The weird facts thread

This may be common knowledge for most, but came as a surprise for me:

When rats yawn, they get an erection.

Doesn't everyone?

---dr.M.

Okay, I owe you more than that. One weird fact deserves another. Here's mine:

First of all, you have to know that many coral reef fish--those colorful guys you always see on aquarium screen saver--change their sex in the course of their life, some starting out male and turning female, others the opposite.

Well, now it looks as though the fertility of other 'straight' fish is being jeopardized by the hormones in birth-control pills that get flushed down the sewers and discharged into the ocean. This effect is being investigated as a possible cause of the drop-off in fish fertility off the coast of the UK. Here's a link:

http://www.edie.net/gf.cfm?L=left_frame.html&R=http://www.edie.net/news/Archive/5356.cfm

Concentrations of BC pill hormones as low as 1 part per billion can cause sex changes in fish.

Imagine the confusion in all the fish pick-up bars...

---dr.M.

It is scientifically impossible for a bumble bee to fly. According to all laws of aeronautics a bumble bee doesn't have enough wing area to lift the mass of the bees body. Yet bumble bees have been flying around for millions of years.

I've never heard that one Pierce. I spent 6 years in aviation and the first thing we were taught was the theory of lift on the design of the wing. I never knew that anyone disputed the theory.

Ok I've lifted this straight form one of my husbands posts on a completely different bulletinnboard...I am sure he won't mind*L*

Butterflies taste with their feet.

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

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 they do death.

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

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

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

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

It's possible to lead a cow upstairs ... but not downstairs.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

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

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."

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.

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.


>> Almost everyone who reads this will try to lick their elbow. You tried to lick your elbow, didn't you?

In 1925, the automobile industry, eager to satisfy American's craving for two-tone cars, had difficulty making a clean, sharp edge where one color met another. Richard Drew, a laboratory employee primarily involved with abrasives used to make sandpaper at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (better known as 3M), developed a two-inch wide strip of paper tape coated with a rubber-based adhesive. To cut costs, the tape was coated with only a strip of glue one-quarter inch wide along the edges, instead of covering the entire two-inch width. Unfortunately, the tape failed to hold properly, and the painters purportedly told the 3M salesmen to "Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put adhesive all over the tape, not just on the edges." The 3M company complied, but when the salesman returned to the automobile paintshop, a painter derogatorily asked him if he was still selling that "Scotch" tape, launching a tradename based on an ethnic slur denoting stinginess. The name, like the improved tape, stuck.

weird facts

I once heard (though I can't find any scientific claims to back it up) that a pigs orgasm can last up to 30 minutes.

A duck's feet are very warm. Someone I know from another forum told me she had been walked on by a duck, which is how she found out.

This is not a wierd fact but it is a wierd story.

In my former life in the late 1980's running a property company in London, we acquired a Mews development in Little Venice, London. For the benefit of those that do not know, a 'mews' was once the service zone behind the houses, staff, stables, etc were housed there. In the mid 1900's some mews became 'bijoux' cottages in the fashionable parts of London, others became odd repair businesses, storage etc. We bought one of those.

It was two storey, brick under a slate roof, we eventually built 48 houses on the long thin site which gives some idea of it's length.

In one unit, on the first floor, we found a car. It was an old 'baby' Austin from 1950's. The car was intact, complete in every respect. It filled the entire first floor with only an access stair behind it. By filled, I mean that it was not possible to walk around the car unless you were very thin. It is impossible to understand how this car came to be on the first floor. The brickwork was all original, it had not been reconstructed to allow the car to be positioned and there was no room within the room to assemble the car 'in-situ'.

No-one could explain how (or why) this car came to be there.

Will's

wishfulthinking said:

This may be common knowledge for most, but came as a surprise for me:

When rats yawn, they get an erection.

Click to expand...

Now that's damn different, when I yawn it's usually just after I've lost an erection, or used one up anyway.

Weird place names

Arsoli (Lazio, Italy)
Bastard (Norway)
Beaver (Oklahoma, USA)
Beaver Head (Idaho, USA)
Brown Willy (Cornwall,UK)
Chinaman's Knob (Australia)
Climax (Colorado, USA)
Cunt (Spain)
Cunter (Switzerland)
Dikshit (India)
Dildo (Newfoundland, Canada)
Dong Rack (Thailand-Cambodia border)
Dongo (Congo - Democratic Republic)
Effin (Limerick, Ireland)
Fuku (Shensi, China)
Fukue (Honshu, Japan)
Fukui (Honshu, Japan)
Fukum (Yemen)
Hold With Hope (Greenland)
Intercourse (Pennsylvania, USA)
Lickey End (West Midlands, UK)
Little Dix Village (West Indies)
Lord Berkeley's Knob (Sutherland, Scotland)
Middle Intercourse Island (Australia)
Muff (Northern Ireland)
Nobber (Donegal, Ireland)
Pis Pis River (Nicaragua)
Sexmoan (Luzon, Philippines)
Seymen (Turkey)
Shafter (California, USA)
Shag Island (Indian Ocean)
Shitlingthorpe (Yorkshire, UK)
Tittybong (Australia)
Tong Fuk (Japan)
Turdo (Romania)
Twatt (Orkney, UK)
Wank (Germany)
Wankendorf (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany)
Wankener (India)
Wankie (Zimbabwe)
Wankie Colliery (Zimbabwe)
Wanks River (Nicaragua)
Wankum (Germany)
Wet Beaver Creek (Australia)

Thanks for that, P!

I was enjoying my wine, now I have to lick it off the screen.

I've seen Lord Berkeley's Knob.

Lou - LOLing.

Tatelou said:

I've seen Lord Berkeley's Knob.

Click to expand...

And?

perdita said:

And?

Click to expand...

Nothing worth writing home about.

I hope this is true, anyone else heard it?

When the French king Louis XIV died his heart was preserved. Many years later it was eaten by William Buckland, the Dean of Westminster, who saw it sitting in a jar on the mantelpiece at a house he was visiting and mistook it for a pickled walnut.

perdita said:

I hope this is true, anyone else heard it?

When the French king Louis XIV died his heart was preserved. Many years later it was eaten by William Buckland, the Dean of Westminster, who saw it sitting in a jar on the mantelpiece at a house he was visiting and mistook it for a pickled walnut.

Click to expand...

I think that was his left testicle dear.

perdita said:

I hope this is true, anyone else heard it?

When the French king Louis XIV died his heart was preserved. Many years later it was eaten by William Buckland, the Dean of Westminster, who saw it sitting in a jar on the mantelpiece at a house he was visiting and mistook it for a pickled walnut.

Click to expand...

From Wikipedia which bills itself as a free encyclopedia.

Grave robbers stole Louis's heart, which came into the possession of Lord Harcourt, who sold it to the Very Reverend William Buckland, the Dean of Westminster. His son, Francis Buckland, inherited the purloined heart, and eventually ate it.

Click to expand...

I've never heard of the site, though, so I've no idea about the veracity.

Wildcard Ky said:

I once heard (though I can't find any scientific claims to back it up) that a pigs orgasm can last up to 30 minutes.

Click to expand...

In my next life, I want to be a pig.


Each year thousands upon thousands of eels set out from the lush and nutricious mid-atlantic sagasso sea, travel north for thousands of miles, up into the much more barren European coasts, struggle upsteams in rivers, risk their lives and whatever sanity an eel might posess...

...to have sex.

With the same eels that they swam with from the sargasso.

Then they go home.

#L

Liar, being a woman will do.

Perdita

perdita said:

Liar, being a woman will do.

Perdita

Click to expand...

Re: Weird place names

perdita said:

Arsoli (Lazio, Italy)

(and so on...)

Wet Beaver Creek (Australia)

Click to expand...

Splendid list, Perdita!

However, it would not be complete without Fucking, Austria.

#L

perdita said:

Liar, being a woman will do.

Perdita

Click to expand...

Hokay, a real pig. Not the homo swinus I am now.