Fast Facts
March 8, 2006
The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its body size is the ant.
Spiders never spin webs in structures made of chestnut wood.
Obsidian balls, or occasionally brass balls, were placed in the eye sockets of Egyptian mummies. The bandaging of a mummy often took from six to eight months and required a collection of special tools, including a long metal hook that was used to draw the dead person’s brain out through his nose.
When a man died in ancient Egypt, the females in his family would smear their heads and faces with mud and wander through the city beating themselves and tearing off their clothes.
Butterflies taste with their hind feet.
Among the Danakil tribesmen of Ethiopia, when a male dies, his grave is marked with a stone for every man he killed.
In Turkey, the color of mourning is violet. In most Muslim countries and in China, the color is white.
In ancient Egypt, when merchants left the country on business trips, they carried small stone models of themselves. If they died abroad, these figures were sent back to Egypt for proxy burial.
Seedless oranges were not grown in the United States until 1871. The first ones came from Brazil and were planted in California.
Botanically, the pumpkin is a fruit.
An orange tree may bear oranges for more than 100 years. The famous “”Constable Tree,”” an orange tree brought to France in 1421, lived and bore fruit for 473 years.
The banana cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man. Furthermore, the banana is not a tree; it is an herb, the largest known of all plants without a woody stem or solid trunk.
It is impossible to commit suicide by holding one’s breath. At worst, the person who tries this will eventually lose consciousness. The lungs will then start to breathe again automatically.
The dying words of Carl Panzram, murderer of 23 people, were, “”I wish the whole human race had one neck, and I had my hands on it.””
