Fascinating Facts and Trivia

Interesting with 906 posts the top poster on here is...Carl Gen-X

The odds of being born male are about 51.2%, according to census.

Scotland has more redheads than any other part of the world.

There is an average of 61,000 people airborne over the US at any given moment.

Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same aeroplane in case there is a crash.

The most popular first name in the world is Muhammad.

The surface of the Earth is about 60% water and 10% ice.

7% of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

I know 7% doesn’t sound like a lot, but that actually works out at 16.4 million American adults.

The top six foods that make your fart are beans, corn, bell peppers, cauliflower, cabbage and milk.

It’s probably best if you avoid eating any of these if you’re going on a dinner date!

While trying to find a cure for AIDS, the Mayo Clinic made glow in the dark cats.

This is due to their use a specific protein that was fluorescent green.

They used this protein to find out if their tests worked: if the animal glowed, the outcome was successful.

Pirates wore earrings because they believed it improved their eyesight.

Along with many other reasons! Due to superstitions, they thought it protected them from bad eyesight (or even blindness), seasickness, and drowning.

A woman tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building.

She jumped from the 86th floor but was blown back onto the 85th floor by a gust of wind.

Standing almost 1,500 feet tall, there’s no way anyone could survive that fall.

However, when Elvita Adams tried to kill herself by jumping, a strong gust of wind blew her to the floor below.

The worst injury she sustained was a fractured hip.

If you were to fly through space at the speed of an average jumbo jet, a journey to the Sun would take 20 years.
A journey to the next nearest star to us (Proxima Centuri) would take 8 million years.

American tourists can often get landmarks in London confused. For example, some tourists wanted to know what time Piccadilly Circus started and some confused men mistook Scottish Widows pension posters as advertising high class call girls! There is no truth to the rumour that a female porn star was a little perturbed to discover Big Ben(the giant bell in the Elizabeth Tower) wasn't the name of a British porn star

Highbrow journalist for the Times David Aaronovitch is pretty outspoken about most things but he has always had a rebellious side. This surfaced on the ITV quiz programme University Challenge in the 1960's when he and the other members of his team were annoyed at how elitist the programme was decided to answer Trotsky to every question put to them by Bamber Gascoigne, the resident quiz master.

To his credit Bamber somehow kept his cool although he did ask them to stop being silly and at a few points the recording was stopped-being clever they then answered Lenin to some questions. David has since apologised and actually appeared on Christmas University Challenge where again he mentioned it but apologised. Other famous alumni that went on to bigger and better things were actress Miriam Margolyes, the late Clive James, Stephen Fry and feminist Germaine Greer.

Bobby Seagull(yes, that is his real name) and Canadian Eric Monkman achieved fame on that show as contestants and then became friends and presented a television programme where they travelled the country looking at the amazing, weird and wacky. A second programme was commissioned.