The "second unit" films movie shots that do not require the presence of actors.
Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make - $5 million going to actor's salaries.
The world's second largest pipe organ is located at the Organ Grinder on 82nd avenue in Portland, Oregon.
Games Slayter, a Purdue graduate, invented fiberglass.
One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because cotton growers in the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition. It is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.
Olympic Badminton rules say that the bird has to have exactly fourteen feathers
The music group Simply Red is named because of its love for the football team, Manchester United, who have a red home strip.
In case you ever find yourself piloting a dogsled, shout "Jee!" to make the dogs turn left and "Ha!" to go right.
Richard Nixon left instructions for "California, Here I Come" to be the last piece of music played at his funeral ("softly and slowly") were he to die in office.
The earliest document in Latin in a woman's handwriting (it is from the first century A.D.) is an invitation to a birthday party.
Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston.
Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world, at 0.08988 g/cc
Hydrogen solid is the most dense substance in the world, at 70.6 g/cc
The longest U.S. highway is route 6 starting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts going through 14 states, and ending in Bishop, California...
The movie "Paris, Texas" was banned in the city of Paris, Texas, shorty after its box office release.
The 'y' in signs reading "ye olde.." is properly pronounced with a 'th' sound, not 'y'. The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England use the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y".
Pickled herrings were invented in 1375.
The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977) is 3263827.
Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man, woman, and child in the world.
At McDonalds in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies instead of cherry ones.

The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
The international telphone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
A byte, in computer terms, means 8 bits. A nibble is half that: 4 bits. (Two nibbles make a byte!)
A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
The airport in La Paz, Bolivia is the world's highest airport.
The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
Chicago is closer to Moscow than to Rio de Janeiro.
Original copy of the Declaration of Independence is lost. The copy in Washington D.C. is what is referred to as a holograph. That is a term for a handmade copy of a document and is not the same as a laser produced hologram.
Singpore is the only country with one train station.
The little bags of netting for gas lanterns (called 'mantles') are radioactive--so much so that they will set of an alarm at a nuclear reactor.
When measuring fonts 'point size' refers to the height of capital letters (one point being one 72nd of an inch). 'Pitch' is a horizontal measurement of the number of letters which can be printed in an inch.
The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with exactly one endpoint is P.
In the movie "the Right Stuff" there is a scene where a government recruiter for the Mercury astronaut program (played by Jeff Goldblum) is in a bar at Muroc Dry Lake, California. His partner suggests Chuck Yeager as a good astronaut candidate. Jeff proceeds to badmouth Yeager claiming they need someone who went to college. During the conversation the real Chuck Yeager is playing a bartender who is standing behind the recruiters eavesdropping. General Yeager is listed low in the movie credits as 'Fred.'
"Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
Nauru is the only country in the world with no official capital. (Its government offices are all in Yaren
District, but there's no official capital.)

South Africa is the only country with three official capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.
Lucy Ricardo's maiden name was McGillicudy.
Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon wil be about three statute miles away.
The one-hundred eleventh element is known as "unnilenilenium"
The longest muscle name is the "levator labii superioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.
The longest time someone has typed on a typewriter continuously is 264 hrs., set by Violet Gibson Burns.
The Dutch town of Leeuwarden can be spelled 225 different ways.
There was once a town named "6" in West Virginia.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
The oldest word in the English language is "town"
The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.
Tigars have striped skin, not just striped fur.
Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee posthumously of all crimes of treason.
The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.
There are 22 stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.

After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently
Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.
A Laforte fracture is a fracture of all facial bones. It would allow one to pull on another face and remove it like a mask if not held on by skin.
Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
The Earth-Moon size ratio is the largest in the our solar system, excepting Pluto-Charon.
Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5! Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tetonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.)
Most snakes have either only one lung, or in some cases, two, with one much reduced in size. This apparently serves to make room for other organs in the highly-elongated bodies of snakes.
A twelve-foot anaconda can catch, kill, and eat a six-foot caiman, a close relative of crocodles and alligators. While these snakes are not usually considered to be the *longest* snake in the world, they are the heaviest, exceeding the reticulated python in girth.
Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.
It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her.
Cinderella is known as Tuhkimo in Finland.
If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe.
There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.
The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.
According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, it is possible to go slower than light and faster than light, but it is impossible to go at the speed of light.
In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch.
Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
The "heat" of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.
Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand
was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize *this* was the day of the changeover.

In left hand drive countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Japan, and Australia, drivers sit on the right hand side of the car. Except for Sweden, where drivers sat on the left, as in North-America.
Japan is the third most densely populated country in the world. First is the Netherlands, followed by Belgium.
Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".
Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.
Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."
The Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's original name was Temujin.
Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherd.
The type specimen for the human species is the skull of Edward Drinker Cope, an American paleontologist of the late 1800's. A type specimen is used in paleontology as the best example of that species.
The first word spoken by an ape in the movie Planet of the Apes was "Smile".
The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order.
The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"
Hummingbirds are the only animals able to fly backwards
All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in NYC was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
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 dirt road that General Washington and his soldiers took to fight off General Clinton during the Battle of Monmouth was called the Burlington Path.
The only social fraternity founded during the Civil War was Theta Xi fraternity, at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1864.
The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
Several buildings in Manhattan have their own zip code! The World Trade Center has several.
Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan means
"adversary", devil means "liar".
A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.

Geller and Huchra have made three-dimensional maps of the distrubution of galaxies. In each layer of the map some galaxies are grouped together in such a way that they resemble a human being.
Avocado is derived from the Spanish word 'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning testicle.
The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.
Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.
Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
The smallest port in Canada is Port Williams, Nova Scotia.
The Canadian province of Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is half an hour behind Atlantic standard time.
Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.
The second longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".
Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese. Big Ben was slowed five minutes one day when a passing group of starlings decided to take a rest on the minute hand of the clock.
The Velvet Underground was named after a book on the S&M culture.
The Velvet Underground's first manager was Andy Warhol, who also produced their first album and designed the cover artwork. The cover artwork for the album (called "The Velvet Underground and Nico") featured a bright yellow banana that could be peeled off to reveal a bright pink banana underneath, with the label "Peel Slowly and See." "Peel Slowly and See" is the title of the Velvet Underground comprehensive boxed set, which is the only currently-available Velvet Underground recording to feature a peelable banana. The peelable banana caused substantial delays in the production of the VU's first album and contributed to Lou Reed's firing Andy Warhol as the group's manager.
The "wild" horses of western North America are actually feral, not wild.
Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish much more easily than they learn English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish much more easily than they learn Japanese.
New Zealand kiwis lay the largest eggs with respect to their body size of any bird.
Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
Sting got his name because of a yellow-and-black striped shirt he wore until it literally fell apart.
Every photograph of an American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.

The topknot that quails have is called a hmuh.
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth ... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint -- no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.
There is a type of parrot in New Zealand that likes to eat the rubber strips that line car windows.
New Zealand is also the only country that contains every type of climate in the world.
Cockroaches' favorite food is the glue on envelopes and on the back of postage stamps
In 1969, the last Corvair was painted gold.
Ralph Kramden made 62 dollars a week.
The only way to stop the pain of the flathead fish's sting is by rubbing the same fish's slime on the wound it gave you.
Betsy Ross was born with a fully formed set of teeth.
Betsy Ross's other contribution to the American Revolution, beside sewing the first American flag, was running a munitions factory in her basement.
Devo's original name was going to be De-evolution. They shortened it to Devo.
Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book 'The Naked Lunch'.
Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman.
Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stone's emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the 'Sticky Fingers' album.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were the two left-handed Beatles.
Chris Ford scored the first ever NBA three-point shot.
Of all the East Coast States, New Hampshire has the shortest coastline, about fourteen miles.
New Hampshire is also the only State name the has four consecutive consonants in it (in the same word).
Ontario is the only Canadian Province that borders the Great Lakes.

Alaska has the longest border with Canada of all the fifty states.
Montana has the longest border with Canada of the lower forty-eight States.
Montana also borders the most Canadian Provinces of all the fifty states. It borders three of them.
Arkansas is the only US State that begins with "a" but does not end with "a". All the other States that begin with "a", Arizona, Alabama and Alaska, also end with "a".
Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible: Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer.
Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
Wilma Flinestone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
Lenny Kravitz's mother played the part of "Helen" on "The Jeffersons."
The term "devil's advocate" comes from the Roman Catholic church. When deciding if someone should
become a saint, a devil's advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.
Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, the reverse of how a record works.
The term "Mayday" used for signaling for help (after SOS), it comes from the French term "M'aidez" which is pronounced "MayDay" and means, "Help Me"
Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did start in a barn belonging to Patrick and Katherine O'Leary. The O'Leary's house was one of the few that survived the fire. The O'Leary's house had to be guarded by soldiers for weeks afterwards, however, because many enraged residents wanted to burn it down.
The biggest bell is the "Tsar Kolokol" cast in the Kremlin in 1733. It weighs 216 tons, but alas, it is cracked and has never been rung. The bell was being stored in a Moscow shed which caught fire. To "save" it the caretakers decided to throw water on the bell. This did not succeed in -- the water hit the superheated metal and a giant piece immediately cracked off, destroying the bell forever.
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
The smallest mountain range in the world is outside of Marysville, California and is named the Sutter Buttes.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.
Many species of bird copulate in the air. In general, a couple will fly to a very high altitude, and then drop. During their descent, the birds mate. Sometimes the couple gets too involved and SPLAT!
If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die because they need gravity to swallow.
There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.
You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter "A" in the English language to spell a whole number.
The only member of the band ZZ Top without a beard has the last name Beard.
Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sidewards, like a scissor, to extract the juices from the food.
The letters H I O X in the latin alphabet is the only ones that look the same if you turn them upside down or see them from behind.
The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a "porcelator".
When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home to a sellout crowd, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.
In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."
Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott".
Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.
The metal part at the end of a pencil is twenty percent sulfur.
John Larroquette of "Night Court" and "The John Larroquette Show" was the narrator of "The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre."
Vietnamese currency consists only of paper money; no coins.
Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting while he was alive, Red Vineyard at Arles.

A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
A pig's penis is shaped like a corkscrew.
It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
Skin is thickest is at the back -- 1/6 of an inch.
The most sensitive finger is the forefinger.
Alaska is the most northern, western and eastern state; it also has the highest latitude,the most eastern longitude and the most western longitude.
Some of Beethoven's symphonies were performed in Kentucky before they were performed in Paris, France.
The word denim comes from 'de Nimes', or from Nimes, a place in France.
Dublin comes from the Irish Dubh Linn which means Blackpool
Scottish is the language called Gaelic, whereas Irish is actually called Gaeilge.
The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life"
A penguin only has sex twice a year.
Mr. Spock's (of Star Trek) blood type was T-Negative
The Dutch town of Abcoude is the only reasonably sized town/city in the world whose name begins with ABC.
A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
New Jersey has a spoon museum featuring over 5,400 spoons from every state and almost every country.
Eleven square miles of southwest Kentucky (Fulton County) is cut off from the rest of the state by the
Mississippi River. If you wish to travel from this cut off section to the rest of the state or vice-versa, you must first cross a bordering state.
Point Roberts in Washington State is cut off from the rest of the state by British Columbia, Canada. If you wish to travel from Point Roberts to the rest of the state or vice versa, you must pass through Canada, including Canadian and U.S. customs
A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge.
A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
The only city in the United States to celebrate Halloween on the October 30 instead of October 31 is
Carson City, Nevada. October 31 is Nevada Day and is celebrated with a large stret party.