A PHIL BRODIE BAND'S FUN PAGE . . ENJOY
updated for January 2010
..AMAZING FACTS
AND
LOTS OF USELESS INFORMATION !!
NEW ONE EVERY MONTH
unless I am away or PC is in a mood
If you would like to contribute to this page I am only an email away.

Did You Know . . . ???
*Except that the word kyanos (cyan) was used for dark blue enamel, the Ancient Greek lacked a word for blue and Homer called the colour of the sea "wine dark"
* 'Allegedly' the earliest identified use of the exact phrase "the whole 9 yards" dates from 1942, in the Investigation of the National Defense Program: Hearings Before a Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, by Admiral Emory Scott Land, who said "You have to increase from 7.72 to 12 for the average at the bottom of that fifth column, for the whole nine yards". This use refers to the total output statistics for the nine new shipyards that produced "Liberty Ships" with unprecedented speed, crucial to the course of World War II. I don't know what gave rise to the phrase.
* The most frequently quoted explaination of 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." There are several claims for this phrase. The yard is quite an old measurement.
*The whole 9 yards... In early Scotland, a gentleman wore a kilt. There were two types of kilts, one for casual wear, and one for formal affairs. The formal one took 9 yards of tarten. The tailor would inquire to which kilt was needed, and the reply…if it was for a formal one was “I’ll take the whole 9 yards” This one could be fairly old.
*When looking at statues of a person on a horse, if the horse has both front hooves in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front hoof in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four hooves on the ground, the person died of natural causes. This is a myth .. shame really, I like the idea.
*Out of 268 stations, there are only two stations on the London Underground that have all five vowels in them - Mansion House and South Ealing. (year 2009)
*A scallop has 35 eyes and they are all blue. Their eyes can't see shapes, but can detect light and motion.
*Some 30% of local residents in Shanghai say cycling is their main means of transport and 60% of locals pedal to work every day. With the possible exception of China, the Netherlands boasts more bicycles per capita than any other country - at least 16-million bikes for the 16-million Dutch. Roughly 30% of all urban trips in the Netherlands are on bicycles, compared with 2% in the UK.
*Their are at least 250,000 species of insects constituting the order Coleoptera or beetles, making it the largest order in the animal kingdom. Among the approximately 5,000 widely distributed beetles of the family Coccinellidae is the Ladybird; the name originated in the Middle Ages, when this little beetle was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and called "beetle of Our Lady".
*In the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill , Jack represented the French King, Louis XVI who "Lost his Crown" in the Revolution, while Jill who (or rather her head) came tumbling after, was Marie Antoinette
*Fish or fishes?? Though often used interchangeably, these words actually mean different things. Fish is used either as singular noun or to describe a group of specimens from a single species. Fishes describes a group containing more than one species
*Ten countries border Brazil in South America; Equador and Chile are the only two countries in South America that do not share a border with Brazil.
*One out of every 25 coffins from the 16th century were found to have scratch marks on the inside. This is a Myth. Some did get buried alive, but not that many! It is a 10 year old internet joke.
*AIDS was first 'reported and recognised' June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. It had no name, the term "GRID" was used first followed by “the 4H disease”, by September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS, and properly defined the illness.
(update because of confusion: Later research by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) finds .. In 1966, a widely traveled Norwegian sailor died with AIDS-like symptoms. When his blood was tested later, it turned out HIV positive. A 1959 blood sample kept from a man living in Kinshasha in Zaire turned out to be HIV positive when tested, according to the CDC. According to Laurie Garrett (1994), the CDC lost this blood sample and the positive test results were never confirmed by anyone else. The HIV that researchers claimed the blood of a sailor from Manchester, U.K., who died of AIDS-like symptoms in 1959, when tested it had was tainted with the modern virus, and a Saint Louis teenager who died in the 60's of AIDS-like symptoms the HIV virus was never found in his blood, the CDC say if either of them had died from Aids, they had a variety that is not known today, that has died off or evolved into a more modern form).
*The 1912 Olympics were the last games that gave out gold medals made entirely of gold. Absolute pure gold, is so soft, it can be moulded on your hands.. okay if you get fed up with it and want something else round your neck!!! On a more serious note I think this well used fact should be phrased differently.
*In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette
*More than 20 million seahorses are harvested each year for folk medicinal purposes. The world seahorse population has dropped 70 per cent in the past 10 years.
*It takes 20,000 light bulbs to make the Eiffel Tower sparkle at night and there are 2,500,000 rivets holding it together; the total weight of the tower is 10,100 tons. They use 60 tons of paint each repainting campaign, every 7 years in it's entirety. 1,665 steps in the East pillar take you to the top, the hieght to the top of the flage pole is 312m, if including the antennas it is 324 m.
*According to research women are enticed to buy more if they hear the clicking of heels on the floor ~ I wonder??!
*In Aztec mythology, a pantheon of 400 rabbit gods known as Centzon Totochtin, led by Ometotchtli or Two Rabbit, represented fertility, parties, and drunkenness.
*Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Margret Mitchell's 'Gone With The Wind' was originally named Pansy.
*In ancient China, criminals who attacked travellers had their noses cut off.
*In the early days of film making, the people who worked on the sets were called movies. The films were called motion pictures.
*Hyperpolysyllabicomania is a fondness for big words.
*The first genuine French kiss in a Hollywood movie was between Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in the film "Splendor In The Grass". (allegedly)
*The Great Barrier Reef is composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs, 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres and has more than 1,500 species of fish living on it.
*Tottenham Hotspur didn't have a single player sent off in a Football League match between October 27th 1928 and December 4th 1965.
*The words moonbeam, generous & to champion were all invented by Shakespeare. There are 200 plus words that you will see scattered around claiming "invented by Shakespeare". These words were not all invented by Shakespeare but the earliest citations for them in the OED from Shakespeare.
*If you suffer from geophagia then you have a compulsive urge to eat soil.
*The African baobab tree (adansonia digitata) blossom opens only to moonlight and it is pollinated by bats .. the fruit bats.
*Clint Eastwood's roll of Dirty Harry was turned down by Paul Newman, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra.
*According to sales, 17,000 individual 'smarties' are eaten every minute in the UK. (2006)
*The life of an eyelash is about 6 weeks.
*Iceland, Europe's second largest island following Great Britain, boasts of having the world's oldest 'active' parliamentary body, Althing, which first met in 930AD.
*The Turkish football club, Galatasaray, has an A for every other letter.
*The tongue of a mature Blue Whale has approximately the same mass as that of an entire adult elephant.
*The study, which tested telephones, desks, water coolers, doorknobs, and toilet seats, compiled 7,000 samples from major centers across the country. What they found, was that while phones ranked highest in bacteria levels, the office desk was a close second.
*In England during World War I, many German names and titles were changed and given more English-sounding names, including the royal family's from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Kaiser Wilhelm II countered this by jokingly saying that he was off to see a performance of 'The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.'
*Both turdoid and turdine mean "belonging to the family turdus," Turdus musicus is the song thrush & Turdus viscivorus is the mistletoe thrush.
*Nearly a quarter of all mammals can fly; with a huge 985 known species, bats make up 23.1% of all known mammals by species.
*January is National Soup Month in the United States, January is the seasonal equivalent to July in the Southern Hemisphere; & on Jan 14th, 90% of New Year resolutions will be broken!
*You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown and you use an average of 17 muscles for a smile, and they say every two thousand frowns creates one wrinkle.
*Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms in the first 14 nestling days of their life and that is not even their main food on the menu (14 feet a day is wrong) But parent robins make around 100 food visits to the nest every day!
*The first man to die during planning & construction of the Hoover Dam was the father of the last man to die during its construction. December 20, 1922 with J.G. Tierney a Bureau of Reclamation employee who was part of a geological survey and drowned when he fell from a barge. Exactly 13 years later, in 1935, his son Patrick W. Tierney, fell to his death from an intake tower.
* You will have to walk 80 kilometers for your legs to equal the amount of exercise your eyes get daily.
*The Chinese used fingerprints as a method of identification back in 700.
*Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than it does through the air.
*A greenfly born on a Tuesday can be a grandparent by Friday.
*There are more mobile phones in UK than there are people.
*Termites are affected by music; the termites will eat your house twice as fast if you play them loud music.
*Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the extreme fear of Friday the 13th.
*One gallon of used motor oil can ruin approximately one million gallons of fresh water!
*Christopher Trace, the first presenter of Blue Peter, was the body double for Charlton Heston in the film Ben-Hur.
*Thomas Edison got patents for a method of making concrete furniture and a cigar which was supposed to burn forever.
*A cubic mile of ordinary fog contains less than a gallon of water.
*If you think of the Milky Way as being the size of the continent of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.
*The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex Myth or fact??
*The average driver will be locked out of their car nine times during their life time (yes, men are in the stats).
*A Boeing 767 airliner contains 3,100,000 parts.
* Belief in the existence of vacuums used to be punishable under Church law.
* Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain.
*An owl can see a mouse moving from over 150ft away by a light no brighter than candlelight.
*The average person has walked 100,000 miles by the time they reach the age of 85.
*Your hearing is less sharp after eating too much.
*In the course of a lifetime, the average person spends 2 years on the phone (I bet cell phones/mobiles were not taken into consideration when that fact was worked out!!).
* Henry VIII was once served a loin of beef while visiting the house of a noble. He was so impressed with the beef that he asked for a sword and knighted it! Ever since, that particular cut of beef has been known as sirloin. ("Sir Loin").. This is a MYTH
*In a lifetime, the average clean-shaven man will spend five months shaving and will remove 28ft of hair.
*Beethoven was extremely particular about his coffee , he always counted 60 beans per cup.
*In 1943, Navy officer Grace Hopper had to fix a computer glitch caused by a moth, hence the term 'computer bug'.
*Jupiter is large enough to contain the other major 7 planets in our solar system.
*The water pressure inside every onion cell would be sufficient to explode a steam engine.
*Film stars originally wore sunglasses, not to look mysterious, but to relieve their eyes from the dazzling glare of the early studio lights.
*If you take any number, double it, add 10, divide by 2, and subtract your original number, the answer will always be 5.
*Over a 12 day period your body generates a whole new set of taste buds. (This process continues until you are in your 70's.)
*Greyhounds can reach their top speed of 45 mph in just 3 strides
*There is more sugar in 1kg of lemons than in 1kg of strawberries.
*Paraskevidekatriaphobia, is a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th. Therapist Dr. Donald Dossey, whose specialty is treating people with irrational fears, coined the term. He claims, when you can pronounce the word you are cured. Friggatriskaidekaphobia has the same meaning.
*American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class
*Titan arum is probably the world's smelliest flower. Originating in the tropical rain forests of Sumatra, this huge, extremely rare flower is a giant lily. It seldom blooms, but when it does the smell is described as something like the dead carcass of an animal
*A Viking tribe once raided England because they had run out of beer
*Walt Disney World generates about 120,000 pounds of garbage every day.
*Turtles can breath through their bottoms.
*Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
*The buzz generated by an electric razor in America is in the key of B flat. In the UK, it is in the key of G.
*Some of the most popular lipstick shades in Renaissance England were named, Rat, Horseflesh, Turkey, Blood and Puke.
*When Thomas Eddison died in 1941, Henry Ford captured his dying breath in a bottle.
*Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was the first Hollywood film that showed a toilet flushing - thereby generating many complaints.
*The first flying-trapeze circus act was performed by Frenchman Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon on Nov 12th 1859. He invented the garment now known as the leotard.
*In 1972 when Gordon Brown (British Chancellor of the Excheque) was 21, he won a Daily Express competition for "A Vision of Britain In The Year 2000."
*It is said, grapefruit scent makes middle age women seem six years younger to men (but it does not work the other way round).
*The average elephant produces 50lb of dung a day.
*The dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park came from slowing down the sounds of elephants, geese and horses.
*The French invented the pop of the Christmas Cracker in the 19th century (Tom Smith bought the idea back to UK after holidaying in France)
*The chances of hitting 2 holes-in-one during the same round of golf is one in 8 million
*Victorian ladies tried to enlarge their boobs by bathing in strawberries
*Until the 18th century, India produced almost all the world's diamonds
*The ancient Egyptians thought it was good luck to enter a house left foot first
*During their marriage, Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton bought an electric chair for their dining room
* The average single man is one inch shorter than the average married man
*Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet of which 80% are in-cloud flashes and 20% are cloud-to-ground flashes.
*When screen lover Rudolph Valentino married Jean Acker (on Bonfire Day), she locked him out of their bedroom, the marriage lasted only six hours
*160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road. On paper they can, as the road (actually it's an avenue) is 865 feet wide, but in reality they can't.
*When a female horse and a male donkey mate, the off-spring is called a mule; but when a male horse and a female donkey mate, the off spring is called a HINNY
*On average women speak 7000 words per day, where as men speak just over 2000
*Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair
*While in Alcatraz, Al Capone was inmate No.85
*Disney World is bigger than the world's 5 smallest countries
*A house fly hums in the middle octave key of F
*Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor
*In one gram of soil, about ten million bacteria live in it
*A single ounce of gold can be beaten into a thin film covering 100 square feet
*Before the 1800, there were no separately designed shoes for left and right feet
*Paper was invented early in the second century by Chinese eunuch
*The first person to receive a singing telegram was singer Rudy Vallee, in honour of his 32nd birthday, July 28th 1933.
* The longest one-syllable word in the English language is screeched
*In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes when you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase, "Goodnight, sleep tight."
*There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball
*A 75-year-old male driver received ten traffic tickets, drove on the wrong side of the road four times, committed four hit-and-run offenses and caused six accidents, all within 20 minutes, in McKinney, TX on 15 Oct 1966 [Worst driver: G. B. of Records]
*Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Shaghoopal
*The word "trivia" comes from the Latin "trivium" which is the place where three roads meet. People would gather and talk about all sorts of matters. Also in medieval universities, the trivium comprised the three subjects taught first, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, AND the Roman Goddess, Trivia, is the goddess of crossroads, witchcraft and the harvest moon.
*In 1935, the police in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arrested 42 men on the beach. They were cracking down on topless bathing suits worn by men.
*During lunch breaks in Carlsbad, New Mexico no couple should engage in a sexual act while parked in their vehicle, unless their car has curtains.
*The distance between cities are actually the distances between city halls. When you see a sign "Sheffield - 40 miles" it means it is 40 miles to the city hall of that city sign (and I expect town halls too!!)
*The name of Canada is believed to come from the Iroquois Indian word "Kanata", meaning "village" or "community". The word Canada was first used in a 1534 text written by Jacques Cartier describing the Indian village of Stadacona.
*The longest non-medical word in the English language is floccipausinihilipilification (29 letters), which means "the act of estimating as worthless."
*Dominica, Mexico, Zambia, Kiribati, Fiji and Egypt all have birds on their flags.
*Bees visit over 2,000 flowers and fly over 55,000 miles to produce just 1lb. of honey
*Four out of every ten people who come to a party in your home will look in your bathroom cabinet
*The taboo against whistling backstage comes from the pre-electricity era when a whistle was the signal for the curtains and the scenery to drop. An unexpected whistle could cause an unexpected scene change!
*The sound you hear when macho people crack their knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.
*Francis Bacon died of hypothermia while trying to freeze a chicken by stuffing it with snow
*Captain Jean-Luc Picard's (Star Trek) fish was named Livingston
*The WD in WD40 means "water displacement." The 40 in WD40 comes from the 40 attempts at creating this product.
*Beethoven dipped his head in cold water before he composed.
*Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and man all have seven neck vertebra.
*The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator,
Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz."
*American car horns beep in the tone of F.
*The only food cockroaches won't eat are cucumbers.
*China has more English speakers than the U.S.
*Hong Kong has the world's largest double-decker tram fleet in the world
*The words silent and listen have the same letters. Santa and Satan do too
*You can tell the sex of a turtle by the sound it makes, A male grunts, A female hisses.
*There are no public toilets in Peru.
*Samuel Clemens [aka Mark Twain] was born in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into view. When he died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again
*The pound sign is called a 'octothorp.'
*In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on
the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run
*"Dreamt" is the only word in the English language to end in "mt."
*The Queen termite can live up to 50 years and have 30,000 children every day
*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," eveything else was allowed.
*A Dalmatian is the only dog that can get gout
*The male gypsy moth can smell the virgin female up to 1.8 miles away
*A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away
*The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet out of the body.
*A puff of smoke, such as when someone is smoking a cigarette or a pipe
is called " a lunt "
*The name "Pinocchio" is from Tuscany, Italy and means "pine nut" or "kernel".
*Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy
*It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her. It was originally the right, but the translator messed up again.
*Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600's by a translator.
*Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour & if you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee
*For 47 days in 1961, the painting "Matisse's Le Bateau (The Boat)" was hanging upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. None of the over 116,000 visitors seem to have noticed.
*Walt Disney named Mickey Mouse after Mickey Rooney, whose mother he dated.
*Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of "Lorne Greene's Animal Kingdom."
*The magic word 'Abracadabra' was originally intended for the specific purpose of curing hay fever.
*The phrase "rule of thumb" was popularized by an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb top to first joint. (a thumb measurement is an inch)
*More redheads are born in Scotland UK than in any other part of the world
*The Sanskrit word for 'war' means - "desire for more cows".
*The average bed is home to over 5 billion dust mites.
*Only female wasps, bees, and mosquitoes sting.
*Las Vegas means "The Meadows" in Spanish.
*Born on November 2, 1718, British politician, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, is credited with naming the 'sandwich.' He developed a habit of eating beef between slice of toast so he could continue to play cards uninterrupted.
*Ice hockey was first played in 1885 by British soldiers stationed in Canada
*Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
*Your fingernails grow 4 times faster than your toe nails
*Pain travels faster than 3000 feet per second
*A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person
*About 10,000,000 people have the same birthday as you
*The snail mates only once in it's entire life, also a snail has 4 noses
*The Coca-Cola company is the biggest consumer of sugar in the world
*The dot that appears over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
*All major league baseball umpires must wear black underwear while on the job (in case their pants split)
*Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott"
*The word gymnasium comes from the Greek word gymnazein which means to
exercise naked. Etymology: Latin, exercise ground, school, from Greek gymnasion, from gymnazein to exercise naked, from gymnos naked
*Everyone thought Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia, because he couldn't speak properly until he was 9 years old.
*Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots
*The nation of Monaco on the French Riviera, is smaller than Central Park in New York. Monaco is 370 acres and Central Park is 840 acres
*Gweneth Paltrow's nickname for Steven Speilberg is "Uncle Morty." Steven Speilberg calls Gweneth Paltrow "Gwynnie the pooh."
*You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
*The sorcerer's name in Disney's Fantasia is Yensid, which happens to be Disney backwards.
*Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy
*The world's longest name is: Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Shermasn Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft Sr.
*Shirly Temple received 135,000 presents on her 8th birthday.
* When Christopher Columbus and crew landed in the New World they observed the natives using a nose pipe to smoke a strange new herb. The pipe was called a "tabaka" by the locals, hence our word tobacco.
*Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
*The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in jelly.
*Hitler and Napoleon both had only one testicle.
*Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
*In ancient China, people committed suicide by eating a pound of salt.
*Queen Victoria [UK 1837-1901] eased the discomfort of her monthly cramps by having her doctor supply her with marijuana.
*The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night. [usually in our sleep] ~ this is a MYTH
*If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough energy is produced to create an atomic bomb
*Sugar was first added to chewing gum in 1869 by a dentist (William Semple). One way to assure business!!
*The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.
*The names of the three wise monkeys are: Mizaru: See no evil, Mikazaru: Hear no evil, and Mazaru: Speak no evil.
*The Spanish word esposa means "wife." The plural, esposas, means "wives," but also "handcuffs."
*23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts.
* There was one U.S. state that no longer exists? In 1784 the U.S. had a state called Franklin, named after Benjamin Franklin. But four years later, it was incorporated into Tennessee.
*The clinical term for a hairy buttocks is "daysypgal."
*A duck's quack doesn't echo, and ... no one knows why.~ MYTH everything echoes. University students have recorded a ducks echo. It is usually so quiet we cannot hear it.
*"The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language. ??? Maybe if said fast... Dubious.
*Clans many many years ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them, burnt their houses down - hence the expression " to get fired." !!

Thankyou to everyone who sends me the above info in.
If you would like to contribute to this page I am only an email away.

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