The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (8 page)

ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

Ancient Sybarites taught their horses to dance to music to make their parades more glamorous.

Ancient Sumerians thought the liver made blood and the heart was the center of thought.

The ancient Etruscans painted women white and men red in the wall paintings they used to decorate tombs.

Abdul Kassam Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.

At the turn of the previous millennium, Dublin had the largest slave market in the world, run by the Vikings.

A two-?hundred-?year-?old piece of Tibetan cheese was auctioned off for $1,513 in 1993.

Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant “plenty of excrement.”

In 1281, the Mongol army of Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan but was ravaged by a hurricane that destroyed their fleet.

The Toltecs, seventh-?century native Mexicans, went to battle with wooden swords so as not to kill their enemies.

There was a pony express in Persia many centuries before Christ. Riders on this ancient circuit, wearing special colored headbands, delivered the mail across the vast stretch of Asia Minor, sometimes riding for hundreds of miles without a break.

In ancient Japan, public contests were held to see who in a town could break wind loudest and longest. Winners were awarded many prizes and received great acclaim.

UNRECORDED HISTORY

During the Cambrian period, about five hundred million years ago, a day was only 20.6 hours long.

The name of the asteroid that was believed to have killed the dinosaurs was Chixalub (pronounced sheesh-?uh-?loob).

WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

Ra was the sun god of ancient Egypt.

In ancient Egypt, the apricot was called the egg of the sun, killing a cat was a crime punishable by death, and Egyptians paid their taxes in honey.

Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the death of their cats.

Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.

About three hundred years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were thirty.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian men never became bald. The reason for this, Herodotus claimed, was that as children, Egyptian males had their heads shaved, and their scalps were continually exposed to the health-?giving rays of the sun. In Egypt around 1500 B.C.E., a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.

If a surgeon in ancient Egypt lost a patient while performing an operation, his hands were cut off.

Pharaoh Ramses II died in 1225 B.C.E. At the time of his death, he had fathered 111 sons and 67 daughters.

The Egyptian city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E.

The Egyptian hieroglyph for one hundred thousand is a tadpole.

The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C.E.

Cleopatra married two of her brothers.

Preparing an Egyptian mummy sometimes took up to seventy days. Dead Egyptian noblewomen were given the special treatment of being allowed a few days to ripen so the embalmers wouldn’t find them too attractive.

On some mummies that have been unwrapped, the total length of the bandages has been about 1.5 miles.

Tomb robbers believed that knocking off Egyptian sarcophagi’s noses would stall curses.

A golden razor removed from King Tut’s tomb was still sharp enough to be used.

IT’S GREEK TO ME

The ruins of Troy are located in Turkey.

In 290 B.C.E., Aristarchus was the first Greek astronomer to suggest that the sun was the center of the solar system.

At the height of its power, in 400 B.C.E., the Greek city of Sparta had twenty-?five thousand citizens and five hundred thousand slaves.

In ancient Greece, women counted their age from the date they were married.

ROMAN HOLIDAY

High-?wire acts have been enjoyed since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Antique medals have been excavated from Greek islands depicting men ascending inclined cords and walking across ropes stretched between cliffs. The Greeks called these high-?wire performers neurobates or oribates. In the Roman city of Herculaneum, there is a fresco representing an aerialist high on a rope, dancing and playing a flute. Sometimes Roman tightrope walkers stretched cables between the tops of two neighboring hills and performed comic dances and pantomimes while crossing.

Trivia is the Roman goddess of sorcery, hounds, and the crossroads.

After the great fire of Rome in 64 C.E., the emperor Nero ostensibly decided to lay the blame on Christians residing in the city of Rome. He gathered them together, crucified them, covered them in pitch, and burned them. He walked around his gardens admiring the view.

Ancient Romans believed that birds mated on February 14.

Flamingo tongues were a common delicacy at Roman feasts.

Hannibal had only one eye after losing the other to a disease he caught while attacking Rome.

In ancient Rome, it was considered a sign of leadership to be born with a crooked nose.

In ancient Rome, weasels were used to catch mice.

It was decreed by law in the Roman Empire that all young maidens be fed rabbit meat because it would make them more beautiful and more willing.

Julius Caesar tried to beef up the population of Rome by offering rewards to couples who had many children.

Spartacus led the revolt of the Roman slaves and gladiators in 73 C.E.

The Pantheon is the largest building from ancient Rome that survives intact.

The Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.

The Roman emperor Commodos collected all the dwarfs, cripples, and freaks he could find and had them brought to the Colosseum, where they were ordered to fight each other to the death with meat cleavers.

The saying “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 was to poke someone’s eyes out.

All office-?seekers in the Roman Empire were obliged to wear a certain white toga for a period of one year before the election.

THE CHINA CLUB

Slaves under the last emperors of China wore pigtails so they could be picked out quickly.

The Chinese ideogram for trouble depicts two women living under one roof.

The Chinese Nationalist Golf Association claims the game is of Chinese origin (ch’ui wan—the ball-?hitting game) from the third or second century B.C.E. There were official ordinances prohibiting a ball game with clubs in Belgium and Holland from 1360.

The Chinese, in historic times, used marijuana only as a remedy for dysentery.

The Great Wall of China, which is more than 4,000 miles long, took more than 1,700 years to build. There is enough stone in the Great Wall to build an eight-?foot wall encircling the globe at the equator.

The world’s youngest parents were eight and nine and lived in China in 1910.

IN THEIR PRIME

William Pitt, elected in 1783, was England’s youngest prime minister at the age of only twenty-?four.

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

“GREAT” WARS

During World War I, almost fourteen million people died in battle.

During World War I, cigarettes were handed out to soldiers along with their rations.

Charles de Gaulle’s final words were “It hurts.”

At age ninety, Peter Mustafic of Botovo, Yugoslavia, suddenly began speaking again after a silence of forty years. The Yugoslavian news agency quoted him as saying, “I just didn’t want to do military service, so I stopped speaking in 1920; then I got used to it.”

Prior to World War II, when guards were posted at the fence, anyone could wander right up to the front door of the White House.

A family of six died in Oregon during World War II as a result of a Japanese balloon bomb.

Corcoran jump boots (Army jump boots) have 82 stitches on the inside of the sole and 101 stitches on the outside of the sole in honor of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions’ actions during World War II.

During conscription for World War II, there were nine documented cases of men with three testicles.

It took the United States only four days to build a ship during World War II.

During World War II, the Navajo language was used successfully as a code by the United States.

W. C. Fields kept $50,000 in Germany “in case the little bastard wins.”

World champion chess player Reuben Fine helped the United States calculate where enemy submarines might surface based on positional probability.

During World War II, Americans tried to train bats to drop bombs.

Escape maps, compasses, and files were inserted into Monopoly game boards and smuggled into POW camps inside Germany during World War II; real money for escapees was slipped into the packs of Monopoly money.

“John has a long mustache” was the coded signal used by the French Resistance in World War II to mobilize their forces after the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches.

Kotex was first manufactured as bandages during World War II.

Playing cards were issued to British pilots in World War II. If captured, the cards could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.

The phrase “the whole nine yards” came from World War II fighter pilots in the Pacific. When arming their planes on the ground, the .50-caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly twenty-?seven feet before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got the whole nine yards.

The universally popular Hershey bar was used overseas during World War II as currency.

The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

The Red Baron’s real name was Manfred Von Richtofen.

The first atomic bomb dropped on Japan fell from the Enola Gay, named after the unit commander’s mother. The second was dropped from a plane known as Bock’s Car.

A B-25 bomber airplane crashed into the seventy-?ninth floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.

HE SHOULD HAVE USED THE PATCH

The earliest recorded case of a man giving up smoking was on April 5, 1679, when Johan Katsu, sheriff of Turku, Finland, wrote in his diary, “I quit smoking tobacco.” He died one month later.

SHIP OF DREAMS

Each anchor chain link on the Titanic was about 175 pounds.

The Titanic had four engines.

The Titanic’s radio call sign was “MGY.”

The Titanic was running at twenty-?two knots when she hit the iceberg.

Two dogs were among the Titanic survivors.

When the Titanic sunk, there were seventy-?five hundred pounds of ham on it.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

In 1968, a convention of beggars in Dacca, India, passed a resolution demanding that the minimum amount of alms be fixed at fifteen paisa (three cents).

AMERICAN HISTORY 101

More than 150 people were tried as witches and wizards in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 1600s.

The $8 bill was designed and printed by Benjamin Franklin for the American Colonies.

During the American Revolution, many brides used to wear the color red instead of white as a symbol of rebellion.

Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States in 1789.

John Hancock was the only one of fifty signatories of the Declaration of Independence who actually signed it in July.

The first aerial photograph was taken from a balloon during the Civil War.

The Civil War was the first war in which news from the front was published within hours of its occurrence.

When John Wilkes Booth leaped on to the stage after shooting President Lincoln, he tripped on the American flag.

Robert E. Lee, of the Confederate Army, remains the only person, to date, to have graduated from the West Point military academy without a single demerit.

Robert E. Lee wore size 4½ shoe.

All the officers in the Confederate Army were given copies of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo to carry with them at all times. Robert E. Lee, among others, believed the book symbolized their cause. Both revolts were defeated.

Banks first used Scotch tape to mend torn currency during the Depression.

If a family had two or fewer servants in the United States in 1900, census takers recorded the family as lower middle class.

In 1954, boxers and wrestlers had to swear under oath they were not Communists before they could compete in the state of Indiana.

When Saigon fell, the signal for all Americans to evacuate was Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” being played on the radio.

THROUGH THE YEARS

In 1801, 20 percent of the people in the United States were slaves.

In 1829, two sisters in the United States, Susan and Deborah, weighed 205 and 124 pounds although they were only five and three years old, respectively.

In 1900, the third leading cause of death was diarrhea.

In 1917, Margaret Sanger was jailed for one month for establishing the first birth control clinic.

In 1937, yeast sales reached $20 million a year in the United States.

IT’S THE FASHION

Before the 1800s, there were no separately designed shoes for right and left feet.

Any Russian man who wore a beard was required to pay a special tax during the time of Peter the Great.

Children in the Chinook Indian tribe were strapped between boards from head to toe so they would have fashionably flat skulls.

Evidence of shoemaking exists as early as 10000 B.C.E.

In 1778, fashionable women of Paris never went out in blustery weather without a lightning rod attached to their hats.

In the marriage ceremony of the ancient Inca Indians of Peru, the couple was considered officially wed when they took off their sandals and handed them to each other.

Olive oil was used for washing the body in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Pirates thought having an earring would improve their eyesight.

Welsh mercenary bowmen in the medieval period only wore one shoe at a time.

Until the Middle Ages, underwater divers near the Mediterranean coastline collected golden strands from the pen shell, which used the strands to hold itself in place. The strands were woven into a luxury textile and made into ladies’ gloves so fine that a pair could be packed into an empty walnut shell.

In Ethiopia, both males and females of the Surma tribes shave their heads as a mark of beauty.

A BAD DAY TO GET OUT OF BED

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950.

The sinking of the German vessel Wilhelm Gustloff is the greatest sea disaster of all time. Approximately eight thousand people drowned.

In the Great Fire of London in 1666, half of London was burned down but only six people were injured.

Influenza caused more than twenty million deaths in 1918.

More than half a million people died as a result of the Spanish influenza epidemic.

TGIF?

In the nineteenth century, the British Navy attempted to dispel the superstition that Friday was an unlucky day to embark on a ship. The keel of a new ship was laid on a Friday; she was named HMS Friday, commanded by a Captain Friday, and finally went to sea on a Friday. Neither the ship nor her crew was ever heard of again.