Dumb Facts » Pop Culture

• The first couple seen in bed together was Mary Kay & Johnny Steen (Source: snopes.com)
• Charles Dickens slept facing North. He thought it improved his writing.
• A golden razor removed from King Tut’s Tomb was still sharp enough to be used.
• The house where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence was replaced with a hamburger stand.
• There was a person that paid $14,000 for the bra Marilyn Monroe wore in Some Like It Hot.
• The first American to have indoor plumbing was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1840.
• Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant “plenty of excrement.”
• Dr. Seuss pronounced his name so that it rhymed with “rejoice.”
• Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roasted turkey from foil packets as their first meal on the moon.
• Pamela Anderson is Canada’s Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversiary of Canada’s independence.
• The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
• Mary Todd Lincoln claimed she was haunted during her life, and sewed money into clothes to foil the invisible thieves.
• Lee Harvey Oswald’s cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992.
• Samuel Colt, the famous gun maker, paid the equivalent of $400,000 in today’s money for his wife’s wedding dress and accessories.
• David Prouse (the man inside the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars) spoke all of his lines in the first movie. He did not know that his voice was being dubbed over with that of James Earl Jones until he saw the finished movie.

Dumb Facts » Plants

• The hurricane plant has holes in its leaves, which keep it from being destroyed by wind.
• The canopy of a rainforest is so thick, only one percent of sunlight reaches the ground.
• A living tree never stops growing.
• 40% of prescripition drugs dispensed in the U.S. have active ingredients derived from plants, animals or microorganisms, many of them from forests.
• A banana is about 75 percent water.
• The world’s fastest-growing plant is the giant water lily, which grows almost a foot a day.
• Researchers recently sprouted a lotus seed known to be 1,288 years old, making it the oldest seed ever germinated.
• The Venus flytrap takes less than half a second to slam shut on an insect.
• A single large tree can release up to 400 gallons of water into the atmosphere each day.
• Rafflesia flowers attract pollinating flies by looking and smelling like rotten meat.
• One acre of trees absorbs enough carbon dioxide per year to match that emitted by driving a car 26,000 miles.
• The world’s largest flower is the Rafflesia arnoldi. It can grow to the size of an umbrella.
• The saguaro cactus of the Arizona Desert grows less than one inch in it’s first 10 years.
• In the 1800′s an Eggplant was known as a “mad apple” and believed to be poisonous.
• One cord of wood can make 7 and a half million toothpicks.

Dumb Facts » English

• The shortest complete sentence in the English language is “I am.”
• The most used letter in the English alphabet is ‘E’, and ‘Q’ is the least used!
• Floccinaucinihilipilification, the declaration of an item being useless, is the longest non-medical term in the English language.
• Goddessship is the only word in the English language with a triple letter.
• The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” uses every letter of the alphabet!
• The sentence “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs” uses every letter of the alphabet and uses the least letters to do so!
• The world’s longest-named lake has 45 letters (Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg).
• In the U.S. there are 18 doctors called Dr. Doctor, and one called Dr. Surgeon. There is also a dermatologist named Dr. Rash, a psychiatrist called Dr. Couch and an anesthesiologist named Dr. Gass.
• “Rhythm” is the longest English word without a vowel.
• The longest word in the English language is ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ which describes a lung disease caused by breathing in particles of volcanic matter or a similar fine dust.
• “Jack” is the most common name in nursery rhymes.
• In the English language there are only three words that have a letter that repeats six times. Degenerescence (six e’s), Indivisibility (six i’s), and nonannouncement (six n’s).
• The only three words in the English language to have 2 consecutive u’s is vacuum, residuum, and continuum.
• The very first dictionary “The American” took Noah Webster 20 years to put together.
• The word “alphabet” is derived from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: “alpha” and “beta”.

Dumb Facts » Earth and Space

• 5,865,696,000,000 – The amount of miles in a light year.
• More than 20 million meteroids enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. Most are no bigger than a speck of dust.
• The largest painting on earth is a 72437 square foot smiley face.
• The Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust.
• Gold is the only metal that doesn’t rust, even if it’s buried in the ground for thousands of years.
• The winds on Saturn blow at 1,200 mph. 10 times faster than a strong Earth hurricane.
• The average iceberg weighs 20,000,000 tons!
• A diamond is the hardest natural substance.
• Earth’s oceans contain 7 1/2 million tons of gold, dissolved in the water.
• The energy given off by a hurricane in one day would power the entire U.S for three years.
• The sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth.
• There is enough energy in one bolt of lightning to power a home for two weeks.
• Io, a moon of jupiter, has the most active volcanoes in the solar system.
• Hydrogen can be a metal, but it is only in a solid state under extreme conditions such as being in the core of Jupiter!
• Rain falls at an average speed of 22 mph.