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• The US has a twelve scale designation for the size of olives. Based on the number of olives to the pound the scale proceeds from sub-petite (200 to the pount) to midget, select, medium, large, extra large, mammoth, giant,jumbo, colossal, super colossal up to special super colossal (28 or less to the pound).
• Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, Mexico in the 1920s by Caesar Gardini.
• Oktoberfest originally began in Bavaria as a celebration of Ludwig I's wedding on the 27 October 1810.
• After the British retreat to Boston some Minutemen stayed camped outside the town. The first American army.
• During his last year as a law student at Duke University Richard Nixon's anxiety over his grades lead him to break into the dean's office. He discovered he was top of the class and wasn't punished.
• The USSR was the first country to legalise abortion - in 1920.
• A mortgage (a dead pledge) was distinguished in the middle ages from a vifgage (a live pledge), in which revenues from pledged property counted toward reducing the principal of a debt. Mortgages were more favourable to lenders since revenues were paid over to the mortgage holders without shrinking the mortgagee's debt.
• The Spanish crown jewels are walled up somewhere inside the royal palace. When Napoleon's armies occuiped Spain the jewels were hidden. The French redecorated and no clues to the jewel's whereabouts remained.
• Dutch Rice Kripies (Rice Bubbles) don't go Snap, Crackle, Pop they go Pif, Paf, Pof.
• A jackpot was originally two jiggers of whiskey.
• The probability of hitting a target in a atom-smasher is measured in barns. A smaller units of measurement is also used - the shed.
• Minding one's Ps and Qs in its original sense involved accounting for a patron's consumption of pints and quarts in an English pub.
• The pipee was a French unit of distance - it was the distance a man could walk while smoking one pipeful of tobacco.
• Once sold in Chinese apothecaries for tongue ailments, the white substance sold as "Dragon's Brains" was asbestos.
• Julius Caesar was not born by Caesarean. In ancient Rome it was a legal requirement that the child would be removed from the womb of women who died in late pregnancy. "Caesarean" indicates the jurisdiction of the law.
• The title of the song Jimi Hendrix was working on the night he died was titled "The Story of Life".
• Utopia is the Greek word for nowhere. Discount clothes Cheap Dolce & Gabbana
• Alexander Dumas pere wrote poetry on yellow paper, novels on blue paper and non fiction on rose coloured paper.
• There are at least 3500 charted wrecks in the English Channel.
• Logarithmancy: divination by logarithms.
• Omphalomancy: divination by navel reading.
• Bishops have seven crosses on their tombs, Priests have five and ordinary christians have one.
• Four proven miracles are required for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Beatification requires two.
• Marilyn Monroe did not know who her father was.
• David Niven's father was killed in the Battle of Gallipoli.
• Napoleon provided the original design for the flag of Italy. Victor Emmanuel later adopted it and added his own coat of arms.
• There were six Roman Emperors in one year (238 AD). Maximin, Gordian I, Gordian II, Balbinus, Pupienus Maximus & Gordian III.
• First 6 rulers of England: Egbert (802-839), Aethelwulf (839-858), Aethelbald (858-860), Aethelbert (860-865), Aethelred (865-871), Alfred (871-899).
• A private suite on the Titanic cost $4350.
• Marie Antoinette did not say "Let them eat cake". Rosseau used the the phrase in Confessions when Marie was 11. Rosseau used the word broiche not cake.
• Christo, the German artist, once sent a piece called The Parcel to London for exhibition. Custom agents opened The Parcel for inspection.
• The first photocopy contained the words "10-22-38 Astoria": the date and place that the photocopy was made.
• Greenwich became the basis for the prime meridan in 1884. Other contenders for the role included Jerusalem, The Great Pyramid and Paris.
• The lowest toll for passing through the Panama Canal was 36 cents. The fee was charged to Richard Haliburton (calculated on 140 pounds of cargo tonnage) when he swam the Canal's locks.
• A set of artists' paint brushes are utilised as weapons in the kung-fu art of ban-gwan-pi" (literally 'justice brush').
• The word robot comes from the Czech for slave, "robotnik".
• Plans for constructing a tunnel between France and England were proposed as early 1802.
• In the 1910s in the US there were about 300 car manufacturers.
• Two gallons of beer was part of each child's weekly ration in 1632 in the Norwich Children's Hospital.
• At the time of the US War of Independence, Philadelphia was the second largest English speaking city.
• New York City has 570 miles of shoreline.
• The Nile has frozen over twice - once in 829 AD and again in 1010.
• Florence Nightingale's constant companion was a pet owl which she kept in a pocket.
• Turkeys tend to look up with their mouths open during rainstorms - many drown as a result.
• Lake Baikal in Siberia is the only lake deep enough to contain deep-sea fish.
• Water is the only substance on Earth that is available in volume in solid, liquid and gaseous forms.
• Charles Babbage, credited with a significant role in the foundations of modern computing, also invented the skeleton key and the train cow catcher.
• In 1900, one third of all cars in New York, Boston and Chicago were electric.

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