Welcome to the Back Alley

Welcome to my page of useless facts. Stay as long as you like!! Don't forget to sign the guestbook at the bottom of the page.

*The voice that says "Hello," "You've got mail," and "Goodbye" on AOL is Elwood Eldrige, an employee.
*There are 22 stars in the Paramount movie studio logo
*A humpback whale's milk is 54 percent fat. *If you were to toss the new 10p coin (Pounds Sterling), 10000 times, the average odds of it being heads/tails would not be 50/50. It would be closer to 45/55 in favour of tails because the new picture of the Queen's head is slightly larger than it used to be (she has gone a bit saggy) and so it makes the heads side heavier than the tails side, thus it has more chance of landing on tails.
*For a short time in 1967, the American Typers Association made a new punctuation mark that was a combination of the question mark and an exclamation point called an interrobang. It was rarely used and hasn't been seen since.
*The first letter Vanna White ever turned on Wheel of Fortune was the letter T.
*The snapping turtle eats carion and is used by police to find dead bodies in lakes, ponds and swamps.
*The roaring lion in the MGM logo was named Volney and lived at the Memphis Zoo.
*The roaring lion in the MGM logo's hide is now on display in the McPherson Museum located in McPherson, Kansas.
*Kermit the Frog has 11 points on his collar around his neck.
*Cleveland spelled backwards is "DNA level C". (I think it's a conspiracy)
*Harvard uses "Yale" brand locks on their buildings.
*A "jiffy" is a unit of time: 3.3357 times 10 raised to the -11 (3.3357x10^-11) seconds. So named for the length of time it takes light to travel a cm in a vacuum.
*During the Manhattan Project in the early '40s, the time it took for the imploding shell of uranium to reach the center of the sphere was measured in "shakes of a lamb's tail". One shake = 1x10^-8 sec. It took about three shakes of a lambs tail to get the uranium to a critical mass and initiate spontaneous fission.
*When you die your hair still grows for a couple of months
*The average human blinks there eyes 6,205,000 times each year.
*It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
*The entire length of all eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 30 metres.
*The average human will shed 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime
*Human Thigh bones are stronger than concrete
*During a 24-hour period, the average human will breathe 23,040 times.
*In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivelent of 5 times around the equator.
*Your hair and fingernails will continue to grow long after you have died
*At - 40 degrees Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.
*Pet superstores now sell about 40 percent of all pet food
*One million Americans, about 3,000 each day, take up smoking each year. Most of them are children.
*In 1933, Mickey Mouse, an animated cartoon character, received 800,000 fan letters.
*There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous
*If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.
*Less than 3% of Nestle's sales are for chocolate.
*The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change
*More than 2500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products
*It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7% of the world's population are drunk
*The tip of a 1/3 inch long hour-hand on a wristwatch travels at 0.00000275 mph
*All consumption of alcohol is strictly regulated here in Norway, and is only sold through state owned shops called Vinmonopolet. Nevertheless between 25 and 40 % of all alcohol consumed is either smuggled or illegally made at home
*One thing that humans do more than anything in their entire life is sleep. Most Americans sleep more than 6-8 hours a day, which is on average around 24 years of ones life!
*A man's beard contains between 7000 and 15,000 hairs.
*A beard grows an average of 140mm a year
*A hair is 70 per cent easier to cut when soaked in warm water for two minutes
*Women's hair is about half the diameter of men's hair
*During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble
*4.5 million people have their health 'adverely affected' by air pollutants each year.
*4 million children dia each year from inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn wood and Dung
*4 million people die annually from diarrhoea infections, caused by poor sanitary conditions
*Less than one percent of the 500 chinese cities have clean air, respiratory disease is China's leading cause of death.
*The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times faster than the population growth
*It took 1,175 animators working in Disney studios in Burbank, California, Orlando, Florida, and Paris, France to complete the animated Tarzan. Because of the time differences, production was able to occur around the clock for more than three years.
*The most expensive commerical ever made is one of the most famous. The famous '1984' Apple Macintosh commerical shown introducing Macintosh to the world, only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl. It was directed by Ridley Scott, and cost around $600,000 to $1 million to make. The commerical shows hundreds of people dressed in the same clothing going down dark hallways to a huge telescreen featuring Big Brother. A women in colored clothing (representing the creativity in Macintosh), runs down the hallway followed by the Thought Police. She hurls a sledge hammer at Big Brother and the screen explodes, while the drones look on with dropped jaws
*About 17% of humans are left handed. The same is true of chimpanzees and gorillas.
*Banging your head against a wall uses 150 caliores an hour.
*The entire length of all eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 30 metres.
*The average woman consumes 6 lbs of lipstick in her lifetime.
*The average person swallows 8 spiders a year.
*It only takes 7lbs of pressure to rip your ear off
*26 Billion dollars in ransom has been paid out in the U.S. in the past 20 years.
*You use more calories eating celery than there are in the celery itself.
*On average there are 178 sesame seeds on each McDonalds BigMac bun.Thanks to Chris for this fact
*There are 1 million ants for every person in the world.
*Odds of being killed by a dog- 1 in 700,000
*Odds of dying while in the bath tub- 1 in 1,000,000
*Odds of being killed by space debris- 1 in 5 billion
*Odds of being killed by poisoning- 1 in 86,000
*Odds of being killed by freezing- 1 in 3 million
*Odds of being killed by lightening- 1 in 2 million
*Odds of being killed in a car crash- 1 in 5,000
*If you played all of the Beatles' singles and albums that came out between 1962 and 1970 back 2 back it would only last for 10 hours and 33 mins
*Odds of being killed in a tornado- 1 in 2 million
*Odds of being killed by falling out of bed- 1 in 2 million
*Odds of being killed in a plane crash-1 in 25 million
*Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock music.
*The Apollo 11 only had 20 seconds of fuel when it landed.
*13 people each year are killed by Vending Machine's falling on them.
*There is a 1/4 pound of salt in every gallon of seawater
*About one third of American adults are at least 20 percent above their recommended weight
*One third of 95 developing countries have a waiting period of six years or more for a telephone connection, compared with less than a moth in developed countries
*The average talker sprays about 300 microscopic saliva droplets per minute, about 2.5 droplets Per word
*The average smell weighs 760 nanograms report Japanese researchers The researchers weighed odours by dissolving them in fat and using an ultra sensitive quartz crystal Microbalance
*One third of black men in the US between 20 and 29 years old were in prison, on parole or on probation. The number increased from one fourth five years ago - The Key, April 1996
*One sixth of all Americans am estimated 43 million people move each year. (US Census Bureau)
*The Earth experiences 50,000 Earth quakes each year
*Skin temperature does not go much above 95of even on the hottest days
*314 Americans had buttock lift surgery in 1994
*Sex burns 360 calories per hour
*The average human will walk the distance of 160 billion millimetres in his/hers lifetime
*Annual growth of WWW traffic is 314,000%
*Experts at Intel say that microprocessor speed will double every 18 months for at least 10 years
*The Earth's revolution time increases .0001 seconds annually.
*The odds against a person being struck by a meteorite, are ten trillion to one
*Driving at 75 miles per hour, it would take 258 days to drive around one of Saturn's rings.
*Driving 55mph instead of 65mph increases your car mileage by about 15%
*Airbags explode at 200mph
*If we had the same mortality rate now as in 1900, more than half the people in the world today would today not be alive
*One third of all cancers are sun related
*The average person flexes the joints in their finger 24 million times during a lifetime
*The largest known kidney stone weighed 1.36kg
*There are more than 100 chemicals in a cup of coffee
*It would take 7 billion particles of fog to fill a teaspoon
*The average iceberg weighs 20,000,000 tons
*The average human produces 25,00 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools
*Your brain weighs around 3 pounds. All but ten ounces is water
*A can of SPAM is opened every 4 seconds
*If you freeze-dried, 10% of your body weight would be from the micro-organisms on your body
*If you gave each human on earth an equal portion of dry land, (including the uninhabitable areas) everyone would get roughly 100sqft
*The average person makes about 1,140 telephone calls each year
*There are 336 dimples on a regulation golfball
*In a century's time Islam had converted one third of the world
*If all the ozone in the atmosphere were compressed to a pressure corresponding to that at he earth's surface, layer would be only 3mm thick
*In 75% of Americans households, women manage the money and pay the bills
*The world record for rocking non-stop in a rocking chair is 440 hours
*Only one person in two billion will live to be 166 or older
*The world record for Rainboot tossing is 54.60 metres
*Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza everyday
*Right handed people live, on average; nine years longer than left handed people do
*More Monopoly money is printed in a year, than real money throughout the world
*One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet
*Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails
*You blink over 10.000.000 times a year
*There are 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire strung across America
*Sneeze travels out of your mouth at over 100 miles an hour
*If the population of China walked past you in single file the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction
*The earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, tons
*The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year
*The average person laughs 15 times a day
*It has been calculated that in the last 3,500 years, their have only been 230 years of peace throughout the civilised world
*The average person spends about two years on the phone in a lifetime
*When glass breaks, the cracks move at speeds up to 3,000 miles per hour
*The next total solar eclipse (after 1999) will be visable from angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique and will take place in 2001
*The X's that people sometimes put at the end of letters or notes to mean a kiss, actually started back in the 1000's when Lords would sign their names at the end of documents to other important people. It was originally a cross that they would kiss after signing to signify that they were faithful to God and their King. Over the years though, it slanted into the X
*Papaphobia is the fear of Popes
*Multiply 37,037 by any single number (1-9), then multiply that number by 3. Every digit in the answer will be the same as that first single number
*The Academy Award statue is named after a librarian's uncle. One day Margaret Herrick, librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made a remark that the statue looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.
*Nova Scotia is Latin for 'New Scotland.'
*Stressed is Desserts Spelt backwards
*If you multiply 111,111,111 by 111,111,111 you get 12,345,678,987,654,321
*The term Cop comes from Constable on Patrol. It's from England.
*The collecting of Beer mats is called Tegestology.
*'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish
*Even though it is widely attributed to him Shakespeare never actually used the word 'gadzooks'.
*Karoke means 'empty orchestra' in Japanese.
*In Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan 'finger-lickin' good' came out as 'eat your fingers off.'
*'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'
*There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous
*The word 'Bye' is used in both English and Spanish meaning the same thing
*Pogonophobia: The fear of beards
*In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same
*The infinity charecter on the keyboard is called a "lemniscate"
*Good bye came from God bye which came from God be with you. So-long came from the Arabic salaam and the Hebrew shalom
*The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the Zoo'
*The pound sign is called a "octothorp" before Jets, Jet lag was called Boat lag
*The words racecar and kayak are the same both ways.Thanks to Leanna Olcen
*The word "monosyllable" actually has five syllables in it
*There are no words in the English language that rhyme with silver and orange
*Only 2 blue moons (the saying 'only once in a blue moon ' refers to the occurrence of two full moons during one calendar month) are to occur between now and 2001. Those times are January 1999 and March 1999
*The letter "I" is used exactly one hundred and nine times in Act IV of Shakespeare's Macbeth
*There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet
*"Naked" means to be unprotected. "Nude" means unclothed
*Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower', because in the time when al original print had to be set in individual letters, the 'upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case stored smaller, 'lower case' letters
*Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language
*The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with
*The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator
*The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want
*In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value
*Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States
*The word "trivia" comes from the Latin "trivium" which is the place where three roads meet, a public square. People would gather and talk about all sorts of matters, most of which were trivial
*TYPEWRITER, is the longest word that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard
*"Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when you're talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"
*The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the King is dead"
*The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the english language
*The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable
*Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village"
*Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand
*The most common name in the world is Mohammed
*The longest non-medical word in the English language is FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, which means "the act of estimating as worthless".
*Mafia in Old Arabic means 'sanctuary.'
*In the 40's, the Bich pen was changed to Bic for fear that Americans would pronounce it 'Bitch.'
*The WD in WD40 means water displacement.
*Of all the words in the English Language, the word "set" has the most definitions.
*The word "samba" means "to rub navels together"
*The word Diastima is the word for having a gap between your teeth.
*The dot above the letter "i" is called a tittle.
*The words "assassination" and "bump" were invented by Shakespeare.
*"i am" is the shortest sentence in the English language.
*The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan".
*The study of soil is paedology.
*Another term for pure china clay is Kaolin.
*Speleology is the study of caves.
*The search for the existence of ghosts is Eidology.
*A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.
*Calcium sulphate hemihydrate is more commonly known as Plaster of Paris.
*The Mercedes-Benz motto is 'Das Beste order Nichts' meaning 'the best or nothing.'
*There is no synonym for THESAURUS.
*At Andrew Jackson's funeral in 1845, his pet parrot had to be removed because it was swearing.
*The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
*"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
*Almonds are members of the peach family.
*The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
*The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
*The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
*"Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."
*There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
*The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis Let me define this for you; pneumono = lungs ultramicroscopic = just what it says silico=silicon volcano=just what it says coni = dust osis = inflammation So, this big word indicates ultramicroscopic silicon volcano dust has caused inflammation of the lungs.
*The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiw en uaitnatahu, a New Zealand hill.
*Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, "L.A."
*An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
*Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
*Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
*The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint - no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
*A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
*The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.
*There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
*Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
*It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
*Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.
*The male gypsy moth can "smell" the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.
*The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
*"Stewardesses" is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.
*To "testify" was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.
*The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
*The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
*Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
*Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
*The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead."
*The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
*The first episode of "Joanie Loves Chachi" was the highest rated American program in the history of Korean television. "Chachi" is Korean for "penis."