Fascinating Facts and Trivia

A sheep, a duck and a rooster were the first passengers in a hot air balloon. in 1783, the first hot air balloon was launched carrying a sheep, duck, and a rooster. The flight lasted for 8 minutes before landing safely with its passengers.

In Uganda, around 48% of the population is under 15 years of age. Of the 41 million inhabitants, nearly half of those are youths. If you were to expand the age to just 30, that brings the percentage up to 77%!

The average male gets bored of a shopping trip after 26 minutes. Meanwhile, women don’t get tired of shopping until around 2 hours!

In the 16th Century, Arab women could initiate a divorce if their husbands didn’t pour coffee for them. Today, this would be unheard of. But back then, coffee was an integral part of Turkish society. No one knows why exactly this was acceptable, but the fact remains that it was!

Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to watch television for 3 hours. The average person has the chance to recycle 25,000 cans in their lifetime – that’s 75,000 hours of television!

After the premiere of “16 and Pregnant,” teen pregnancy rates dropped. MTV may not have the most wholesome programs, but after the premier of this show, teen pregnancy dropped by 5.7% within 18 months of the show airing.

Approximately 10-20% of U.S. power outages are caused by squirrels. Harmless and cute as they seem, these fuzzy little creatures aren’t as innocent as you think! Squirrels have a tendency of chewing the wires, but luckily it’s a simple fix.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are all banned in China. Those aren’t the only ones either – over 8,000 domain names are blocked. Other major banned social network sites include Pinterest and Tumblr.

Honeybees can recognize human faces. Whereas before it was thought that only large brained mammals could distinguish faces, but honeybees can do this as well. They see faces in a compilation of 5,000 individual images like pixels.

From memory
I am sure you all remember Raiders of the Lost Ark and the scene in the market place when Indy is looking for Marian who has been snatched by swarthy arabs for the Nazis. He is searching for her and suddenly the crowd moves away and reveals a fiercesome swordsman who proceeds to whirl his huge sword about, but then Indy just reaches for his gun and shoots him dead. That scene was meant to be pretty dramatic but it is fair to say(when I saw it at least) it got the biggest laugh in the cinema.

In Superman the Movie veteran actor Marlon Brando (who appears with Suzanna York) as Kal-El's father Jor-El, but he is literally only on screen for a few minutes. For that brief cameo he was paid $1m.

Back to Raiders Of the Lost Ark. Remember the scene when both Marian and Indy are trapped inside a giant pyramid with the spiders, snakes and other gruesome things. The set piece was Indy climbing onto a giant statue of Anubis and loosening it so he could make it fall and smash through the wall to get out. Stuntman Martin Grace(whose wife Wendy Leach doubled for Karen Allen(Marian) got ready to ride the statue hanging on to the whip, but according to him, he says that the statue moved before he was ready and nearly got smashed into the wall. Luckily he wasn't hurt.

And finally. In Doctor No, a deadly tarantula snake is sent by Strangways to Bond's room and in a tense scene Bond wakes up to see something moving under the bedclothes. It is only a few seconds later we see the spider appearing to crawl up his body, but again look closer at that scene and you will see Bond(Sean Connery) is under a pane of glass(you can see an actual reflection) and so perfectly safe although tarantulas don't bite you unless you provoked them.

Speaking of snakes, in a scene from the making of Raiders, Steven Spielberg is seen watching them put snakes on the ground, but rather than writhe about menacingly they just stayed still so they were squirted with water to get them to move. The main shot when Indy falls and is confronted by a cobra was not as dangerous as it first looked. If you look very carefully you might be able to see the cobra is in fact behind a pane of glass protecting it from Harrison Ford and him from it.

Australian fast bowler Mitchell Starc has a brother called Brandon Starc who is a world class high jumper. There was once an Aussie 400m hurdler called Daniel BATMAN.

Unfortunately there was also a long distance runner called Wan Quing, but thankfully he didn't make a final so the likes of David Coleman and Ron Pickering(both stalwarts of BBC athletics) didn't have to struggle with that name.

Everyday over 47 million litres of water are pumped from the London Underground network to stop the tunnels flooding.

Chicken soup is not called Jewish penicillin for nothing, 9/10 mothers swear by it and it's even been mentioned in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal. (That said having been riddled with cold since Friday, I've just had a bowl of it with sweetcorn, rice and peas added to bulk it up - not the best thing for a Summer's day but it does fight the cold)

(25-06-2019 19:12 )GMach1 Wrote:  From memory
I am sure you all remember Raiders of the Lost Ark and the scene in the market place when Indy is looking for Marian who has been snatched by swarthy arabs for the Nazis. He is searching for her and suddenly the crowd moves away and reveals a fiercesome swordsman who proceeds to whirl his huge sword about, but then Indy just reaches for his gun and shoots him dead. That scene was meant to be pretty dramatic but it is fair to say(when I saw it at least) it got the biggest laugh in the cinema.

^ that scene was changed because Harrison Ford was suffering from a bad case of the shits and he simply couldn't be bothered to do the original fight scene.

Another Raiders of the Lost Ark fact..

The sound effects for the giant rolling boulder were created by holding a mic near the tyres of a Honda Civic as it coasted down a gravel embankment.

The average person will get at least two colds a year but it is possible to have flu as well as a cold through the year, although flu season is usually from October to January.

The shooshing noise from the doors opening on the Enterprise in Star Trek was a piece of paper being slid out of an envelope and then enhanced by special effects.

Cleopatra was actually alive closer, in years, to the invention of the Iphone than she was to the building of the pyramids.