Thursday, April 7, 2011

11 Things I Didn't Know A Month Ago



----- The National Weather Bureau didn't issue tornado warnings before 1950. (The Powers That Be thought that issuing warnings would induce panic.)

----- "OMG" can be traced back to a letter written by a British admiral in 1917.

----- Some 240 million 911 calls are made in the US every year.

----- William Hazlitt boasted that he never changed an opinion after he reached the ripe old age of 16.

----- Germans perfected the glass eye in about 1835.

----- Virtually all of our nerves are present in sharks. (The muscles and cranial nerves that we use to talk and swallow are used by sharks and fish to move their gills.)

----- 4.7% of Americans surveyed say that they've fallen asleep at least once while driving during the previous 30 days.

----- 122 dogs died while being transported by US airlines during a recent 5-year period (2005-2010); 31 were bulldogs. (Apparently their short muzzles make it harder for them to breathe.)

----- More than half of the people in the Middle East live in countries that do not produce oil.

----- The majority of snake bites occur in drunk males in their 20s.

----- Hitler was officially declared dead on Oct 25, 1956.

1 comment:

  1. I fell asleep while driving once on the Ohio Turnpike. But it wasn't in the previous 30 days. More like 30 years. Long ago and in a different life.
    That's funny about the snakes. I wonder if there is some kind of redneck or fraternity drinking game that involves snakes. Yuck. I wish I hadn't wondered that.

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