Weird & Interesting Facts

Humans were first infected with the HIV virus in the 1930s.

Thinking about your muscles can make you stronger.

Women blink twice as many times as men do.

We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening. Layers of cartilage in the joints gets compressed during the day.

The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They appear when the child is 2-6 years of age.

Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second!

The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you'll have a bad dream.

After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.

There are more people alive today than have ever died.

Earth is the only planet not named after a pagan God.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

As of 2006, 200 million blogs were left without updates

As of 2006, more than one in eight people in the United States show signs of addiction to the internet.

Men can breastfeed babies.

The Population of the world can live within the state boundaries of Texas.

Because of Animal Crackers, many kids until they reach the age of ten, believe a bear is as tall as a giraffe.

When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home to a sellout crowd, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.

By law, employees do not have to wash hands after sneezing.

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

Via Berro.com

Link

Urban Legends

As an initiation into a street gang, potential members hide under peoples cars at night, and when the unsuspecting owners start to get in, they slash their ankles and when they fall they steal a shoe.

A not particularly bright man takes a high speed train to get home from a business meeting on the other side of the state. While riding, he looks out the train window to admire the beautiful country side. A woman from behind yells "Look out!" so the man leans farther out the window to see. A loud "whack" sounded as the man's head was chopped off be a passing tree.

Gang-members are swabbing the buttons and receivers of pay telephones with a deadly combination of LSD and strychnine.

A state trooper was driving through a rural area one day and as he passed by a farm, the farmer yelled "PIG! PIG!" at him while shaking a pitchfork. The trooper wasn't the sensitive type and began yelling out the window "Redneck! Redneck!" as he ran into the large pig crossing the road.

A philosophy professor gives a final exam consisting entirely of a single word: "Why?" One student answers "Why not?" and receives an A.

A couple had just moved into a small castle they'd recently purchased and were excitedly searching all the nooks and crannies. In a large underground room they found many empty barrels that had been tapped years ago, and one that appeared to be full. They immediately tapped it to find that it contained a delicious brandy. They drank and served it at parties enjoying not only it's flavor, but that it could have been hundreds of years old. Months later when the barrel ran dry, they noticed it was still too heavy to be empty, they cut it open and found a shriveled corpse curled up in the barrel.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves represent the seven levels of cocaine dependancy.

In the 50's a town in Japan was renamed Usa so that products could be shipped to the US with the stamp MADE IN USA.

An extremely stressed student realized he couldn't take anymore during a particularly difficult exam. He put the ends of each of his #2 pencils up his nostrils and slams his face into the desk.

A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Until that moment he had been happily listening to his walkman.

Brazil legend - Homeless children are often "adopted" by a US or European agency where they are put into comas and they're organs are harvested as needed by the wealthy.

United Kingdom - Numerous Rolls Royce production plants around the country are actually secret nuclear weapons facilities.


A man runs off with a little cutie and sends his wife a Dear Jane letter telling him he's not coming back and he wants a divorce. He tells his wife to sell his Porsche and send him half the proceeds. She runs an ad "Porsche for Sale, $20" and sends him his check for $10.



Via Urban Legends and Modern Myths

10 Good Ask Metafilter Questions

People go to Metafilter to get any question answered. There is really no limit to what you can ask and you usually get comical stories with your answers. So join me as I take a look at some of the more unique Metafilter items. Click on the questions to go to the answers.

My dog has developed a romanitic interest in his doggy bed. What to do?

Is it possible to annoy an animal/person to death?

What should I name my hockey team?

I compulsively eat bits of myself when I shed them. How bad is this for me?

Long johns: Are you supposed to wear them accompanying underwear, or as underwear?

How can I stop caring so much about the appearance and status of my house and neighborhood?

My girlfriend is not fun. What do I do about this?

I was attacked by a house mouse.


Why does different sorts of alcohol affect you differently?

How do I tell my wife she's fat?

What should I ask metafilter? Leave your answers in the comments.

Via Ask Metafilter

Bizarre facts

• Lawn darts are illegal in Canada.
• The three winter months in the southern hemisphere are June, July and August.
• Did you know...
  Wine will spoil if exposed to light, hence tinted bottles.
• Did you know...
  A barnacle has the largest penis of any other animal in relation to its size.
• Did you know...
  A female ferret can die if she goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
• Earthworms have 5 hearts.
• A crocodile can open and close its jaw but cannot move it side to side.
• Goats do not have upper front teeth.
• If a lobster loses an eye or a claw it can usually grow a new one.
• Iguanas can recognize their human handlers and greet them differently, compared with strangers. Adam Sandler and Bill Gates rank number 1 and 2 among the most popular role models with male college freshmen.
• George Washington died after being bled by leeches.
• George Washington grew marijuana in his garden.
• A meteor has only destroyed one satellite, which was the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.
• Google receives more than 200 million search queries a day, more than half of which come from outside the United States. Peak traffic hours to google.com are between 6 a.m. and noon PST, when more than 2,000 search queries are answered a second.
• The United States has paved enough roads to circle the Earth over 150 times.

An endless supply is just a click away

Childrens letters to God

Just a good reminder of how dumb innocent children are.

Dear GOD,
Are you really invisible or is that just a trick? Lucy

Dear GOD,
Is it true my father won't get in Heaven if he uses his bowling words in the house? -Anita

Dear GOD,
Did you mean for the giraffe to look like that or was it an accident? - Norma

Dear GOD,
Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don't You just keep the ones You have now? -Jane

Dear GOD,
I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that okay? -Neil

Dear GOD,
Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. -Joyce

Dear GOD,
Please send me a pony. I never asked for anything before, You can look it up. -Bruce

Dear GOD,
I want to be just like my Daddy when I get big but not with so much hair all over. -Sam

Dear GOD,
I think the stapler is one of your greatest inventions. -Ruth M.

Dear GOD,
I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday. That was cool! -DJ

Click here for more

Top 20 Homicides

Every year, the F.B.I. investigates over 36,000 serious crimes including murder & homicide. These are a few of the top 20 ways in which someone was killed:
(Warning: Some of these are quite nasty)

• Alex Mijtus, 36 years old, was killed by his wife, armed with a 20 inch long vibrator. Mrs. Mijtus had had enough of her husband's strange sex practices and one pushing all 20 inches of the vibrator into Alex's anus until it ruptured several internal organs and caused severe bleeding.

• Peter Stone, 42 years old, was murdered by his eight year old daughter, who he had just sent to her room with no dinner. Young Samantha Stone felt that if she couldn't have dinner no one should, and she promptly inserted 72 rat poison tablets into her father's coffee as he prepared dinner. The victim took one sip and promptly collapsed (Samantha Stone was given a suspended sentence as the judge
  felt she didn't realize what she was doing, until she tried to poison her mother using the same method one month later).

• Megan Fri, 44 years old, was killed by 14 state troopers after she wandered onto a live firing, fake town simulation. Seeing the troopers all walking slow down the street, Megan jumped out in front of them and yelled, "Boo!" The troopers, thinking she was a pop up target, fired 67 shots between them, over 40 of them hitting their target. "She just looked like a very real looking target," one of the troopers stated in his report.

• Helena Simms, wife of the famous American Nuclear Scientist Harold Simms, was killed by her husband after she had an affair with the neighbor. Over a period of three months, Harold substituted Helena's eye shadow with a uranium composite that was highly radioactive, until she died of radiation poisoning. Although she suffered many symptoms, including total hair loss, skin welts, blindness, extreme nausea and even had an ear lobe drop off, the victim never attended a doctor's surgery or hospital for a check up.

• Military Sergeant John Joe Winter killed his "two timing wife" by loading her car with Trintynitrate explosive (similar to C4). The Ford Taurus she was driving was filled with 750 kilograms of explosive, forming a force twice as powerful as the Oklahoma Bombing. The explosion was witnessed by several persons, some up to 14 kilometers away. No trace of the car or the victim were ever found, only a 55 meter deep crater and 500 meters of missing road.

• Patty Winter, 35 years old, was killed by her neighbor in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Her neighbor, Falt Hame, for years had a mounted F6 phantom jet engine in his rear yard. He would fire the jet engine, aimed at a empty block at the back of his property. Patty Winter would constantly complain to the local sheriff's officers about the noise and the potential risk of fire. Mr. Hame was served with a notice to remove the engine immediately. Not liking this, he invited Miss Winter over "for a cup of coffee and a chat" about the whole situation. What Winter didn't know was that he had changed the position of the engine. As she walked into the yard, he activated it, hitting her with a blast of 5000 degrees, killing her
  instantly, and forever burning her outline into the driveway.

Complete list here

Steven Wright one liners

Steven Wright played the guy on the couch in half baked and has been a standup comedian for over 16 years. His humor is described as thinking "out of the box." My friend had me listen to one of his C.D.'s a few days ago and if your in the right mood, it can be quite funny.

If I ever had twins, I'd use one for parts

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

I took a course in speed waiting. Now I can wait an hour in only ten minutes.

Why doesn't the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie?

I got a new shadow. I had to get rid of the other one... It wasn't doing what I was doing.

I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I say, "I think I might have written that."

I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into another dimension.

A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, "Wish you were here."

I'm moving to Mars next week, so if you have any boxes...

I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... Perhaps you've seen it.

One time I went to a drive-in in a taxi cab. The movie cost me $95.

I went to a general store. They wouldn't let me buy anything specific.

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

Tons more here

People do dumb things

French farmer Michael LeMond shot himself in the foot when he opened fire on what he thought was a ghost.

The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.

A man in Clifton, Colorado apparently got so caught up in his "Tomb Raider" computer game that he forgot he wasn't supposed to use a real gun. Sheriff's deputies confiscated Douglas Miller's shotgun after he fired it at his computer screen.

A man in Taormina, Italy was hospitalized after swallowing 46 teaspoons, 2 cigarette lighters, and a pair of salad tongs.

A 25-year-old Argentine man pushed his 20-year-old wife out of an eighth-floor window after an argument, but her fall was broken when her legs became entangled in power lines below. A police spokesperson told the state-run Telam news agency that when the husband saw the woman dangling beneath him, he apparently tried to throw himself on top of her to finish her off. He missed, however, and fell to his death. Meanwhile, the woman managed to swing over to a nearby balcony and was saved.

Pierre Beaumard, a French factory worker suffering from various obsessional fears and an inability to relate to others, decided to join a therapy group. Mr. Beaumard was encouraged to sandwich himself between two matresses, and allow other group members to walk on him to "stamp out his complexes." After several minutes of this treatment, Beaumard was crushed to death.

In a related story, 9-year-old Derek Hume was run over by a 1 ton concrete roller. The boy escaped without a bruise, however, because the massive cylinder pressed him into the rain-soaked earth.

I saw a lady at work today putting a credit card into her floppy drive and pulling it out very quickly. I inquired as to what she was doing and she said she was shopping on the internet, and they asked for a credit card number, so she was using the ATM "thingy".

Tech Support: "What does the screen say now.." Person: "It says, 'Hit ENTER when ready'." Tech Support: "Well?" Person: "How do I know when it's ready?"

I was in a car dealership a while ago when a large new motor home was towed into the garage. The front of the vehicle was in dire need of repair and the whole thing generally looked like an extra in "Twister." I asked the manager what had happened. He told me that the driver had set the cruise control, then went in back to make a sandwich.

An actual tip from page 16 of the HP "Environmental, Health & Safety Handbook for Employees: "Blink your eyelids periodically to lubricate your eyes."

And the winner:

I am a medical student currently doing a rotation in toxicology at the poison control center. Today, this woman called in very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants. I quickly reassured her that the ants are not harmful and there would be no need to bring her daughter into the hospital. She calmed down, and at the end of the conversation happened to mention that she gave her daughter some ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants. I told her that she better bring her daughter in to the ER right away.

Via

Your day can't be that bad compared to these people.

A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an ax leaving her mentally retarded.

In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record. Suffering from the flu he came down eight hours short of the 400 day record, his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him and his phone and electricity had been cut off.

Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Till that moment he had been happily listening to his Walkman.

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale.

Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.

Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.


Via

THINGS THAT ARE DIFFICULT TO SAY WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK:

- Indubitably

- Innovative

- Preliminary

- Proliferation

- Cinnamon

THINGS THAT ARE VERY DIFFICULT TO SAY WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK:

- Specificity

- British Constitution

- Passive-aggressive disorder

- Loquacious Transubstantiate

THINGS THAT ARE DOWNRIGHT IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK:

- Thanks, but I don't want to have sex.

- Nope, no more beer for me.

- Sorry, but you're not really my type.

- Good evening officer, isn't it lovely out tonight.

- Oh, I just couldn't. No one wants to hear me sing.