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Interesting Facts
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*George Washington refused to shake hands during his presidency as he thought it was undignified.
*Louis Pasteur often refused to shake hands for a different reason. He was obssessive about hygeine.
*Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini also thought shaking hands was unhygeinic. He claimed that this was the
reason he adopted the straight-arm Fascist salute.
*Chimpanzees have no such hangups. They shake hands as a sign of greeting.
*Mogul Emperor Shah Khan Jahan was buried with his hand sticking through the wall of his tomb so that
visitors could shake hands with him.
*In Britain, failed suicides were hanged in the 19th century, and cutting down a tree was a hanging offence
until 1819.
*British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, once had the unpleasant task of putting to death a friend from his
local pub.
*Hippopotamuses cannot swim, whales can't swim backwards, tarantulas can't spin webs, crocodiles can't
chew and hummingbirds can't walk!
I*A. Moron was the Commissioner of Education on the Virgin Islands in 1980.
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*Jaguars are frightened by dogs.
*Judge Turtle, of the California Supreme Court, awarded damages to a seven-year-old elephant which lost
its talent for water-skiing after a car crash.
*In February 1978, an Iowa judge dismissed a drink-driving charge against a man he ruled to have been too
drunk to have consented to the blood alcohol test that proved he was inebriated.
*In 1983, magistrates rejected an application for a sports and social club because the building was deemed
to be a fire hazard. The applicants were the local fire brigade!
*In St Albans, England, a judge let off an Irish felon who stole microwave ovens, believing them to be TV
sets. The judge thought that anyone so stupid should not go to jail.
*In Brazil there was a traffic jam when a couple kissing in a car got their dentures interlocked.
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*Giovanni de Medici (1475-1521), later Pope Leo X, was made a Cardinal when only thirteen years old. He
raised funds by selling indulgences and excommunicated Martin Luther, who objected to this practice.
*Louis XIV (1638-1715), King of France, the Sun King, had an unfortunate experience while putting on a
sock: his toe fell off. Was this because he was not in the habit of bathing? He built the Palace at
Versailles without bathrooms and toilets, and apparently had only three baths in his entire life.
*Madame Tallien, a member of his court, used to bathe in crushed strawberries whenever they were
available. Strawberries contain less sugar than lemons.
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*Karl Marx disapproved of Friedrich Engels' mistress for being too common. Groucho Marx was
auditioned for the lead in Gone With The Wind.
*During the middle ages, many animals were executed for crimes such as heresy and witchcraft.
*The world's first feature length film was produced in Australia (in 1906?).
*Alfred Hitchcock made it a rule that no-one should be admitted to Psycho after the movie had begun.
*Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VIII of England both acted in films. Leon Trotsky once appeared
in a Hollywood movie as an extra.
*Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was expelled from school for stabbing a fellow pupil in the buttocks, and
later became premier-dictator of Italy (1922-1943).
*He was originally one of Adolf Hitler's most vocal critics, despite the fact that both were vegetarians.
N*The island of Nauru is composed mainly of bird droppings.
*Queen of Egypt, wife of the 18th dynasty Pharoah Ikhnaton and mother-in-law of Tutankhamen.
*Cleopatra was a Greek.
*Nile catfish swim upside down.
*400 years after the extinction of the three metre tall moa bird, New Zealand cut the
Muppet movie because of gratuitous violence.
*In Turkey, Miss Piggy was removed from television during religious festivals. The moa is
not related to the turkey.
*A New York father wanted to be a good mother. He breast-fed his baby daughter for three months with
the aid of female sex-hormone tablets.
P*Pigs were once ranked by scientists as the tenth most intelligent animals in the world. This ranking is sure
to rise after the daring exploits of the "Tamworth Two". In January 1998, Butch and her male companion
Sundance escaped an abbattoir in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, eluding all pursuers for over a week. So much
did they capture the public imagination that a return to the abattoir was unthinkable, and the pair of
porkers are now expected to live happily ever after, at the expense of a tabloid newspaper.
*A pig used by German police to sniff out drugs was fired when the mayor decided that it wasn't good for
the forces image.
*Denmark has more pigs than humans.
*Brisbane police once arrested a man for being drunk in charge of a wheelchair, and in Norway, 1980, a
man was fined for being drunk in charge of a mobile vacuum cleaner.
*Menzhinsky, former head of the Soviet Secret police, used to paint his finger- and toe-nails red. This
practice was started by Nefertiti.
*There is a post office on the Russian space station Mir.
*Mr J. S. Mann, a scrap dealer from Bundaberg, Queensland, applied to the United Nations for a permit to
salvage scrap spaceship metal on the moon. His application was turned down.
*In 1879, cats were used to carry letters in Belgium. The experiment was a failure.
*Every post office in Great Britain is given a small grant towards the upkeep of a cat, but their duties do
not include delivering the post.
*Cats sweat through the pads of their feet (especially when they hear a dog barking) and cannot taste
sweet things.
*Weasels were used to catch mice in ancient Rome.
*In 1863, Paul Hubert of Bordeaux was imprisoned for his own murder and served 23 years before the
mistake was discovered.
*Some prisoners dug a tunnel to escape from their Mexican gaol, only to emerge in the very courthouse
where they had been sentenced.
Q*The luxury liner QE2 consumes seventeen percent of the world's caviar production every year.
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*Carnivorous mammal of genus Procyon.
*When Orvell Lloyd was asked why he killed his mother-in-law, he explained that he had mistaken her for
a racoon. His error could have been forgiven if she was about 60 centimetres long, with a grey-brown
body, a black-and-white ringed tail, and a black mask around her eyes.
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*Scotland exports sand to Saudi Arabia.
*Pontius Pilate was born in Scotland (at Fortingall, near Dunkeld).
*Dall's porpoise never sleeps, elephants sleep two hours a day, horses sleep standing up, and Sitatunga
antelopes can sleep underwater.
*Mexicans believe that bathing a baby in lettuce water cures sleeping problems.
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*Many Hindu women dye their teeth red to make themselves more attractive.
*Lisa di Anton Maria di
Noldo Gherardini, the model for the Mona Lisa, lost her teeth between sittings.
*Benjamin Disraeli was
once in the middle of a parliamentary debate when his false teeth fell out.
*In Japan, the first dentists pulled teeth with their fingers. They had to practise to make their fingers
stronger to do so. Chinese dentist, Dr. Kung Hsueh-pin has extracted more than 30,000 teeth with his
fingers, without use of drugs or anaesthesia.
*Saint Apollonia is the patron saint of toothache. Ancient Egyptians believed that toothache was caused by
a demon which took the shape of a worm and burrowed into teeth. Strangely, worms (and lice) have been
inserted into cavities as a cure for toothache.
*When Mrs Janet Bibby of Northamptonshire had her ear syringed to cure her deafness, a tooth fell out.
She surmised that she must have left it on her pillow for the tooth fairy some thirty years earlier. Rats'
teeth are sometimes worn as earrings in the Cameroons.
*The palace at Knossos, which dates back to 2000 BC, had a flush toilet which is still functional.
*In 1869, a patent was filed for a toilet seat with rollers on top to prevent people standing on it.
*"Loo" is the name of a town in West Flanders, Belgium.
*In Sweden the fire brigade was fined for parking illegally while putting out a fire, and in Swindon, 1985, an
ambulance attending an emergency call was fined for "illegal standing".
*In 1975, David Philips, a 77-year-old man from Cardiff, was fined five pounds for 42 kiss-and-run
incidents involving female traffic wardens.
*Australian traffic wardens used to be called "brown bombers" until a change of uniform saw them
re-christened "grey ghosts". On Queensland's Gold Coast, the local council sought to boost the tourist
trade by employing young women to insert coins into expired parking meters. Their uniform was the bikini.
Bikinis were worn in ancient Rome.
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*An unemployed Anglican minister went to his local employment exchange and was offered the position of
Moslem religious leader in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
*Pope Urban VIII ordered the excommunication of anybody caught taking snuff in church.
V*18th-century gentleman Jemmy Hirst trained pigs to act as setters, rode a bull to go fox-hunting, and left
money in his will for his coffin to be carried by eight old maids. He further stipulated that they should
swear on oath that they were virgins.
*Saint Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, was martyred when she was only thirteen years old.
W*Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, was Welsh.
*An edict during the reign of Elizabeth I declared:
"Any woman who through the use of false hair, Spanish hair pads, make-up, false hips, steel
busks, panniers, high-heeled shoes or other devices, leads a subject of Her Majesty into
marriage, shall be punished with the penalties of witchcraft."
*Queen Elizabeth I used to appear in public with her mouth stuffed with fine cloth because her face had
sunk inwards after the loss of her front teeth.
*Hungarian, Ehmann Lajos, once squeezed 32 lines of writing on a matchstick. and C. N. Swift wrote the
Lord's prayer 25 times on a piece of paper 22mm x 18mm - half the size of a postage stamp.
*Ernest Wright wrote a 50,000 word book containing not a single occurrence of the letter E.
*Samuel Langhorne Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) wrote most of his books in bed, Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) wrote his books standing up, and James Joyce (better
known than his life-long companion Nora Barnacle) wrote so illegibly that his manuscript for Ulysses was
thought to be a spy's coded message.
X*Xhosa women of South Africa are permitted to smoke a pipe when they come of age.
*During World War II, Soldiers in the British and U.S. armies were banned from putting kisses on their
letters as the XXX could have been a coded message.
Y*In 1837, a yogi called Haridas was buried alive in the ground for 40 days, after which he was dug up again
and revived. The same fellow could touch his forehead with his tongue.
*A Hindu, Urdhabahu, held his arms above his head for twenty years.
Z*Zimbabwe was a mighty empire in the middle ages.
*The Median prophet Zoroaster (c.630-c.553 BC), founder of Zoroastrianism, ate nothing but cheese for
thirty years. Goto Page 1
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