Did you know that... - Another Mindless Tibits (Again!) "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. "O.K." was first popularized in an 1840 Presidential campaign. Back then, everyone seems to have a nickname, and when Martin Van Buren ran for President he was nicknamed "Old Kinderhook" after his birthplace in Columbia County, New York. His New York City supporters formed a club in his honor called The O.K. Club, and "O/K." became a rallying cry for their candidate. Van Buren lost. But "O.K." won, and it's the most widely used word in America. "Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos, actually) to keep from freezing. 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 A group of frogs is called an army. A group of geese is called a gaggle. A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of officers is called a mess. A group of owls is called a parliament. A group of ravens is called a murder. A group of rhinos is called a crash. A group of unicorns is called a blessing. A group of whales is called a pod. A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually talking. A whale's penis is called a dork. Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy. Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex. Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute. Ballroom dancing is a major at Brigham Young University. Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball. 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. Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village". Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fish was named Livingston. Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," but he did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Scott". Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike. Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed, and continue living. Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight. Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in the 1600s by a translator. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired." Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono. Cutting an onion alters its cell structure and puts sulfur compounds in contact with an enzyme, ultimately producing thiopropanel sulur oxide, and irritating gas with an acid base. The gas moves upward and is transported by the water in your eyes to the ocular tissues, causing irritation and tearing. Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy. 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." Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice." Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors. 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 tectonic destruction (2 is the smallest that can be felt unaided.) Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie. Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck. Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk. Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt. Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, they need gravity to swallow. If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation. 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. If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam." In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak. It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again. It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her. Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since. Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula." Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of linen. More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes. Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple. Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 year later. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the sub-atomic particles known as quarks for a random line in James Joyce, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape. Reindeer like to eat bananas. Rene Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling. Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson." Sir Isaac Newton was an ordained priest in the Church of England. Some biblical scholars believe that Aramaic (the language of the ancient Bible) did not contain an easy way to say "many things" and used a term which has come down to us as 40. This means that when the bible -- in many places -- refers to "40 days," they meant many days. Steve Young, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, is the great-great-grandson of Mormon leader Brigham Young. 'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand. Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself. Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with "Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six minutes. The "huddle" in football was formed due a deaf football player who used sign language to communicate and his team didn't want the opposition to see the signals he used and in turn huddled around him. The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth. The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie "Barbarella. 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". 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. The flag of the Philippines is the only national flag that is flown differently during times of peace or war. A portion of the flag is blue, while the other is red. The blue portion is flown on top in time of peace and the red portion is flown in war time. The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher. The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F. The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672. 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. The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds. The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural. The most common name in the world is Mohammed. The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy." The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb. The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep. The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children. The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows." The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off... Thus the saying. The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards." The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified is to poke someone's eye out. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo. The word "samba" means "to rub navels together." 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". There are two credit cards for every person in the United States. To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs -- it will let you go instantly. Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink." White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (Formerly of the Monkees). Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, otherwise it will digest itself.