Sunday 1 May 2016

I love Useless Facts

This is a scheduled blog posting – which is, in itself, a piece of useless information.  If I haven’t responded to your comments on earlier postings please don’t take it personally; I’m not necessarily seeing well at the moment.


In 1969, a gang of Brazilian bus drivers trained beetles to climb into the fare boxes on the buses and extract the coins.  The drivers were arrested – as were the beetles!

A survey in 1995 reported that 38 per cent of Canadian women preferred chocolate to making love.

Another survey that same year showed that one in three British children believed their mum preferred their cat to their dad.  (Judging by the words Partner-who-loves-tea used on Mac yesterday I'm safe for a while so long as I don't sit on her laptop keyboard.)

The average person in the UK borrows almost seven books a year from public libraries, while his or her household spends £1.50 on books every week.  The average British make aged 15 to 24 spends only 3.1 minutes a day reading books.

Boiling down an ounce of cress will produce enough cyanide to kill two mice.

The bra industry in the US was boosted in 1917 when the War Industries Board asked women to stop buying corsets in order to save metal.  The switch from corsets to bras provided enough metal to build two battleships.

A useless fact for Canadian Chickadee (who has a smaller than average rear end!!) The size of the average UK and North American person has increased in recent years.  As a result, in 1998, a ferry in Seattle, cut its maximum seating from 250 to 230 –“Eighteen inch butts are a thing of the past,” said a ferry spokesman.


Mel Blanc – the voice of Bugs Bunny – disliked the taste of carrots.

According to Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 20-22, the chicken came before the egg!


And a useless fact for Eva - Queen Victoria loved Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and requested a copy of Carroll’s next book.  It was ‘Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry’.


8 comments:

  1. These are the type of things that could come up in a pub quiz, so I better try and remember them all!!!
    And up until reading this post, I had no idea how much room my butt takes on a seat. I measured it now, only to find out that I have an anachronistic butt.

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  2. I suspect that the fourth fact about public library usage is a very old 'fact' indeed.

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    1. Twenty years old - about the same age as the bookstock in the few remaining public libraries!

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  3. What an interesting collection. NOw if I could just remember them to share.

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    1. That's always the problem isn't it. All the fascinating things one comes across on blogs and then can't recall the next day...

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  4. No measuring of posteriors going on here, but i'm about the size of an average 12-year-old and i can fit in some very small seats.

    Poor Mel Blanc did hate the taste of carrots. They tried to substitute celery, crackers, and several other crunchy items, but none of them had the exact same sound as crunching a carrot. So he always recorded Bugs' voice with a bucket next to him so he could spit the carrot out!

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    1. That Mel Blanc bucket fact is even ore useless than my original one!! Brilliant.

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  5. These are wonderful! I haven't stopped laughing -- I did not know about the ferry system changes! Hugs and lots of smiley face emoticons, xoxoxox

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