Miscellaneous Trivia

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The roar that we hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear. Any cup-shaped object placed over the ear produces the same effect.

In 1982, the last member of a group of people who believed the Earth was hollow died.

A man named John Bellavia has entered over 5000 contests, and has never won a thing.

The famous painting of "Whistler's Mother" was once bought from a pawn shop.

Revolvers cannot be silenced because of all the noisy gasses which escape the cylinder gap at the rear of the barrel.

In 1961, Henry Matisse's painting Le Bateau hung upside down in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It remained upside down for forty-one days until someone noticed. It's estimated nearly 116,000 people passed in front of the painting before the error was noted.

The number 4 is the only number that has the same number of letters in its name as its meaning.

A standard 747 Jumbo Jet has 420 seats.

According to Dennis Changon, spokesman for the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, Canada - if all of the commercial planes in the world were grounded at the same time there wouldn't be space to park them all at gates.

If you lace your shoes from the inside to the outside the fit will be snugger around your big toe.

In 1931, an industrialist named Robert Ilg built a half-size replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa outside Chicago and lived in it for several years. The tower is still there.

The first manager of the Seattle Space Needle, Hoge Sullivan, was acrophobic - fearful of heights. The 605 foot tall Space Needle is fastened to its foundation with 72 bolts, each 30 feet long. The Space Needle sways approximately 1 inch for every 10 mph of wind. It was built to withstand a wind velocity of 200 miles-per-hour.

The first revolving restaurant, The Top of the Needle, was located at the 500-foot level of the 605-foot-high steel-and-glass tower at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, Washington. It contained 260 seats and revolved 360 degrees in an hour. The state-of-the-art restaurant was dedicated on May 22, 1961.

The foundations of the great European cathedrals go down as far as forty or fifty feet. In some instances, they form a mass of stone as great as that of the visible building above the ground.

Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently Hungarian.

The roads on the island of Guam are made with coral. Guam has no sand. The sand on the beaches is actually ground coral. When concrete is mixed, the coral sand is used instead of importing regular sand from thousands of miles away.

The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York are an engineering feat. The air circulators in the tunnels circulate fresh air completely every ninety seconds.

The official soft drink of the state of Nebraska - Kool-Aid.

Ivory Soap was originally named P&G White Soap. In 1879, Harley Proctor found the new name during a reading in church of the 45th Psalm of the Bible: "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad."

Studebaker still exists, but is now called Worthington.