Some Random Curiosities

* A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh cham­pagne will bounce up and down con­tin­u­ously from the bot­tom of the glass to the top.
* A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No one knows why.
* Almonds are mem­bers of the peach fam­ily.
* Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedo-ing up into the shark’s stom­ach from under­neath, caus­ing the shark to explode.
* Babies are born with­out knee caps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2–6 years of age.
* Your stom­ach has to pro­duce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
* If you are locked in a com­pletely sealed room, you will die of car­bon diox­ide poi­son­ing first before you will die of oxy­gen depri­va­tion.
* Choco­late kills dogs. Choco­late affects a dog’s heart and ner­vous sys­tem. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.
* The word ‘byte’ is a con­trac­tion of ‘by eight.’
* A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100^th of a sec­ond.
* The dot over the let­ter “i” is called a tit­tle.
* The plas­tic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
* Adjust­ing for infla­tion, Cleopa­tra, 1963, is the most expen­sive movie ever made to date (as of mid-1999). Its bud­get of $44 mil­lion is equiv­a­lent to 270 mil­lion 1999 dol­lars.
* Although iden­ti­fied with Scot­land, bag­pipes are actu­ally a very ancient instru­ment, intro­duced into the British Isles by the Romans.
* “Bil­lie Jean” by Michael Jack­son was the first video to air on MTV by a black artist.
* Don­ald Duck’s mid­dle name is Fauntleroy.
* “Happy Birth­day” was the first song to be per­formed in outer space, sung by the Apollo IX astro­nauts on March 8, 1969.
* In 1938 Joe Shus­ter and Jerry Siegel sold all rights to the comic-strip char­ac­ter Super­man to their pub­lish­ers for $130.

1. Lak­bayan
2. How These Com­pa­nies Got Their Names