I Bet Ya Didn't Know

Feb. 20, 1962: John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth in Friendship 7.

What do these words have in common (besides each having eight letters)? captions - clasping - lifespan - panelist - pleasing - pralines When typed normally, each requires the use of every finger once.

Cats rule! There are now 68.9 million pet cats and 61.6 million canine companions, both record highs. Turtles, snakes, and lizards combined to slither up to 2.8 million.

Ferrets rock! At nearly 1 million, these fun-loving pets continue to be a craze, and most owners have two.

You now have 144 fewer bones than you had as an infant. Many of your baby bones fuse together. So you start out with 350 and wind up with only 206. The last to fuse is the collar bone. Somewhere from age 18 to 25.

A crumb of bread crust has 8 times more of an antioxidant that may prevent cancer than a crumb from the rest of the slice.

The Proteus aircraft, designed to cruise at altitudes of up to 60,000 feet for up to 18 hours, can be flown remotely from the ground.

The J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, CA, cost the late oil magnate nearly $42,000,000 to build, and he left $1,271,900,000 to maintain it, yet he never took the time to see it.

J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the FBI, was scared by a black cat. He stepped on its tail in a raid on the Roger Touhy gang, and the cat's yowl was Hoover's greatest moment of fear in 30 years as head of the G-men. (Chicago, Ill.--Dec, 29, 1942)

The average American eats 5 gallons of frozen desserts a year.

The lily leaf caterpillar sews itself a coat by stitching together with strands of silk 2 sections of a lily pad.

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

On average, the Statue of Liberty's fingernails weigh 100 lbs apiece.

Hoover Dam, on the border between Nevada and Arizona, contains 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco, California, to New York City, New York, a distance of 2,930 miles.

All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.

Admiral James H. Whitshed (1762-1849) joined the British Navy at the age of 11 and became its commander-in-chief 76 years later.

That condensed water vapor in the sky left behind by a high flying jet is a CONTRAIL.

Dentists recommend that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

President Grover Cleveland had the first telephone installed in the White House in the late 1880's. He always answered the phone himself.

Cracker Jacks were introduced in the year 1896, but the prizes weren't included in the boxes until the year 1912.

A huge statue of Buddha, which lay ignored in the fields near Bangkok, Siam, for years, was found to have under its top coating of plaster 400 pounds of gold.

Rodrigo Ponce de Leon (1443-1492), famed Spanish army officer, to retrieve a glove dropped by Ana de Mendoza at a reception attended by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, leaped into a pit filled with ferocious lions. He recovered the glove and escaped unharmed (1483, Seville, Spain).

In the 3rd to 2nd century B.C, Eratosthenes measured the radius of the earth and came within one-percent of the actual value determined by today's space craft technology.

The Mountain of the Monks near Kayseri, Turkey, is the location of 60 churches, monasteries and chapels, which have been dug out of the rocks and were used by refugee Christian monks for 300 years.

The cuckoo ray is the only creature in nature that has eyelids inside its eyes.

The coat of arms of Adam Ries (1492-1559), the celebrated German mathematician, embraces the formulas 2 times 2 equals 4 and 4 divided by 2 equals 2, which he considered the greatest representations of truth.

A drinking glass, dropped by Anna Harding in Reno, Nev., on St. Valentine's Day, broke to form a perfect heart.

A goose quill, encased in a metal tube with a supply of ink sealed in the tube, was constructed in Leipzig, Germany, in 1781.

King Charles XII (1682-1718) of Sweden, while in exile in Turkey, by merely writing letters to the sultan, persuaded him to change the Turkish government 4 times and to declare war on Russia 3 times, all in a period of 2 years.

The term "anchorman" was coined with regard to the respected Walter Cronkite on "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite", likening his lead position to that of an anchor on a relay team. For a time in Sweden, TV news anchors were called "Cronkiters" in honor of Cronkite.

A building in which silence is enforced, like a library or school room, is referred to as a "silentium."

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.

The porcupine's love for salt often leads the animal to roadways or walkways where salt has been sprinkled to melt the ice. They will lick and gnaw on anything containing salt, such as saddles, canoe paddles, and ax handles.

Male western fence lizards do push-ups on tree limbs as a courtship display for females.

President William Taft kept a cow on the White House lawn to supply him with fresh milk. He was the last president to do so.

1776 - George Washington unveiled the Grand Union Flag, the first national flag in America after King George III of England called on American forces to surrender.

1876 - The first British trademark was registered--to Bass Pale Ale.

The national park that gets the most visitors is the Great Smoky Mountains, in Tennessee and North Carolina, with 9.3 million visitors in 2002.

The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.