Hello and happy New Year to whoever may or may not be reading this- for those who are not, please consult reality and try again. I was considering taking this opportunity to look forward and pontificate on what the new year may bring, but I eventually decided that since I don’t have a sodding clue what interesting stuff’s going to happen (bar the Olympics, which everyone knows about already), I have decided instead to give you a list of random facts to give some new stuff to confuse people with in 2012 conversations*. Read and enjoy:
The only sound Seahorses make is a small clicking or popping sound during feeding or courtship
Krispy Kreme make five million doughnuts a day
There were no red colored M&Ms from 1976 to 1987
In Belgium, there is a museum that is just for strawberries
Tomatoes were once referred to as “love apples.” This is because their was a superstition that people would fall in love by eating them
Over 90% of diseases are caused or complicated by stress
An average person uses the toilet 2500 times a year
Approximately 97.35618329% of all statistics are made up
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined
Pentagon estimates their computer network is hacked about 250,000 times annually
Marilyn Monroe had six toes
On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag
Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 and 9 am
There is a town in Norway called “Hell”
The electric chair was invented by a dentist
The word “nerd” was first coined by Dr. Suess in the book “If I Ran to the Zoo.”
For every human in the world there are one million ants
After being picked an orange cannot ripen
There are more pigs than humans in Denmark
Hockey pucks were originally made from frozen cow dung
Karate actually originated in India, but was developed further in China
A group of tigers is called a streak
The average ear grows 0.01 inches in length every year
The same careers advisor dismissed both Mark Knopfler and Alan Shearer’s ambitions (to be a musician and footballer respectively), saying to Knopfler “you’ll never get anywhere playing that kind of stuff”. Shearer broke the world record in transfer fees when he signed for Newcastle, and Knopfler went on to make over £50 million and played at Live Aid
The most exclusive aftershave in the world is named after a Welsh winger and rugby captain
A bank in Paraguay was once held up by two sets of bank robbers simultaneously
A South Korean woman failed her driving test 959 times, and when she finally passed was given a car worth nearly $17,000 by Hyundai, as well as an advertising deal
The biggest defeat in a game of football is held by a team from Madagascar, who lost 149-0 in a match in October 2002
In a 2008 council election in North Dakota, absolutely nobody voted, not even the candidates
A news reporter in Swaziland once spent a month delivering reports from a broom cupboard whilst pretending to be in Baghdad
Elvis Presley once came third in an Elvis Presley impersonator contest in Tennessee
A South African effort to promote condom usage, that included the distribution of a free government condom, ended in failure when it was noticed that the condoms had been stapled to the packaging, puncturing two holes in each of them in the process
*I make no claim to have sourced any of these- the first half come from a friend who used to post these things on Facebook, and the second half are from one of my favourite books- The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pile. The ones I have done are just the easiest to paraphrase from the first two chapters- if you want a good source of laughs for the upcoming year, buy yourself a copy and enjoy the rest
The Ramblings of Ix 