h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the first lip balm was made from earwax.

sorry, the cite is wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earwax

but it does have another cite tho the link is not live.

Fish scales are used in lipsticks.

The motorcycle ridden by Evel Knievel on his first public jump was a Honda 250 Scrambler.

OK.... here's something even more useless:

The White House has 412 doors.

There's an "X" over one of those doors in the Oval Office.

For that matter, the office is only oval shaped because George Washington specifically requested it.

the us presidential seal is used to sell soap products to raise money for the secret service.

http://www.1600formen.com/

Today's page on my Bathroom Reader calendar had several "blue" laws (like the law in Helena, Montana banning giggling on the street). After reading so many of them here they tend to get a bit dull, but this one struck me as a bit different so I thought I'd share.

A New Hampshire law dictates that cars meeting at an intersection must wait for each other to pass.

I love laws like that; they're my favorite bits of useless trivia. But as I haven't got a new one to share, instead I'll just say that in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, Marvin says that due to time travel, he's three times older than the universe itself. The universe is estimated to be about 14-billion years old, so Marvin having said this in the present time, (and assuming I'm remembering that part correctly, because I haven't checked), that means Marvin is 42-billion years old when he dies.

On a typical day, each baggage handler at an Australian airport will lift between 12 and 15 tonnes of baggage.

Do you mean "lift" as in raise or "lift" as in steal?

I helped rescue a frog from our garden last night. The garden is surrounded by a 6ft fence that goes right down to ground level. There's only one small hole by the gate that the frog could have got out through, which raises the question of how it got in in the first place. Hubby and I managed to get the frog into a bucket and I carried it down the road to some fields. There's a small river running through the fields and I'm sure the frog will have found it eventually.

The area our house is in used to be quite boggy because it's on the river's flood plain and our garden is on what used to be a transit route for frogs.

Ok... according to today's page on my calendar the word 'mascara' comes from the Spanish word 'máscara' which comes from the Italian 'maschera'. Both words mean "mask"... OK, that's to be expected, but apparently their root is the Arabic word 'maskharah' which means clown or buffoon.

Frogs do much better in ponds than in rivers.

Frogs use the same muscles that help to control their eyes to swallow food, that's why they shut their eyes when swallowing.

"Frogs do much better in ponds than in rivers."

They probably do. But this isn't a large river, nor is it fast flowing. (Near our house it's shallow enough to paddle in.) And frogs have been known to cross people's gardens to get to the river area since before hubby was a kid. So I guess the frogs know what they're doing.

OK, this little tidbit was on my calendar yesterday.

"When given unlimited access to mice, a cat will kill about 15 before stopping."

What's the likelihood that this was determined not by observation in nature but by lab experiment.



Oh, and the main entry that day was about Marven Gardens being misspelled for 60 years on Monopoly boards.

If that is true about cats (under lab conditions), it's probably for the same reason foxes massacre the contents of a hen-house. Foxes don't know when they'll next have the chance to make a kill so they kill what they can, probably with the intention of stashing some and coming back for more. Of course, the farmer comes out with his gun long before the fox can put his plan into action, so the fox gets the reputation of a wanton killer.

I've seen my cat playing with a mouse for some time before killing it, just to make the hunting/killing experience last. He didn't know when he'd next make a kill, so the mindset is probably the same.

15 mice? Pah! Towser would be disgusted.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4388043.stm

Wow... What a mouser. His lifetime daily average works out have been 3.42 mice per day. Considering he must have had dry patches he surely must have killed 15 at a go on several occasions.

What's interesting is they got the total because they found where Towser stored the bodies. One of the distillery workers sat and counted the skulls. At the time they reckoned the total was about 25% higher, because they found more body parts than skulls but the Guinness Book of Records would only count the skulls figure. During recent renovations, they found two more stores of corpses with thousands more skulls. Unfortunately, my wife no longer works there so I don't know the latest total. I know they doubted if they could definately be attributed to Towser as there have been other cats there since him.