Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Gettin' by with a little help from...

I seem to have hit a mental block on the post I meant to do, so I enlisted the help of the always willing office crew for this offering.
Some More Absolutely Useless Information From Our Junk Boxes:
-Gertrude Ederle was still a teenager when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel on August 6, 1926. Not only did she swim the channel, but she broke the speed record held by a man. -The Sears Tower contains enough phone wire to wrap around the earth 1.75 times and enough electrical wiring to run a power line from Chicago to Los Angeles. -In 1985 child prodigy Ruth Lawrence achieved a starred first in Mathematics at Oxford University. The 13-year-old was the youngest British person ever to earn a first-class degree and the youngest known graduate of Oxford University. - American naval hero John Paul Jones was born in 1747 at Kirkcudbrightshire on the south-west coast of Scotland. -The Bledowska Desert, in Poland is the only true desert in Europe. -Sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit (16.6C) is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able to hop. -Badminton was first recognized as an official sport in the Olympic Games during the 1992 Summer Games. More than 1.1 billion people watched badminton's Olympic debut on TV.
-The word 'verb' is a noun. -Country comedienne Minnie Pearl always wore a hat with a price tag hanging from it when she performed. The amount ascribed on the price tag was $1.98. -Most landfilled trash retains its original weight, volume, and form for 40 years. -The first spacecraft to send back pictures of the far side of the Moon was Luna 3 in October 1959. The photographs covered about 70 percent of the far side. -The Jumbotron scoreboard at the SkyDome in Toronto, Ontario, measures 33 feet by 115 feet and has 420,000 light bulbs, the largest scoreboard in the world. Home of the Toronto Blue Jays, the SkyDome has a 348-room hotel located in center field. Seventy of those rooms have views of the field. The apex of the retracted dome is 310 feet, making it the tallest in Major League baseball. The SkyDome opened in 1989.-Radio towers are always painted with alternating red and white stripes. If the tower is over 700 feet tall, every stripe is 100 feet high. If it's under 700 feet, the tower will always have seven stripes. The top stripe on a tower is always red. -There are 1,783 diamonds on the Britain's Imperial State Crown. This includes the 309-carat Star of Africa. -Gene Simmons, of the shock-rock group Kiss, earned a B.A. in education and speaks four languages. -The three-toed sloth of tropical America can swim easily, but it can only drag itself across bare ground. -The Ruby-throated Hummingbird's wings beat at over 60 times per second, its heart beats aproxximately 1260 times per minute, and it completes one in-out breathing cycle 250 times per minute. -The word 'verb' is a noun. -There are over 2,000 species of firefly averaging one inch/2.54cm in length and having an average lifespan of 2 months in the wild. -A 'phthisiologist' specializes in the study & treatment of tuberculosis. -The nation of Chile's name is from an Indian word, Tchili, meaning 'the deepest point of the earth'. -Sunbeams that shine down through clouds are called crepuscular rays. -Most landfilled trash retains its original weight, volume, and form for 40 years. -In 1984 the state of New York became the last of the United States to put photographs on drivers' licenses. -The pyramids in Egypt contain enough stone and mortar to construct a wall 10 feet high and 5 feet wide running from New York City to Los Angeles. -The liver stretches across almost the width of the body, occupying a space about the size of a football. It weighs more than 3 lbs. -There is a town in Sweden called "A" and a town in France called "Y." -Mike is a slavedriver and a cheapskate! -The first color photograph was made in 1861 by James Maxwell. He photographed a tartan ribbon. -In September, 1962, the Beatles recorded their first single 'Love Me Do' for the Parlophone label. The rest, so they say, is history. -The pyramids in Egypt contain enough stone and mortar to construct a wall 10 feet high and 5 feet wide running from New York City to Los Angeles. -In the 1900 Sears Roebuck company catalog, a piano cost $98.00 - FOB Chicago. -According to purist Italian chefs, ingredients that should never appear on an authentic Italian pizza include bell pepper, pepperoni, or chicken.

This unique post was brought to you by Mike's wonderful, loving, friendly, and underpaid team of 'Spellcheck Kitties' from Kitty Komputer Korporation, Inc.

8 comments:

Natalie said...

mike is a slave driver and a cheapskate...hahahahaha.

good info. i like these random bits of information.

Muhd Imran said...

That is a lot of trivia to digest.

Love the cat photos. If those cats weren't yours, you must have taken a lot of effort to collect all those "office-cats" photos to do up your post. I love it. I'm a cat-person too.

jmsjoin said...

Damn Mike!

Unknown said...

okay..the grasshopper thing is stuck in my brain. hope it comes up on jeopardy one night.

my cats love those cat photos!

tweetey30 said...

My girls enjoy looking at the cat photo's..

MissKris said...

Well, I sure learned a lot on my visit here this time! Thanks, too, for commenting about the fleas and giving me a tip on the garlic. I went grocery shopping today and picked up some garlic pills for Chloe dog. What a devoted team of office employees you have, haha! Hope this finds you having a great weekend, Mike!

tshsmom said...

"-Mike is a slavedriver and a cheapskate!"
Just seeing if we were paying attention, eh? ;)

Heather said...

I can't tell you how much I loved this post. I'm purring. Seriously. That "It's Trivia Time" cat needs to come live with me. I love him.