Fascinating Facts and Trivia

In 1834, Dr. John Cooke Bennet added tomatoes to ketchup, which back in the day was made out of fish or mushrooms.

He alleged that his new ketchup would cure jaundice, rheumatoid arthritis, indigestion, and diarrhea, as they were packed with vitamins and antioxidants.

Since, as it turns out, the claims weren’t quite accurate, (shocker!) ketchup was no longer used as medicine by 1850.

If you could actually breathe in space without dying, you’d notice a pretty unique scent, which would smell like barbecue, gunpowder, and diesel fumes. These combined scents are created mainly by dying stars.

Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower' because in the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the 'upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters.

$283,200 is the absolute highest amount of money you can win on Jeopardy.

Almonds are members of the peach family.

Rats and horses can’t vomit.

The penguin is the only bird that can’t fly but can swim.

There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room during a dance.

I was just watching Fernanda and thinking how sad it is that in my opinion women can only seem kind, cute and have time for us guys when they're being paid to do it.
And this article in The Grauniad from last year shows the result. The birth rate down by 46% since 1947, 10% since 2012.
In twenty five years time they'll be a massive labour shortage and there'll be no babe channels because there'll be no girls to go on them!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...l-time-low

The longest TV ad of all time is 14 hours long.

Created by Old Spice for a product that supposedly “lasts forever,” the commercial features actor Terry Crews, among others, and is currently airing “for an eternity” online.

But since that’s not exactly possible on TV, a 14-hour version was put together and aired in São Paulo, Brazil, on December 8, 2018, earning the Guinness World Record for the longest TV ad ever.

For every tidbit of info we know about Shakespeare’s life, there are just as many that we don’t. And one thing historians aren’t too sure about is how Shakespeare’s name was actually spelled.

Frankly, he didn’t seem too sure either. The Bard himself used variations of his moniker such as “Willm Shakp,” “Willm Shakspere,” and “William Shakspeare.”

His contemporaries spelled it more than 80 different ways too, including “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.”

It turns out, the man never used “William Shakespeare” once, despite the fact that it’s become the accepted spelling of his name.

Bananas may be famously yellow, but according to one study, the usually sunny-toned fruit actually glows an “intense” blue color when put under black light (or UV lights).

Scientists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and Columbia University in the U.S. found that the degradation of chlorophyll that happens in the fruit while it ripens is the cause of the blue glow

If you remember blancmange and ice cream being advertised on television in commercials such as Angel Delight and Wall's Ice cream you might be surprised to learn that the advertisers used a little trick-as under the lights of a studio ice cream and blancmange would melt, so they used coloured mashed potato - which would explain why my mother could never get the Angel Delight to whip up to look like it did on the packet!

(15-01-2020 21:06 )GMach1 Wrote:  If you remember blancmange and ice cream being advertised on television in commercials such as Angel Delight and Wall's Ice cream you might be surprised to learn that the advertisers used a little trick-as under the lights of a studio ice cream and blancmange would melt, so they used coloured mashed potato - which would explain why my mother could never get the Angel Delight to whip up to look like it did on the packet!

Remember this was revealed in one of the tv programmes on adverts of the past a few years back as one of the tricks advertisers used to make their product look good