It's True! (Part Five)

Excerpts from That's a Fact Jack!

Here's some more fun facts and trivia for you:

• If you put a mirror one light year away from Earth and looked at it through a telescope, you would see two years into the past. (This one confused me a little, I'll admit)

• Potatoes have more chromosomes than humans do - 48 verses 46!

• The steam rising from a cup of coffee contains the same amount of antioxidants as three oranges!

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• The largest human cell is the female ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.

Get ready to storm the castle!

• A fetus acquires fingerprints by the end of the first trimester!

• If you feel the obsessive need to correct other people's grammar, you may be suffering from a type of OCD called Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome or GPS.

• Winston Churchill suffered a heart attack in the White House struggling to open a bedroom window!

Better get Andersen next time

• The average lifespan of an NHL hockey puck is SEVEN minutes. Those that don't fly into the stands (or some poor player's teeth) is removed because they warm up from the friction and bounce on the ice. Game pucks are chilled at -10 Fahrenheit for maximum performance and are kept in a freezer in the penalty box!

• FORE! The warning yelled by weekend duffers after hitting an errant golf shot, was originally an English military term. Back when soldiers fired rifles in lines, the command "BEWARE BEFORE!" was a signal for the front line to kneel or risk getting their heads blown off.

• According to the Guinness World Records the Bible is the best-selling book of all times, with roughly 2.5 BILLION copies distributed between 1815 and 1975 in over 2,200 languages and dialects. Since 1975, that number has increased to an estimated 6 billion copies today. Ironically, it's also the most shoplifted book in the world!

The Holy Bible

• In his role as James Bond, Sean Connery wore a toupee to hide his receding hairline. (I'm wondering if he also hid his Walther P99 up there?)

• Liz Sheridan, who played Jerry Seinfeld's TV Mother, was briefly engaged to James Dean! (There's an episode in there somewhere!)

• The most common name for privately owned boats is SERENITY. The second most common is Wet Dream. (No, I'm not going to comment).

• Greenland is the world's largest island. At 840,000 square miles, it's three times the size of Texas.

• Skin is the body's largest organ. The average adult's skin weighs eight to ten pounds, making it two to three time as heavy as the brain. (Just ewww..)

Hey, Fathead!

• New York City Taxi medallions - permits affixed to the hoods of New York City's 13,327 official yellow cabs have provided a far greater return to investors to than stocks. If you bought a medallion in 1970 and held on to it till today, you would have outperformed the S&P 500 by SEVERAL THOUSAND percent!

My Medallion!

• One out of five American meals is eaten in a car.

• You can tell the temperature listening to a cricket chirp. For the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and then add 37.

• In the summer of 1967, Jimi Hendrix played seven gigs as the opening act for the Monkees.

Jimi with Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork - no, they didn't inhale.

• Fun Fact - Michael Nesmith's Mother invented Wite-Out liquid correction Fluid - Bette Nesmith Graham invented a tempera water-based paint for correcting errors on IBM typewriter documents in the early 1950's. It was originally called "Mistake Out". In 1956, she improved the formula, renamed it Liquid Paper and began marketing it independently when IBM declined to purchase it. She sold it to Gillette corporation in 1979 for $47.5 Million.