What is the weirdest fact that you know?

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Same as the title: What is the weirdest fact that you know?

New Hampshire has licqor stores on the interstate system?

The original dolphin that played Flipper in the 60's TV series commited suicide.

Heard on television - 1993

I am fascinated by strange facts and I have many of them. I will try not to take over this thread with them though. It's hard to choose what is stranger than another.

having hook worm prevents allergies
if you don't close the lid to the toilet when you flush, the spray can travel up to six metres away
butterflies don't have blue pigments in their wings
blue whales have balls as big as volks wagon beetles

ElfMan

I love collecting useless and interesting information. I can't think of just one thing though.

--The bubbles in Guiness Beer sink to the bottom rather than float to the top like all other beers. No one knows why.

--On 15 April 1912 the SS Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage and over 1,500 people died. Fourteen years earlier a novel was published by Morgan Robertson which seemed to foretell the disaster. The book described a ship the same size as the Titanic which crashes into an iceberg on its maiden voyage on a misty April night. The name of Robertson's fictional ship was the Titan.

--Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had epilepsy.

--Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button.

--If the population of the Earth continued to increase at its present rate indefinitely, by 3530 A.D. the total mass of human flesh and blood would equal the mass of the Earth. By 6826 A.D. it would equal the mass of the known universe.

Okay. I'll give it a rest for now.

My head is filled with a lot of useless knowledge, but I can't seem to recall any thing particular at the moment.

I've always been a bit of a Concorde nut...

At Mach 2.0 and 60,000 feet above sea level, the Concorde stretched by 9.44 inches due to the heat caused by skin friction. The cockpit and cabin were not attached to each other, and the 9 inch gap would form between them. The nose of Concorde would reach as much as 200 degrees C while the outside air temperature was -57 C. Concorde is the only airliner that did not have flaps for landing -- hence the extremely high nose angle on landing. It had fuel tanks in the front and rear of the aircraft, and would pump the fuel fore/aft to manipulate the center of mass, performing the function normally provided by flaps. Concorde only had one crash in over 30 years of commercial service (and 7 years of flight testing), making it the safest commercial aircraft in history. Everyone knows about British Airways and Air France, but not many people know that Braniff Airways also flew Concorde briefly before realizing it was too expensive in sub-sonic flight. Concorde used afterburners TWICE on each flight -- once to take off, and once again to accelerate between M0.97 and M1.40 (air resistance actually decreases after M1.40 because the entire aircraft is then inside the shock cone).

I know the lyrics to the "Meow Mix" jingle:


"Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow"=

"I want chicken, I want liver, Meow Mix, Meow Mix, please deliver!"


Dunno if that's uncommon or not, though.

Here's some more:

Civets are small creatures which closely resemble both weasels or cats, but they are actually their own family, viverridae. Civets are often eaten in China and other Asian countries, and the civet was used as the scapegoat as the transmitter of the SARS virus to humans (it was never proven). Civets also secrete a musk, called "civet" (go figure, heh), that is used as a stabilizer in perfumes. One odd and rather gross thing people use civets for is for coffee. The civets are fed coffee beans, and once the coffee beans have gone through their digestive tract and are, well, emitted, the beans supposedly gain some appealing taste. These beans are a delicacy, and rather expensive to apprehend.

The Andrewsarchus, or "Andrew's Beast," is believed to be the largest carnivorous land mammal that ever lived. It lived during the Cretaceous period, and it stood approximately 8 feet tall at the shoulder. Though it more closely resembles a wolf or hyena, it is actually more closely related to the the modern ungulate family (hoofed mammals).

-Cows don't have upper front teeth.
-Twelve cows are known as a "flink."
-The Hellbender salamander can achieve a length of 2 feet.
-Charles Manson and Hitler were both vegetarians.
-In 1994 a hermaphrodite beluga whale was found in the St. Lawrence Estuary, Quebec, Canada. This represents the first case of true hermaphroditism in a cetacean, and is the fourth hermaphrodite mammal with two testicles and two separate ovaries.
-The biggest clams in the world weigh 500 pounds and make pearls as big as golf balls.
-A McDonald's drinking straw holds 7.7 ml of fluid.

That should do for now.

Something cute for the number freaks among us, courtesy of Slashdot:
Tomorrow at 1:58:31 in the morning (UTC) will mark 1111111111 seconds since the Unix epoch (midnight, Jan 1st, 1970).

The Russian composer Prokfiev's birthday fell on April 25th and he died in 1958.

My birthday falls on April 25th and I was born in 1958.

Your foot should be the same size as your forearm from the wrist to the bend. Everyone check.

No two cornflakes are the same!

I read an article about that before. Apparently it's one of the most expensive types of coffee there is. I guess products like this spring up when the rich run out of ideas on how to creatively squander their fortunes.

Who on earth was it who first came up with "Hey, I know! Let's try making coffee out of recycled cat cr*p"..... and more to the point, who was it who said "OK" and "Hmmm... this tastes good....."? And rich people pay for this? In that case, I'm living on an absolute goldmine given all the flaming local moggies I get who seem to think my garden is a knocking shop or something...... I'll snap my marigolds on right away - I'm rich! Whoo-hoo!! !!

One of the comedians on "Just For Laughs" did a routine like that:
Imagine two cave men staring at a chicken as it lays an egg. One of them says "hey, look what just came out of that chicken's a**" and the other one replies "yeah. let's eat it!"