True Facts - Feel Free to Add You Own

[MrScorpio]

- Rob Schneider is part filipino
- Maya Rudolph's mom was the late, great Minnie Ripperton
- Republicans are scum
- The Earth's magnetic poles have reversed in the past
- Pearl Jam was once named Mookie Blaylock
- Exposure to the Bush Family promotes rickets in lab rats
- Your elbows were never meant to touch each other
- Not only do male whales have the worlds largest penises, but the females possess the world's largest clitorises
- Karl Rove has a tail
- A Sri Lankan cricket team once scored a staggering 952 for 6 against India
- The women of the Paduang tribe of Myanmar are famous for having the world's longest necks
- George Bush is not an idiot, he just plays one on TV

[Bunny]

1. Minnie Ripperton's voice range was eight octaves!

Edit - I looked up her bio and it said her voice had a five octave range. Sorry about that!! Still, five octave is pretty damned impressive too!

I remember hearing that when she died. That's an incredible thing!

[VOX]

2. She is buried at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park in L.A.

Along with many other notables -- Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder, Walter Matthau, Caroll O'Connor, Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood and Peggy Lee, to name only a few.

[radfringe]

3. Butterflies taste with their feet

Weird Facts101 -- Weird Things You Would Never Know!!

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.

Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

A snail can sleep for three years.

No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH".

Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears
never stop growing.

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

All polar bears are left handed.

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,
including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the
letters only on one row of the keyboard.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

"Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English
language.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33.
She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

[RebelOne]

4. Wow!! I'm left-handed, so I'm a polar bear.

My daughter always accused me of being a polar bear because I love the cold weather. So now I can tell her she was right.

[DS1]

14. duck quacks echo, and what about punts?

.

[foo_bar]

5. Karl Rove has a tail?

You mean a guy following him around in a Chevy Lumina or genu-wine caudal vertebrae with pygostyle?

[Don_G]

6. The Velocity Of Light Is

486,282 miles per hour.

Speed of light is a term you're more familiar with, but "speed" refers from point A to Point B in a straight line, while velocity more accurately reflects the gravitional influence external forces shape our perception of events.

Issac Asminov....

[MojoKrunch]

7. The Earths Magnetic Poles will reverse again in the very near future

In fact, the poles are in the process of reversing as we speak.
Nova did a special on it.
Very cool.
It'll finish within the next few hundred years.
There will be a point where "northern lights" will be seen all across the world at many different points simultaneously.

The only adverse effects will be a slightly higher instance of cancer among the general population.

Without its magnetic field, the earth would eventually end up like Mars.
The molten iron core of the earth is sufficiently hot to keep our magnetic field going for much, much longer.
Unlike the Mars core which cooled down 4 billion years ago, ending its magnetic fields thereby leaving its nascent oceans and atmsphere to be ravaged by the solar winds and blown away.
Any evidence of life on Mars will only be the very earilest forms.
Venus does not have a magnetic field either and its atmosphere is being blown away as well.

Of the 9 planets orbiting Sol, 4 billion years ago, 3 of them contained water and atmosphere.

Pearl Jam was once named Mookie Blaylock
And Mookie went on to become a professional basketball player.

Your elbows were never meant to touch each other
People try?

A Sri Lankan cricket team once scored a staggering 952 for 6 against India
What is that in dog years?
Or comparable to some sport I might be familiar with?

The women of the Paduang tribe of Myanmar are famous for having the world's longest necks
And they accomplish said feat not be stretching their necks but by pressing their collar bones *down*.

George Bush is not an idiot, he just plays one on TV
This is not factual.
I've seen his IQ scores.
He is, in fact, an idiot.

:D

Factoid: if humans were like other higher primates pregnancy would last approdimately 22 months and new borns would be able to crawl and grasp when born. Our very large brains make this impossible, hence all human new borns are actually "preemies" when compared to other higher primates.

Mojo

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Even more

If you laid every starlet in Hollywood end-to-end, no one would be surprised (paraphrasing Dorothy Parker).

LSD was invented as a drug to ease childbirth and migraine headaches; MDMA -- Ecstasy -- was originally patented around 1915 as a weight-loss drug.

If you sleep with little kitchen magnets on your eyes, you will go completely blind for a short time (a week or so).

The first electronic music synthesizer was developed before 1900.

The movie "Godzilla" (Gojiro in Japanese) was inspired by the discovery of a small colony of mutant reptiles in the Hiroshima River in 1947.

Influential French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg is Jewish.

During Special Prosecutor Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton, physicist Stephen Hawking was called to give testimony that Clinton's penis had been determined to exist in eleven dimensions, five of which are "non-local," or transcend space and time.

In 45 million years, Los Angeles will be in the eastern part of the Himalaya hills.

Before Esperanto was a language, it was a car.

Comedienne Janeane Garofalo is better-known to her friends by her nickname "Spanky".

The obnoxious "dude" who does the narraration for the Maximum Exposure ("Max-X") wacky video show and the new truck commercials was born biologically female.

Cats have been known to slash open the throats of babies to get at the milk they have been drinking.

The Earth does not have tectonic plates -- it is, in fact, expanding like an inflating balloon, which causes the illusion of continental drift (so you can just ignore that part about Los Angeles and the Himalayas) -- and one day, it will explode, just as Planet Five exploded into the Asteroid Belt 65 million years ago.

Millions of people alive today are "chimeras," the result of the fusing of two or more embryos early in gestation.

Actor Robert DeNiro's real first name is Joanne, and he only changed it because there was a Joanne DeNiro who was working in the 1950s and 60s in TV as a hand model.

The Moon is a giant, ancient space ship that brought life to the Earth from somewhere else.

The nose and the sex organs share the same nerve bundle in the brainstem.

According to the Grand Merovingian Epopt of the Prieure de Sion (Priory of Zion), pResident Bush is decended from Jesus Christ.

Mary Tyler Moore is able to stop her own heart for as long as four minutes and re-start it again without a bit of damage.

Devout members of the controversial Church of Scientology sign contracts to devote their lives to the church for one billion years (kinda puts that "Battlefield Earth" thing in perspective, doesn't it?)

There is still a law on the books in New Hampshire that allows anyone who wears white after Labor Day to be executed by stoning.

There is a secret group of high-level Masons, Ordo Templi Orientalis members, and other Abrahmelian gnostics who have taken control of the space program and will only allow missions to be conducted during certain auspicious cosmic astrological configurations.

Close to 75% of the world's languages were constructed from Basque nonsense verse by mideval monks with nothing better to do with their time.

A famous actress (who shall remain unnamed) was recently treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after an episode of kinky sex in which her partner inserted all 20 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica Micropedia ("Knowlege In Depth") and five of the ten volumes of the Macropedia ("Survey of Knowlege") into her rectum.

Linguist/Pundit Noam Chomsky has a prosthetic nose.

Actor Brad Pitt was born with jet-black hair, but after a traumatic scare as a child, it turned pure blond.

If you hold your breath while you are making Number Two, you have a better-than-50% chance of self-inducing a heart attack and dying.


That's all I can think up of now.

--bkl
I don't really know it all. I just bluff well.

[trof]

9. If you pull back on the stick,

the houses get smaller.
If you pull farther back, they start getting bigger.

[tjdee]

10. Honey NEVER spoils. Ask the Egyptians.

Apparently when they went into the pyramids and the tombs, there was some honey, which was tested (dunno how) and found to be still good.

Awesome.

[reknewcomer]

11. A fusion reaction is hard to stop

- life is too short or too long depending on you
- honesty is never found - it finds you
- hate is a debit you can never balance
- the answer my friend is blowing smoke

[OneBlueSky]

12. what the world needs now is love, sweet love . . .

that is all . . .

[Swede]

13. The only hope that the hopeless have,

is to have no hope.

[5thGenDemocrat]

15. In all the eighty -plus runnings of the Indianapolis 500 since 1911

There has never been a driver in the field named Smith.
John
Oh -- and the winner of the first race, Ray Harroun, was from Saginaw.

[VermontDem2004]

16. Heavy Metal is noise

Anyone remember that?