Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Trivia Time!

I apologize to my readers for the dearth of new material on this blog. I especially want to apologize to my most avid readers (speaking of which -- a big shout out to the good folks at the Piscataway Asylum for the Criminally Deranged.) The fact is that I've been fairly busy these last few days: Saturday I cleaned my bathroom, Sunday was sock drawer inventory day, Monday I had to get an extension on my city taxes. It's a veritable merry-go-round here at Casa del Neil or, as the locals call it, the House Where That Strange Guy in the Kneesocks Lives. I have always thought of this blog as a casual blog, the kind of blog that doesn't require the public to check constantly for updates. Another name for this type of blog is the lazy man's blog.

Anyweigh, I have decided to make it worth your while to read my latest post (in stark contrast to my usual posts.) As many of you don't know, I am somewhat of a trivia buff. I collect trivia, I remember trivia, I even create trivia. Now I would like to share some trivia with you, my esteemed reader (speaking of which, a big shout out to the American Society of Illiterates). So, sit back, relax, grab a bucket of fried chicken, and read on.

- The Dalai Lama wears a wig when he is working his factory job on weekends.
- Disgraced baseball player Pete Rose played most of his carreer with a prosthetic leg.
- The alphabet was originally used by the the ancient Greeks to insult the Etruscans.
- The number 4 was invented over two hundred years before the rest of the numbers.
- French war hero and president Charles De Gaulle never woke up before noon.
- Archimedes was not actually Greek, he was Puerto Rican.
- The onion is the only food that explodes in outer space.
- Orangutans cannot tell the difference between ice cream and frozen yogurt, but they do recognize frozen custard.
- In Turkey people live in houses shaped like drumsticks.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, wore mittens to hide his webbed fingers.
- Of all the American presidents, Millard Fillmore had both the largest and the smallest feet.
- If you linked together all the paper clips in the world they would reach from the Earth to the planet Jupiter (though there would be some significant gaps).
- Henry Ford used to drink gasoline to amuse people at parties.
- Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, he is also a world class gardener, having once grown a radish the size of his head.
- Arachnids have no sense of humor.
- On a bet, promoter P.T. Barnum raised an army and conquered large areas of Central Asia.
- The Declaration of Independence was written by accident.

That's all for now. I don't want to give away all my trivial nuggets at one time.





3 comments:

Unknown said...

Your command of trivia is astounding. My co-workers will be dumb-founded tomorrow I can assure you. I was just wondering why you didn't include any fish trivia. You covered vegetables, poultry, and the french, after all.

InTheOubliette said...

To add to your Fishbrickian trivia... a few of my current favorite tidbits:

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.

"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

Neil said...

The only fish trivia I know, Justin, is that a monk fish was the first piscene to climb the Matterhorn.

And as for Monica...did you know that New Jersey is the mushiest of all the states. Also, I kind of like the way Goethe writes. I myself can only write when there is a half-eaten baloney sandwich in my left shoe.