November 24:
Mount Everest isn’t the tallest mountain on Earth. Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the twin volcanoes, are taller than Mount Everest, but 4.2km of their height is submerged underwater. The twin volcanoes measure a staggering 10.2km in total, compared to Everest’s paltry 8.8km.
VARIOUS SOURCES USED: The Book of Useless Information (Publications International, Ltd); Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts (Wings Books); More Fascinating Facts (David Louis, Crown Publishers); Evan Swensen’s Publications Consultant newsletter; Explaining Space website; American Shrimp Processors Association; Parade Magazine: 105 Weird Facts; True Facts That Sound Like Bull$#*t, by Shane Carley; MerriamWebster.com; Various Ripley’s Believe It or Not Books; Cosmopolitan magazine; others from the web in some form. BBC Science Focus Magazine.
Previous Tidbits:
November 10:
The world’s tallest hedge is located in Cirencester Park in Cloucesterire, England. (Picture included in book.) It towers 30 ft tall and its annual clipping takes 10 days.
October 27:
Lake Aru Tso in Tibet is alternately drinkable and salt water every 12 years.
October 13:
According to the “Fascinating Facts . . .” book above (which, let the record show, has proven untrustworthy in the past), pollen never deteriorates. It is one of the few naturally secreted substances that lasts indefinitely.
September 29:
1903: Madame Eduigue Rereit, of Paris, France lost her ring while working in her kitchen and recovered it a few days later from a fish she had bought in the public market.
The ring had slid down the kitchen drain, been washed into the river – and was swallowed by a fish that was purchased by Madame Rereit herself a few days later.
September 15:
Robert Gibson (1766 – 1885) of College Mound, MO voted for EACH of the first 22 USA presidents, starting with George Washington and ending with Grover Cleveland!
Don’t think Ripley’s made enough of this . . . Looking at his birth/death dates, and doing a little extra research, he must have voted for Washington when he was 21 or 22 and just barely managed to vote for Cleveland [who took office in 1885 – elected in ’84?] at the age of 118!)
September 1:
Clement Olheim (1690 – 1812) a farmer near Peronne, France, plowed his field regularly at the age of 122 !
August 18:
Charlotte Yonge (1823 – 1901), the English novelist, began teaching Sunday School in Otterbourne England at the age of 7. She continued conducting classes weekly for 71 years.
August 4:
Friedich von Schiller (1759 – 1805), famed German poet, could only compose poetry while sitting with his bare feet immersed in ice-cold water.
July 21:
Denver is the only city in history to turn down the Olympic Games. The 1976 Winter Games were scheduled to be held there, but residents voted against it.
July 7:
Canada is the second largest country in the world, though its area (over 3.5 million sq. mi) is less than half of the Soviet Union’s (over 8.5 million sq. mi.). * China, USA, and Brazil round out the top 5, in that order. [See the April 14 Tidbit below for the smallest country.]
June 23:
Clumps of live worms fell from the sky onto the streets of Jennings, Louisiana, in July 2007. They are thought to have been sucked up into the air by a waterspout seen 5 miles away, and then dropped on the town.
June 9:
In 1900, a single prairie-dog town in Texas covered 25,000 sq. miles, and had a whopping estimated population of 400 million animals!
April 28:
Citizens of a small Wisconsin town couldn’t agree on a name for their home, so they decided to pull six letters our of a hat and name it whatever those letters spelled. Thus, the name of IXONIA was born!
April 14
Vatican City is the smallest country in the world. It’s 120 times smaller than the island of Manhattan.
March 31:
A day on Venus is longer than a Venusian year! This is because Venus takes longer to spin on its axis (243 [Earth] days) than it does to orbit the Sun (224.7 [Earth] days)
March 10:
Edwin Smith, a miner in the California gold rush of the mid-1800s, liked his beard so much that he let it grow for 16 years. It reached a length of 8 ft (2.4 m) and was so long that Smith had to hire a servant just to wash and comb it.
February 24:
Alaska is the only state whose name can be spelled using letters entirely taken from one row (in this case, the 2nd) of a (normal QWERTY) keyboard.
February 10:
Grok may be the only English word that derives from Martian. Grok was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein‘s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok was quickly adopted by the youth culture of America and has since peppered the vernacular of those who grok it.
January 27:
Doubly interesting facts about MLB pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm’s career home runs (as a batter):
A) He hit a home run in his very first major league at bat! B) He never hit another home run over the remainder of his 21 year MLB career (’52 – ’72)!
January 13:
The fastest temperature change on record is a rise of 49 degrees (F). In two minutes, between 7:30 and 7:32 AM on Jan 22, 1943, in Spearfish, SD, the temperature rose from -4 to 45 degrees (F) !