The Mega Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham
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• Jesse James would run back home to his mother following a crime. His obsessive love for his mother extended to him marrying a woman called Zerelda, the same name as his mother and one that was uncommon in the 1800s.
• In 1983, a woman was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
• When he was a boy, Thomas Edison suffered a permanent hearing loss following a head injury. One of his ears was pulled roughly as he was being lifted aboard a moving train.
• While sleeping, one man in eight snores, and one in ten grinds his teeth.
• The most celebrated levitator in history was St Joseph of Copertino, a dim-witted monk who would allegedly soar into the air whenever he felt religious ecstasy. He had no control over his ‘flights’, which could last for minutes and were attested to by scores of witnesses, including the Pope.
• Mozart once composed a piano piece that required a player to use two hands and a nose in order to hit all the correct notes.
• When Napoleon wore black silk handkerchiefs around his neck during a battle, he always won. At Waterloo, he wore a white cravat and lost.
• The Roman emperor Nero married his male slave Scorus in a public ceremony.
• The shortest place names in the USA are ‘L’, a lake in Nebraska, ‘T’, a gulch in Colorado, ‘D’, a river in Oregon flowing from Devil’s Lake to the Ocean, and ‘Y’, a city in Arkansas, each named after its shape.
• In Europe, ‘E’ is a river in Perthshire, Scotland; there are villages called ‘Å’ in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and a ‘Y’ in France.
• The Pacific Caroline Islands has a place named ‘U’ and a peak in Hong Kong is called ‘A’.
• Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight saving.
• The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminium.
• It snowed in the Sahara Desert on 18 February 1979.
• Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.
• 200 million years ago, the Earth contained one land mass called Pangaea.
• It is illegal to swim in Central Park, New York.
• At the deepest point (11.034km), an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.
• The largest wave ever recorded was 85m high near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971.
• Antarctic means ‘opposite the Arctic’.
• The largest iceberg recorded, in 1956, was 200 miles long and 60 miles wide, larger than the country of Belgium.
• The surface of the Dead Sea is 400m below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, which is only 75km away.
• The country of Benin changed its name from Dahomey in 1975.
• The Nova Zemlya Glacier in the former USSR is over 400km long.
• Canada (9,970,610 sq km) is larger than China (9,596,961 sq km) which is larger than the USA (9,363,130 sq km).
• The coldest temperature ever recorded was -70°C in Siberia.
• The second largest US state in the 1950s was California.
• Maryland was named after Queen Henrietta Maria.
• The only country to register zero births in 1983 was the Vatican City.
• Florida first saw the cultivation of oranges in 1539.
• The world’s largest National Park is Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.
• The world’s largest exporter of sugar is Cuba.
• There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.
• England’s Stonehenge is 1,500 years older than Rome’s Colosseum.
• In 1896, Britain and Zanzibar were at war for 38 minutes.
• The Eskimo language has over 20 words to describe different kinds of snow.
• Numbering houses in London streets only began in 1764.
• More than 75 per cent of all the countries in the world are north of the equator.
• Less than one per cent of the Caribbean Islands are inhabited.
• Fulgurite is formed when lightning strikes sand.
• Mountains are formed by a process called orogeny.
• Obsidian, used by American Indians for tools, weapons and ornaments, is dark volcanic glass.
• Eighty-two per cent of the workers on the Panama Canal suffered from malaria.
• In May 1948, New Zealand’s Mount Ruapehu and Mount Ngauruhoe both erupted simultaneously.
• The Incas and the Aztecs were able to function without the wheel.
• The tree on the Lebanese flag is a Cedar.
• Tokyo was once called Edo.
• The Atlantic Ocean covers the world’s longest mountain range.
• In 1825, Upper Peru became Bolivia.
• New York City contains 920km of shoreline.
• There are three Great pyramids at Giza.
• The southwestern tip of the Isle of Man is called ‘The Calf of Man’.
• The world’s largest Delta was created by the River Ganges.
• The Scottish city Edinburgh is nicknamed ‘Auld Reekie’ meaning ‘Old Smoky’.
• The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea speak about 700 languages (including localized dialects, which are known to change from village to village), approximately 15 per cent of the world’s total.
• The world’s first National Park was Yellowstone National Park.
• Sixty per cent of all US potato products originate in Idaho.
• The northernmost country claiming part of Antarctica is Norway.
• The ‘DC’ in Washington DC stands for District of Columbia.
• New York’s Central Park opened in 1876.
• The inhabitants of Monaco are known as Monegasques.
• The East Alligator River in Australia’s Northern Territory was misnamed. It contains crocodiles, not alligators.
• France contains the greatest length of paved roads.
• The city of Istanbul straddles two separate continents, Europe and Asia.
• Rio de Janeiro translates to ‘River of January’.
• The furthest point from any ocean is in China.
• The percentage of the population that walks to work is higher in the state of Alaska that the rest of the United States.
• The busiest stretch of highway in the US is New York’s George Washington Bridge.
• Ropesville, Lariat and Loop are all towns in Texas.
• Venetian blinds were invented in Japan.
• In Venice, Venetian blinds are known as ‘Persian blinds’.
• If you head directly south from Detroit, the first foreign country you will enter is Canada.
• One in every