Really useful trivia
The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away.
The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
The only other word with the same number of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.
Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula."
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth...and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, they need gravity to swallow.
Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life"
If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The head's picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with "Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six minutes.
Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.
Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since.
Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually talking.
The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
A whale's penis is called a dork.
Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs -- it will let you go instantly.
Reindeer like to eat bananas.
A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
A group of owls is called a parliament.
The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
"Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos, actually) to keep from freezing.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
(you could always write about an orange doorhinge if you got the urge but that isn't a single word. [Jessica])
(There are two words in the English language that rhyme with purple:
1) Hirple meaning to walk lamely or hobble, and
2) Curple meaning the hind-quarters or rump of a horse OR the rump, posterior [Abbi])
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
The term "the whole 9 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 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.
In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke someone's eye out.
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.