Welcome to the Attic!

The first baby born on the Mayflower was called Oceanus Hopkins.

No census was ever taken in Bhutan (which is a positively ancient country) until 1975.

The global population of grasshoppers tends to rise and fall in 9.2-year cycles.

Elephant herds post their own sentries. If the sentry sees danger, it raises its trunk and the entire herd is alerted.

The statue The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, is actually a statue of the poet Dante.

The Mona Lisa is actually a portrait of a middle-class Florentine women whose husband's name was Francesco del Giacondo. Typical. You can't find the name of the subject of one of the world's most famous paintings, but you can find her husband's name.

Twins are born with less frequency in the eastern hemisphere than in the western.

Charles Lindbergh was the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic. He was the first to fly solo.

It is impossible to sneeze and keep your eyes open at the same time.

Every human has their own unique tongue print.

Some ancient Chinese recipes: Celestial Thunder: the tongues of a hundred peacocks spiced with chili powder from the western provinces and flavored the sperm of pubescent boys. Three-Day Glory: soy beans mixed with fresh ginseng, the penis of an ox, and a dried human placenta.

In the written Chinese language, the character that means trouble represents two women in one house.

Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. How could he? The fiddle hadn't been invented yet!

In ancient Greece, no one was born or died on the island of Delos. When someone on Delos became pregnant or ill, they were quickly whisked away until nature took its course.

The University of Calcutta in India has 175,000 students.

Bhutan is the only country in the world without a telephone service.

The crimes of theft, disorderly conduct, larceny, armed robbery, assault and battery, breaking and entering, and rape all increase dramatically during the full moon. Murder does not.

In Turkey, the color of mourning is purple. In China, and in Moslem countries, you wear white when someone dies.

Roughly 1/6 of the world's population is in China.

There is less than 1/10 of a calorie's worth of glue on a postage stamp.

Thiopentone is a drug that can kill a human in one second if it is injected directly into the blood.

Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew marijuana on their plantations.

One 75-watt bulb gives off more light than three 25-watt bulbs.

In a trial in 1740, a French judge found a cow guilty of sorcery and sentenced it to hang.

Prisoners condemned to death in Mongolia were once nailed into wooden boxes and left out on the open plains to die of starvation.

Many Hindu women in India stain their teeth with henna to make themselves look pretty.

In the 4th century, it was considered macho to wear skirts. Even in Victorian times, very little boys (younger than three) wore dresses and long hair.

In the late 1800s, it was fashionable for women to wear gold rings through their nipples.

The lungfish can live out of water in suspended animation for up to three years.

An orange tree brought to France in 1421 lived and bore fruit for 473 years.

The name orchid, as in orchid flower, comes from a Greek word meaning 'testicles.'

Honey found in the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharohs was tasted by archaeologists and was found to edible.

There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants.

There are 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the ten opening moves in a game of chess.

The country of Monaco is less than one mile square.

Reno, Nevada is west of Los Angeles, California.

The female praying mantis devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating even after the female has bitten his head off.

The word 'live' spelled backward is 'evil.'

The words 'naked' and 'nude' do not mean the same thing. Naked means unprotected. Nude means unclothed.

The googol is a 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

In colonial Connecticut, children could be put to death for disobeying their parents.

Rememberane of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, contains almost 1.5 million words.

Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote a 6,000-word poem when he was twelve years old.

Lewis Carroll, author of the famous book Alice in Wonderland, was a child porn photographer.

In Elizabethan times, the slang for 'to die' meant 'to have an orgasm.'

In his bok Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact speeds of rotation and their exact sizes. He did this over 100 years before either moon was discovered.

Benjamin Franklin did not fly a kite in a thunderstorm and discover electricity. His son did.

Lycanthropy is the study of werewolves.

The ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.

When gentlemen in medieval Japan wished to settle an agreement, they peed together, letting the streams of urine crisscross.

According to the laws of modern mathematics, time is a curve, there is no such thing as a straight line, and parallel lines eventually meet.

Crystals reproduce themselves.

In 1970, a bidder in London paid $20,000 for a glass paperweight.

In 1975 a birdhouse costing $10,000 was built in Quebec.

In the original movie King Kong, the figure of King Kong was actually only 18 inches high.

The song Happy Birthday to You was written in 1936 by two schoolteachers, and their estates still collect royalties from it.

No one knows where Mozart is buried.

Muhammed is the most common name in the world.

Until 1796, the state of Tennessee was known as the state of Franklin.

You can see the stars during the day at the bottom of a well.

Lord Byron had four pet geese that went everywhere with him, even to social gatherings.

Attila the Hun was a dwarf.

Beethoven poured cold water over his head to inspire him before he sat down to compose.

Tom Fuller, an fourteen-year-old slave, could tell the exact number of seconds in any given time. Once when asked the precise number of seconds in seventy years, responded with the correct answer in a little more than a minute. Yet he could not read or write.

As a child, Blaise Pascal once locked himself in his room for several days and would not allow anyone to enter. When he emerged, he had figured out all of Euclid's geometrical propositions on his own.

The great English poet Thomas Chatterton died when he was seventeen years old.

An egg will float if placed in sugar water.

Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was present at the assassinations of three presidents: his father's, Garfield's, and McKinley's. After the last assassination, he refused to attend a state affair ever again.

Before the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1952, half of all males in the country were Buddhist monks.

Elizabeth I of England owned 3,000 gowns.

The average person might possibly be able to live eleven days without water.

Sarah Bernhardt slept in a coffin. Big deal. My brother does, too.

John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln, was the greatest matinee idol of his era.

In 1221 in Nishapur, Ghengis Khan killed 1,748,000 people in one hour.

Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted to write the Declaration of Independence as people were afraid he might try to include a joke.

Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion, but was talked out of it by her doctor.

Anne Boleyn was put on trial for witchcraft because she had six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot, and three breasts. This condition is known as polymazia.

Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese people put salt in their tea instead of sugar.

Tablecloths were originally meant to serve as towels for guests to wipe their hands and faces after a meal.

In Japan there is a deadly martial art, called tessenjutsu, that depends solely upon the use of a fan.

Conquering Arab armies in the tenth century used primitive forms of the flame thrower and hand grenade. The flame throwers spurted flames of niter and sulphur through copper tubes. The grendades were made of terra-cotta shaped to fit the hand, filled with flammable naphtha, and covered with relief designs to prevent them from slipping while being thrown.

In the town of Tidikelt in the Sahara Desert, there was once a ten-year period in which no rain fell.

In 1816 there were frosts and snow in the northeastern United States every month of the year. There were similar conditions in France, Italy, and Spain. 1816 was known to these countries as 'the year without a summer.'

Salt Lake City, Utah, gets an average of 17 inches more snow annually than Fairbanks, Alaska.

A ten-gallon hat holds less than a gallon.

It takes 100 pounds of rainwater to produce a single pound of food from the earth.

A rat can fall out the top window of a five-story building with little or no injury.

A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.

Many dinosaurs lived to be more than one hundred years old.

Lanolin, an essential ingredient in many cosmetics, is actually a foul-smelling, waxy substance extracted from the fleece of sheep.

A bridge in Lima, Peru, was made of mortar not mixed with water but with the whites of 10,000 eggs. This bridge was built in 1610 and is still standing.

The Great Pyramid in Egypt took 400,000 men 20 years to construct.

The Great Wall of China is not the only manmade stucture visible from space. Certain highways can be seen too.

In the mid sixteenth century Hideyoshi, an emperor of Japan, ordered all the swords in the country to be collected and melted down. The metal was then used to create a giant statue of Buddha. It took six years to build and exactly ten years after it was completed it was destroyed by an earthquake. Not a trace of the statue remains today.

As a youth, Adolf Hitler was a landscape and portrait painter and, according to some who have seen his work, a pretty good one. Of Hitler's three hundred paintings, only twelve survive today.

In 1924 a Ford automobile cost $265

In medieval China it was not uncommon for a mother to breast-feed her child until the child was seven years old.

Yes, it is possible for a fetus in the womb to get the hiccups.

In a single human cell, there are between 10,000 and 100,000 coded messages known as genes. If all the directions contained in these codes were written down, they would fill the equivalent of approximately 10,000 volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A female condor lays one single egg in two years.

One of the so called 'remedies' of the Black Plague was to apply the entrails of a young pigeon or puppy onto the forehead of a victim.

A person cannot taste food unless it is mixed with saliva. For instance, if you put a few grains of a strong-tasting substance such as salt on your dry tongue, you would taste nothing. Once you put your tongue back in your mouth though, you would definitely taste it. Try it! It worked for me.

People living in high altitudes have more blood in their bodies than people living at low altitudes.

There were 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress as of 1973. This is enough to supply every person in Washington D.C. with about 72 free books. The Library of Congress is has the biggest book collection in the world.

Flamingo tongues and fried roses were a common delicacy (isn't that an oxymoron?) at ancient Roman feasts.

Forsenic scientists can determine a person's sex, age, and race by examining a single strand of their hair.

It is impossible to commit suicide by holding one's breath. At the worst, the person who tries will eventually lose consciousness and immediately begin to breathe normally again.

In 1800, only fifty cities on earth had a population of less than 100,000

In Bangladesh, the life expectancy is about 35. Only fifty-five percent of babies born live past age five.

In 1854 there wer 700 people living in the area now called California. One hundred and twenty-five years later, California had a population of over 21,520,000. In little more than a century, the population of this area increased about 30,000 times.

If the world were a single town of one hundred people, one of those hundred would have a college education. Thirty would be able to read and write, fifteen would have adequate housing (the other eighty-five would live in huts), and fifty would be hungry most of the time. That's pathetic!

In 1971 in a New York City hospitla, a woman weighing less than one hundred pounds ran a fever over 114 degrees, and survived without brain damage or physiological afteraffects.

The first message ever sent over a telegraph wire was "What hath God wrought?"

Goldfish only retain their color if kept in a pond or bowl with adequate light.

It is estimated that millions of trees in the world are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and forget where they hid them.

Playing cards in India are round.

Richeborg, a dwarf who was raised as a servant of the Orleans family in eighteenth-century France and stood 23 inches tall at maturity, was employed as a secret agent during the French Revolution. Disguised as an infant and wrapped in blankets, Richeborg was taken in and out of Paris in the arms of a nurse, all the while carrying crucial secret documents. Richeborg died in Paris at slightly less than one hundred years of age.

Earthworms have as many as ten hearts.

The monarch butterfly can detect tastes 12,000 times more subtle than those discernable by human taste buds.

Spiders have transparent blood.

Thomas Edison invented wax paper.

Contrary to popular belief, the bowie knife was not invented by James Bowie but by his brother Rezin Pleasant Bowie.

Punctuation did not come into use until the fourteen hundreds. Before that words written by scribes rantogetherlikethis.

One out of every eight letters used in written English is an e.

Every citizen in Kentucky is required my law to take a bath at least once a year.

In 1976 a Cecilia M. Pizzo filed suit against the U.S. government to nulify the Louisiana Purchase. She claimed that the Purchase, which covered a good part of the southern end of the United States, was unconstituional and an illegal seizure of her family's land. A New Orleans federal judge ruled that Mrs. Pizzo's lawsuit was filed 176 years too late. The six-year statute of limitations on such suits had run out.

In Japan, if a black cat crosses your path, it is considered a sign of good luck.

In 1976 a Los Angeles secretary named Jannene Swift officially married a fifty-pound rock in a ceremony witnessed by more than twenty people.

A plastic container can resist decomposition for as long as 50,000 years.

If one cubic kilometer of a mineral-rich asteroid were brought to earth, it could provide the world with about two hundred years' worth of nickel.

The Incas of Peru developed the decimal system centuries before it was used in Europe.

The Mormon leader Brigham Young had twenty-seven wives and over fifty children.

The highest number recognized by modern mathematics is the centillion, 1 followed by 600 zeroes. Anything over that is infinity.

In Nepal, cow dung is thought to have antiseptic properties. It is often used to pack a woman's vagina after she has given birth. This custom is thought to be the cause of the high incidence of tetanus among Nepalese women.

Over 90 billion pennies have been placed in U.S. circulation since 1900.

There is a club in the United States whose only membership requirement is that one be named Jim Smith. As of 1981, there are 781 members living as far away as Scotland and New Zealand. The members meet once a year at their annual 'Jim Smith Fun Festival.'

Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, had a nephew named Cuitlahac. Translated, Cuitlahac's name means 'plenty of excrement.'

It is possible for any American citizen to give whatever name they chooes to an unnamed mountain or hill just as long as they do not name it after themself. To name a hill or mountain, all you have to do is obtain a U.S. Geological Survey topographical map and find a peak that has no official title. After writing the Chamber of Commerce or the county clerk to make sure that the hill is still without a name, send your suggested name to Executive Secretary of Domestic Geographical Names, U.S.G.S. National Center, Mail Stop 523, 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Virginia 22092.

The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after the first baby ever born in the White House, Ruth Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland.

The following is the name of an Indian chief who died in 1866 in Wisconsin: Chief Lepodotemachoselachogalekranioleipsanodrimupotrimmatosiphioparaomelitokatakelcummenokichleipkossuphophattoperisteralektruonoptegkephalokigklopelsiolagoosiraioealetraganopterugon

In 1950 Ralph Edwards, moderator of the radio show 'Truth or Consequences,' offered free national publicity to any town that would name themselves after his show. The town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, obliged, and today it is still called Truth or Consequences.

An earthquake in the Shensi Province of China in 1556 killed 830,000 people in less than three hours.

Richard the Lionheart, the guy Robin Hood liked so much, was gay.

Paul Revere, the famous American patriot, was once court-maritialed for cowardice.

In 1966 a former British major named Roy Bates moved, with his wife and child, to a 10-by-25-foot cement caisson built seven miles off the British coast during World War II. Bates named the platform Sealand and declared it to be an independent country. He crowned himself king and his wife queen, issued postage stamps, designed passports, and even created currency. Today Sealand is the world's smallest country, and King Roy still reigns. As it is beyond the univeral three-mile limit, Bates and his kingdom are outside the jurisdiction of any country.

In 1972 a Japanese soldier was found hiding deep in the jungles of Guam, living on a diet of snails, rats, frogs, insects, and wild nuts. He had been there for twenty-seven years and the first thing he said, according to legend, was "Is the war over yet?"

Based on the total number of people tested since I.Q. tests were devised, women have, on average, a higher I.Q. than men. Nyah, nyah.

Ivan the Terrible, czar of Russia, killed his own son in a fit of fury.

A man in Albania smoked 12 packs of cigarettes a day and lived to the ripe old age of eighty-six.

The moon weighs 81 billion tons.

Stand with your right leg, foot, and shoulder pressed against a wall, and try to raise your left leg keeping above-mentioned body parts against the wall. It is impossible.

Eskimos use refridgerators to keep food from freezing.

The first marathon was run by an exhausted Greek soldier from the Battle of Marathon to Athens (26 miles, 385 yards) who announced, "Rejoyce, we have conquered!" and dropped dead.

Every one of Israel's cows has an I.D. card.

The average airline stewardess's nose is 1.75 inches long.

The man with the longest name in the world was Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irwin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerorft Sr.

All the tea in China weighs 317,000 tons.

The adult human body contains enough phosphorus for 220 match-heads, enough fat for six bars of soap, and enough iron to make a one-inch nail.

Birds eat about ninety times their weight each year.

It takes exactly one-tenth of a second to blink your eyes.

One followed by eighteen zeroes is a quintillion, and one followed by thirty zeroes is a nonillion.

The average human radiates enough energy to light a 120-watt bulb.

Newborn baby possums are so small, it takes 20 of them to fill a single teaspoon.

The human body takes about two days to digest one meal's worth of food.

If every single vein, artery, and capillary in your body was stretched out to form one line, that line would be long enough to wrap around the earth four times and then some.

There are more sea worms than any other creature in the world. The sea worm population stands at about 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The more shrimp a flamingo eats, the darker pink it becomes.

Llamas can wiggle their ears one at a time.

The Eiffel Tower weighs about fourteen million pounds.

There are more bugs in one square mile of earth than there are human beings on the planet.

The number of words in a half-hour newscast would only take about one/sixth of a page of space in a newspaper.

The Cossack dancers of Russia must lift their legs to a certain height while dancing cause there are knives beneath them and if their legs are too low, they gut cut off.