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     Volume 4 Issue 21| November 12, 2004 |


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Trivia

Info Bits

*Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
*Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
*A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodiles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the longest snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
*Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator. It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
*Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
*The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
*There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
*According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
*In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
*Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realise this was the day of the changeover.
*Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
*The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name was Temujin.
*Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherd.
*The type specimen for the human species is the skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American palaeontologist of the late 1800's. A type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
*The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
*The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
*Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
*Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards.
*All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
*Lucifer is Latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means "adversary", devil means "liar".
*A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
*Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
*Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.
*The second longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".
*Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese.

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