Amazing Facts

Amazing Facts

If you want to spend some very interesting time, go to the website mentalfloss.com and click onto the Amazing Facts link. Some of the facts there you may already know, but I can guarantee you will come across others that will make you say, "Wow, I never knew that". Here are some examples of what you can discover:

• Swanson sold a whopping 55 million TV dinners in 1954, the first year it introduced them. At least one tray never got reheated; it's in the Smithsonian.
• Though the U.S. only makes up 5% of the world's population, we house nearly 25% of the world's prison population.
• Only 1% of all the readily accessible water on earth is drinkable.
• Ty Cobb was baseball's first millionaire.
• Artist Ellen Barbara Senger, who created the Little Miss Sunbeam bread mascot, also illustrated the Dick and Jane book series.
• The first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel wasn't a young male daredevil, but rather a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor.
• Canada has more lakes than all other countries combined.
• An estimated 15% to 20% of people who receive gift cards never redeem them.
• Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive.
• The strings attached to boxes of animal crackers were originally placed there so that the container could be hung from the branches of a Christmas tree.
• The phrase "under god" in the pledge of allegiance has not always been in the pledge. It was put in during the Eisenhower administration.
• Invented in the 1940's in Tennessee, Mountain Dew was created to be mixed with whiskey. In fact, its bottles were first designed to look like moonshine jugs and the original Mountain Dew labels featured outhouses, stills and hay-chewing yokels.
• When he died in 1977, Elvis Presley had $1,055,173.69 in a non-interest-bearing checking account.

copyright 2009-2010 by Lane A Geyer

photo by deb