Miscellaneous Trivia

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The gesture of a nose tap, in Britain, means secrecy or confidentiality. In Italy, a tap to the nose signifies a friendly warning.

In 1981 a guy had a heart attack after playing the game BERSERK - video gaming's only known fatality.

Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, appeared in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. His original name was Jumpman, but was changed to Mario to honor the Nintendo of America's landlord, Mario Segali.

Alcoholics are twice as likely to confess a drinking problem to a computer than to a doctor, say researchers in Wisconsin.

In the game Monopoly, the most money you can lose in one travel around the board (normal game rules, going to jail only once) is $26,040. The most money you can lose in one turn is $5070.

The Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington in the U.S., completed in 1942, was hailed in its time as a structure more massive than the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

The United States government keeps its supply of silver at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

A 17th-century Swedish philologist claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French.

The Metro subway of Washington, DC, has several really deep stations. Its Forrest Glen station - in the Maryland suburbs - is 196 feet deep and has the longest subway escalator in the Western Hemisphere. But MOST of the subway stations in Leningrad are deeper than that.

Out of all of the postage stamps in the United States with people's faces on them, there is not one that has the picture of someone alive.

"Fine turkey" and "honeycomb" are terms used for different qualities and textures of sponges.

In order to sell his sets of Shakespeare door-to-door, David McConnell offered free perfume to his customers. He realized the perfume was more popular and began selling cosmetics door-to-door. This began the company that grew into Avon.

Some china is called "bone" china because some powdered animal bone is mixed in with the clay used to make this china: it gives the china a special kind of strength, whiteness, and translucency.

Russians are buying skateboards from the U.S. - but not for recreational purposes. They see them as an answer to some of the country's transportation needs, because the boards are less expensive than bicycles and require little storage space. The first boards went to school instructors so they could train pupils how to ride them.

The "black box" that houses an airplane's voice recorder is orange so it can be more easily detected amid the debris of a plane crash.

The Colgate Company started out making starch, soap, and candles.

In 1881, Procter & Gamble's Harley Procter decided that adding the word pure to his Ivory soap would give its sales a necessary shot in the arm. Analysis proved that Ivory was almost 100% pure fatty acids and alkali, the stuff that most soap is made of. Ivory's impurities were limited to 0.56%—0.11% uncombined alkali, 0.28% carbonates, and 0.17% mineral matter. Harley marked his soap 99 and 44/100% pure, deciding that using the exact number sounded more credible than rounding up to 100%.

Since most people are right-handed, the holes on men's clothes have buttons on the right - to make it easier for men to push them through the holes. Well, that's easy, but aren't women mostly right-handed too? Women's buttons are on the OPPOSITE side so their maids can dress them. When buttons were first used, they were expensive and only wealthy women had them. Since a maid faces the woman she is dressing, having the buttons on the left of the dress places them on the maid's right.

Each of the suits on a deck of cards represents the four major pillars of the economy in the middle ages: heart represented the Church, spades represented the military, clubs represented agriculture, and diamonds represented the merchant class.

The 3rd year of marriage is called the leather anniversary.