Fast Facts
September 7, 2006
Close to 700,000 land mines were dug up from the banks of the Suez Canal after the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel.
All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in New York City was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
Ted Turner owns 5 percent of New Mexico.
It takes the insect-eating Venus flytrap plant only half a second to shut its trap on prey. The Venus flytrap can eat a whole cheeseburger.
Before 1850, golf balls were made of leather and stuffed with feathers.
Toronto was the first city in the world with a computerized traffic signal system.
The leech will gorge itself up to five times its body weight and then just fall off its victim. The Amazon leech uses a different method of sucking blood. It inserts a long proboscis into the victim as opposed to biting.
Statistically, the safest age of life is 10 years old.
All U.S. presidents have worn glasses; some of them just didn’t like to be seen wearing them in public.
Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats.
Jim Morrison of the Doors was the first rock star to be arrested onstage.
Scooby-Doo’s real first name is Scoobert. Shaggy’s real name is Norville. Casey Kasem was the voice of Shaggy.
One of the many Tarzans, Karmuala Searlel, was mauled to death by a raging elephant on the set.
The only person to decline a Pulitzer Prize for fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book “”Arrowsmith.””
Some coins used in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War were Spanish dollars, which could be cut into pieces, or bits. Because two pieces equaled one-quarter of $1, the expression “”two bits”” came into being as a name for 25 cents.
