AS I SEE IT
By Neal A. Shipman
Farmer Editor
I have always liked trivia. Maybe that’s why I always enjoy reading Arlene Isaak’s “Did You Know?” column each week in this newspaper so much. Arlene spends a lot of time researching her column each week and the wealth of little known facts that she presents is fascinating.
Unlike, Arlene, most of the trivia that I get comes in the form of emails from friends across the country. While I enjoy reading them, most get deleted, while some of the more interesting ones I save for those weeks when I need a column quickly. This is one of those weeks when I am going to dip into the file and pull out one of those trivia emails to bail me out as I rush to get the newspaper done. So read on and enjoy.
• “Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand. And “lollipop” is the longest word typed with your right hand.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
• “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.
• The words ‘racecar,’ ‘ kayak’ and ‘level’ are palindromes, which means they are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
• There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous:” tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
• There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.”
• “Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A snail can sleep for three years.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
• Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches two to six years of age.
• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
• In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
• If the population of China walked past you, eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors .
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
• The average person’s left hand does 56 percent of the typing.
• The cruise liner, QE 2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
• The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.