And now, for some pointless trivia...

[denny]

Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.


Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.

No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.

Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.

Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.

The first product to have a bar code scanned was Wrigley's gum. (ref: keirf)

The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.

A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. Not true (ref: keirf)

Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

Marilyn Monroe had six toes.

All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.

Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

Pearls melt dissolve in vinegar. (ref: feanalwa)

Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. Not true apparently (ref: denari)

The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second was William Jefferson Clinton.

Turtles can breathe through their butts.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of the world's nuclear weapons combined.

On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.

On average people fear spiders more than death.

Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

It's physically impossible bloody difficult and very probably dangerous for you to lick your elbow. (ref: blackmetalbaz)

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

A snail can sleep for three years.

No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH." Not true (ref: zotz and olithered)

Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. SCARY!!!

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

All polar bears are left handed.

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

"Go," is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

Comments

[blackmetalbaz.livejournal.com]

It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.

I just licked my elbow.

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

Obviously you're physically impossible.

Of course, I'm at work so can't really try this...

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Outside or inside? I knew everyone would try that one :) I can do the inside, but no way would I reach the outside which is what I figured it meant.

[blackmetalbaz.livejournal.com]

Outside or inside? Er, outside... am I missing something?

[blackmetalbaz.livejournal.com]

Ah, though I think I may have just something unpleasant to my shoulder. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I'm with Duncan then, you're obviously physically impossible :)

[denari.livejournal.com]

The one with the duck is actually a myth. It does echo...echo

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

The trick is to figure out which ones are actually true and which ones have been thrown in and are taken to be true because they sound no odder than the rest.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I figure there are enough weird people on my friends list that we'll soon find out what's physically impossible and what's not... *looks at Baz* ...and enough people stuffed with useless trivia that we should get a fairly good filtering of the rest of it too.

[zotz]

Grunth rhymes with month, chilver with silver, sporange with orange, and curple with purple. All are valid English words.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I thought you had the answer for that one...

What do that lot mean then, enlighten us :) They're not in the online dictionaries I've checked...

[zotz]

Grunth (or Granth) is part of the English transliterated title of the Sikh scriptures. A chilver is a ewe-lamb, a curple is part of a carthorse harness (a strap across its arse, or by extension someone or something's arse) and a sporange is the spore-body of a fern. All date to the 19th centure or earlier, I think.

[zotz]

And folding a piece of paper eight or nine times would just take a bigger piece of paper and more force. In the museum today I saw a steel bar that had been tied in a knot, cold. If you're willing to make the effort . . .

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure I saw a Guiness Book of Records attempt on Blue Peter once with a load of schoolkids running around on a huuuuuuuuuuuuge piece of paper. Strike another item then.

Shame about the ducks, that would have been quite interesting.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I seem to rememnber they still got to the same number of folds despite the piece of paper being huge. But then I might be wrong because I was very small. Or the number might be eight or nine and not seven after all.

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Month has a rhyme (or several):
http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/language/english/pronunciation/rhyme

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Ooh, funky.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Venus is not the only planet that rotates clockwise. If you stand at the other side of the clock, the hands are turning in the direction that you know to be anticlockwise. This also works for planets.

I just licked the outside of my elbow too. But not the pointy bit, the side.

Pearls do not melt in vinegar, they dissolve.

In principle any animal can and does breathe through its "butt", since the rectum is lined with mucous membrane across which oxygen can pass in solution. The turtle is probably the only animal that can breathe through no other part of its body than its anus and get enough oxygen to survive that way though.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I think rotation of a planet must be considered from a standard viewpoint, otherwise it would be meaningless. North pole, I'd guess.

Ooh, bendy. ;)

Pedant. *applauds* Hang on, what's the difference?

*tries not to think about turtle anuses just before dinner*

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

What - between melting and dissolving? Fwaha. Fwahahahaha. BWAHAHAHHAHA! An innocent unsuspecting victim at whom I can talk about phase transitions!

Melting: a change of state from ordered to disordered without a change in bulk chemical composition.
Dissolving: a process where the number of particles leaving the solid and forming non-permanent bonds with the surrounding liquid molecules per second, is bigger than the number of solid particles forming bonds with the solid.

Melting does not change the type of between-particle bonding in a substance. Dissolving does - the solid particles break their bonds with the rest of the solid and make fleeting "bonds" with the liquid molecules.

Melting is due to an increase in thermal vibrations making the liquid phase the lowest in free energy under the new conditions - the liquid phase was always there on the phase diagram, but the pearl could not reach it. Dissolving is due to the presence of the solvent introducing a new lower energy state (solution) that was not there before the pearl was put in the vinegar.

A dissolving substance can often look like it is melting, because it turns to goo. However this is because the solvent molecules are diffusing into the lump of solid and forming a very concentrated solution.

*ting*

Ah..."clockwise with respect to an observer standing at the North magnetic pole" - now that makes more sense. They need to pay us to check these things. *nods*

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Ooh. That's quite interesting, bet I can't remember the details for long though. :)

So melting essentially means you have the same amount of 'stuff' but in a different form, whereas dissolving means some of the stuff actually goes away and becomes something else - is that right(ish)?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Umm, nearly. When you melt something you have the same number of atoms as when it was a solid, and if it was a solid that is made of molecules, you have the same number of molecules.

When you dissolve something, you still have all the atoms from the solid but they might be e.g. as ions instead of neutral molecules. And you also have a whole load of solvent molecules in which the solid molecules are mixed up. In the case of a pearl which is I think some carbonate salt, you started off with a load of tiny crystals mashed into a round heap, and you end up with a load of carbonate and metal ions in solution.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Both Venus and Uranus rotate clockwise (retrograde) as seen from the pole star, all the other planets rotate anti-clockwise (prograde). So the statement in the email was wrong anyway.

All planets do circle the sun in an anti-clockwise way, as seen from the polestar, however.

[duranorak.livejournal.com]

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

"Minaret, donkey."

E.
x

[keirf.livejournal.com]

The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

The first product to be scanned for its bar code at a supermarket counter was Wrigley's gum. There were other products that were bar coded first, they just happened not to be picked first.