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Trivia ~ People
Page 4
The only bone in your body not attached to another bone is the hyoid, in your throat, where it supports your tongue. When you use it in the process of speaking you are accessing the part of your brain known as Broca's area.
That explains compulsive talkers. Their tongue has cut loose from everything else and their thoughts are coming from a place that's Broca.
In Iceland, people are listed by their first names in the phone book.
If a person yells for eight years, seven months and six days, that person would produce enough sound energy to heat a cup of coffee. Hey, my ex-wife could be the answer to the energy crisis.
People began to weave fabric during the Neolithic Era; domesticated cotton first came into widespread use in ancient India around 3000 BC.
At the Mustang Ranch, the famous legalized bordello in Nevada, the workers spent an average of 15 minutes with each client. What a coincidence. That's the same average time doctors spend with patients these days.
According to the AMA, about 25 percent of American doctors communicate with their patients through email. About 30 percent of physicians have websites. And according to a recent Harris poll, 80 percent of patients queried say that would like to interact more with their doctors via their computers.
Whoop-de-doo. Now your doctor is in a position to GIVE you a virus.
What distinguishes you from apes? Your thumb, of course. Monkeys can’t do much with that first digit except stick it in another monkey’s eye. But with it you can make tools and type out messages on your cell phone and enter data into your PDA. In Nigeria, it even substitutes for the index finger to indicate you-know-what.
No wonder I couldn’t hitch a ride in Nigeria.
The latest status symbol is to have one or two zeroes at the end of your cell phone number. In Santa Monica California, a custom-car maker paid $5000 to buy a cell phone number containing five zeroes from the cell phone customer who already had it .
And then he went off into the sunset, whistling, “I got plenty of nuthin’ . . .”
Ask most people which city has the largest population of American Indians and they’ll probably guess Phoenix, Los Angeles or some other western metropolis. And they would be wrong, because it’s New York City that’s home to more Native Americans -- 41,289 in the 2000 census -- than any other city.
I can state that as the unequivocal truth - without reservation.
What happens if you go several nights without sleep ?
You would be tired, short-tempered and dead if you kept it up long enough . You would also yawn a lot .
Sleep is just about as basic as food to human beings. Your brain needs it to function . People who haven't slept for several days cannot reason very well or concentrate . They may even hallucinate, become schizophrenic and lose touch with reality. (Drinking a pitcher of Margaritas is a quicker and far more pleasant way to accomplish the same thing.) Sleep deprivation also impairs the brain's ability to connect to the nervous system. Without sleep , you can't walk, see or hear very well .
Dream deprivation, scientists conjecture, may also impair our ability to think straight. Fish, spiders and snakes do not dream . Did you ever meet one with a Ph.D.?
Many of us get our picture of Puritans and Puritanism from Hawthorne's, "The Scarlet Letter." According to it, the Puritan's certainly made the A-team when it came to Puritanism.
But a new book, "Sexual Revolution in Early America," suggests that a lot of people were living loose in that sourpussocracy. Puritan court records should have come in a plain brown wrapper. According to them, fornication seems to have been almost as common as traffic violations. Shall I be frank? The records also show that the tight-lipped men who ruled New England weren't the only bastards in residence. Married couples were encouraged not only to do their duty to reproduce, but also to get it on with gusto. And unmarried couples who "bundled," a custom in which they took to bed, separated by a board, were adept at tunneling.
The author of this book, by the way, is named Richard Godbeer. Hmmmm.
Only one person in two BILLION will be live to be 116 or older.
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.
The average person will produce 25,000 quarts of saliva in their lifetime. Enough to fill two swimming pools.
Americans spend more money each year on dog food than on baby food
Your chances of dying by falling down a flight of stairs are one in a million (1,000,000). When crossing the street it's only 50,000 to 1 in your favor. At least you don’t have to worry about a small meteorite hitting your house this year, there’s only a 1 in 182,138,880,000,000 chance of that happening.
Over 11 million people sell their blood annually in the US?
50% of Americans have a gray hair before they reach 50.
According to a recent survey, it is easier for teenagers to obtain marijuana than cigarettes or alcohol?
83% of the people struck by lightning are men
At the University of Calgary, you can take a credit course on HBO’s “The Sopranos.” The teacher says of the series’ episodes that they are worthy of the kind of attention he usually gives to Tennessee Williams, Alfred Hitchcock and Shakespeare.
I hope he understands that this is not about Maria Callas, Leontyne Price and Charlotte Church.
Until the first Divorce Court was established in 1857 it was common practice for British men to trade their unwanted spouses like any other possession.
People usually don’t dream about money, psychologists and psychiatrists say. But they do dream about big beautiful houses, yachts, vacations on the Riviera and expensive food and clothing.
What a relief! We’re not as shallow as I had feared.
As of this writing, the record for most scorpions lived with by a human being in a small room is held by a Malaysian woman. She hung out with 2,700 of them for 30 days. Amazingly, she was stung only 7 times, but did become unconscious at one point.
And all I do is occasionally bang my head against the wall. I feel so inadequate.
The average person can live up to eleven days without water, assuming a outside mean temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mark and Roberta Griswold of Allen Park, MI kissed continuously for a record 29 hours. It not only was the record for the longest kiss, but also for the worse case of chapped lips. GUINNESS WORLD RECORD HOLDER 2000
Think of common Indian tribe names. You know - like Apache and Sioux. Do you know where we got those names? Not from the tribes themselves, who usually used a word in their own tongue that meant "the people," but from their enemies.
The Zuni Indians originated the word "Apache" for their foes. In fact, in Zuni, Apache means "enemies." Similarly, "Sioux" means "little snakes" in Ojibwe.
What do you suppose "Mohawk" meant to their enemies? "Haircut?"
The first pedestrian fatality of the auto age occurred on October 13 1899 in - where else? - New York City when a Mr. Henry Bliss, a 68-year-old real estate broker was hit by - what else? - a taxi. The gentleman was debarking from a southbound streetcar at the corner of Central Park West and 74th Street and had turned to help a lady descend the steps when he got smashed right into the history books. The driver, Arthur Smith was arrested and held on $1,000 bail while Henry Bliss was taken to Roosevelt hospital, where he died
One hopes he made as much of an impression on the lady as he did on the street.
The first lawyer to practice in New York City, Adriaen van der Donck, arrived in 1653. He had a problem. He was the only lawyer in town. The government of the then New Amsterdam didn't think it was fair to allow him to argue a case in court since the other side could not be similarly represented by counsel.
But lawyers can argue either side of a case and can talk out of both sides of their mouth at the same time. You only need one.
Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear & smell better.
With the prices they pay for perfume, they better smell better!!. As far as hearing better, I wonder, ever heard of selective hearing?
How do alcohol breath tests work? There's no way around it: drinking and driving don't mix. But there has to be a way to determine one's level of sobriety, often fixed by law at a certain amount of alcohol in the blood. That's why anyone so childish as to ignore common sense will be pulled over by the police and asked to play blow up the balloon.
The first breath tests, introduced in the late 1930s and in common use by the 60s, actually used balloon-like bags containing chemicals that were turned into vinegar by breath alcohol. If what was left in the bag after you breathed into it could go on a salad, you were in trouble. More recently they have you breathe into an electronic device in which alcohol on your breath fuels an electric current. If you are sufficiently lit up, the machine will be, too.
About one person in 8,500 has a condition called situs inversus in which all the internal organs are located in mirror-image to the usual arrangement. People with situs inversus have their heart on the right and their liver on the left. The condition does not usually result in any medical problems.
No one knows why some people are internally flip-flopped, but recently scientists have discovered some clues.
In the earliest days of embryo development there is a critical period during which cilia (tiny beating hairs) cause a current to flow across the embryo. This current carries certain substances to one side more than the other, creating a left-right difference that becomes amplified into the left-right positions of the organs. People with situs inversus may have a genetic quirk that reverses or removes that current.
In the museum's Egyptian collection I marveled at the ancient stone carving showing a group of men and women watching slaves roll several big rocks. A guy next to me nudged his girlfriend and offered to translate. He said it means, "Ladies and gentlemen, The Rolling Stones."
Seriously, there is a popular notion that hieroglyphics, the famous picture writing of ancient Egypt, was simply a written language. But - surprise! - it did phonetically "spell out" their spoken language, combining alphabet-like symbols with the pictures. Unfortunately, the symbols appear to have represented only consonants, not vowels - nbdy knws hw th lngge snded.
The language itself was a mixture of Cushitic and Berber languages from northern Africa and words taken from the Semitic tongues spoken in nearby Asia. But you can just call it Ancient Egyptian
One quarter of the bones in the human body are in the feet.
An Illinois woman went on national TV to show how she breast-feeds her 8-year-old son. “We are your standard middle-class American family,” she explained, and speculated that she expects to stop the practice when he’s a teenager.
I hope so. Heck of a thing if junior wants to have a friend over for dinner . . .
The human body is approximately 2/3 water, but the human brain is 80% water.
Americans bitten by poisonous snakes have a better than even chance of surviving even if they don't go to the doctor.
Are you feeling lucky today? Not me, thank you very much.
On average, in a mild climate, a person can go about eleven days without water. That may be true, but some guys at work would never make it through the day without a couple of cans of beer.
The average person in America sees more than 20,000 TV commercials in a year.
Did you know that when your stomach growls, it is called "borborygmi," It sounds a bit like the sound you hear.
According to Websters: Main Entry: bor·bo·ryg·mus Pronunciation: "bor-b&-'rig-m&s Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural bor·bo·ryg·mi /-"mI/ Etymology: New Latin, from Greek borborygmos, from borboryzein to rumble Date: circa 1796 : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas
It happens when your stomach walls squeeze together in an attempt to mix and digest food and there's no food there. Gases and digestive juices slosh around in your empty stomach and before you know it - borborygmi
In the French court of Louis XI, the fine ladies lived mainly on soup because they believed that excessive chewing would cause them to develop premature facial wrinkles.
Until the 1970s, Jessica was a very unusual name. William Shakespeare, who may even have made up the name, called Shylock's lovely daughter Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, but it was not until recently that large numbers of people began choosing this name for their daughters.
Approximately five million Americans suffer from a recurring ailment known as SAD. This is an acronym for "seasonal affective disorder." This wintertime syndrome can be treated with light.
All of our bodily functions, even our heart, stop, when we sneeze
The human hand contains an average of 1,300 nerve endings per square inch.
The most commonly used language in the world is Chinese. It is spoken by over 1 billion people and China has more English speakers than the United States.
The Andaman Islanders and the Pygmies are the only world's peoples not known to use fire.
As late as 1890, nearly 75 percent of Americans had to fetch their mail from the post office. A community had to have at least 10,000 people to qualify for home delivery, and most people lived in small towns or on farms.
The largest known kidney stone weighed 1.36kg. (2.9988 lbs.)
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