannot locate Latin America on a map.
1 in 7 Americans have no health insurance.
There are 2 dogs or cats for every American child.
35 Americans have been killed since 1986.
16% of Jewish homes in the US have christmas trees.
87% of Americans who own running shoes don't run.
200 million M&Ms are sold every day in the US.
10% of US adults are apposed to sex education.
1% of national scholarships are from the Miss America pageant.
The median age of US voters is 45.
8 out of 10 presidential candidate winners were taller than their opponent.
1 out of 10 bills passed by Congress in 1990 established commemorative days, weeks, or months.
The US justice system costs $248 per capita.
The total amount of NYC driver parking fines is $461 million.
There is a 1 in 7 chance that a US burglary case will be solved.
5,506,720 documents are classified as secret by the US government.

Moses was 80 yrs old when he led the Jews out of Egypt.
David Copperfield's real name is David Kotkin.
On the TV show 'Get Smart," agent 99's real name was Sue Hilton.
Actors Jim Arness and Peter Graves are brothers.
Only 1% of the population has an IQ over 135.
Actor Dan Blocker was the sole owner of the Ponderosa steak restaurants.
Djakarta, Indonesia was formerly called Batavia.
Singer Chaka Khan's real name is Yvette M. Stevens

The word ghetto comes from the Venetian island of Ghetto, where that city's Jews were forced to live in the 15th century.

When Sony introduced the portable stereo battery-powered headphones-only cassette player in 1979, they named it the 'Soundabout.' Soon afterward they changed the name to 'Walkman.'

Cambodian-Americans operate more than three-fourths of California's ~2500 doughnut shops.

March 4th is the only day of the year that can also be used as a command. (March forth.)

Canada has the highest college attendance rate in the world.

Only 1 person in 2 billion will live to be 116 or older.

A chicken once had its head cut off and survived for over eighteen months, headless.

In 1983, a Japanese artist, Tadahiko Ogawa, made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of ordinary toast.

The IRS employees tax manual has instructions for collecting taxes after a nuclear war.

Gloucestershire airport in England used to blast Tina Turner songs on the runways to scare birds away.

After the “Popeye” comic strip started in 1931, spinach consumption went up by thirty-three percent in the United States.

There is a town in Texas called Ding Dong. In 1990, the population was only twenty-two people.

The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing.

A B-25 bomber airplane crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.

The spray WD-40 got its name because there were forty attempts needed before the creation of the “water displacing” substance.

India has a Bill of Rights for cows.

The first ever “World Summit on Toilets” was held in Singapore in November 2001.

Emilio Marco Palma was the first person born in Antarctica in 1978.

Until the 1960's men with long hair were not allowed to enter Disneyland.

In New Mexico, over eleven thousand people have visited a tortilla chip that appeared to have the face of Jesus Christ burned into it.

In only eight minutes, the Space Shuttle can accelerate to a speed of 27,000 kilometres per hour.

On November 29, 2000, Pope John Paul II was named an "Honorary Harlem Globetrotter."

Coconuts kill more people in the world than sharks do. Approximately 150 people are killed each year by coconuts.

2,500 newborn babies will be dropped in the next month.

Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during WWI.

In 1980, there was only one country without telephones

Most American cars honk in the key of F.

Some toothpaste contains antifreeze.

Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.

Hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego.

Hobart, Tasmania was founded in 1804.

Page 97 of Trollope's Chronicles of Barset contains the word "sent."

The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.

Hong Kong has the most Rolls Royces per capita.

On average, there are 61,000 people airborn over the USA all the time.

The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.

The longest word that has no repeated letters is "uncopyrightable."

"Hang On Snoopy" is the official rock song of Ohio.

Firehouses have circular stairways because in the olden days, the engines were pulled by horses. They were kept in stables on the ground floor, and they learned how to walk up straight staircases.

"I am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

The term "the whole nine yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole nine yards."

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law that stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

The Eisenhower Interstate System requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.

The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the Army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.

If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The national anthem of Greece has 158 verses. No one has ever memorized all 158.

The longest one-syllable word is "screeched".

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag.

On an American one dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the "1" encased in the "shield" and a spider hidden in the front upper right hand corner.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. (DON'T try this at home!)

In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

"Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

"Bookkeeppers" is the only word with four double letters in a row.

At 6.5 million square feet, the Pentagon is the largest office building in the world.

Levan, Utah is "navel" spelled backwards. It is so named because it is in the middle of Utah.

"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

There are more than 200 different types of Barbies.

In order of ascending intelligence are the following terms: idiot, imbecile, moron.

The largest prime number ever found is over 10,000 digits long.

When a piece of glass cracks, the crack travels at over 3000 miles per hour.

The word "sophomore" means "sophisticated moron."

There is a town in Sweden called "A" and a town in France called "Y".

An "anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction" is a kiss.

The largest diamond weighed 567 grams.

The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary is "floccinaucinihilipilification" which means "the act of estimating as worthless."

Every continent has a city called "Rome."

The name "Vaseline" is a combination of the German word for "water" - wasser - and the Greek word for "olive oil" -elaion.

The Maybelline Company is named after the founder's sister, Mabel.

The Colgate Company started out making starch, soap, and candles.

The name "Crayola" is a combination of the French word for chalk - craie - and "ola" from the "oleanginous" which means "oily".

April Fool's Day is the Pagan New Year.

The word "Lucifer" is only mentioned once in the Bible.

It is not sweat that stinks, but the excrement of the bacteria that eat sweat.

100,000 cubic feet of water pours over the Niagra Falls every second.

Each day, 7,500,000 tons of water evaporate from the Dead Sea.

If she were life-size, Barbie's measurements would be 39-23-33.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

Maine is the only whose name is just one syllable.

There are only four words in the English language which ends in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, hazardous.

The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwenuakitanatahu, a New Zealand hill.

Los Angeles' full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestro Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciucula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: "L.A." -CS

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.