- It is highly unusual for a nation's capital to be anywhere near the geographic center of the country. Spain's Madrid is one of the very few exceptions.
- The Spanish brought smallpox to the Aztecs in the 16th Century, and half of them died from it, making that plague, on a per capita basis, deadlier than the Black Plague of 14th Century Europe.
- Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, differed from his contemporaries primarily in that he believed sickness came from natural causes, not evil spirits. He also thought that a woman with a small bust could enlarge it by singing, loudly and often.
- The Pakistanis of 10,000 years ago didn't ever have cavities, according to fossil remains.
- Ship captains once paid men to "shanghai" bodies to fill out crews. The record shows that some of the more enterprising kidnappers would stuff men's clothing with straw and include these "straw men" in the pile of drugged or drunken men they delivered. In the dark hold of a ship, the captain's body counter sometimes didn't notice.
- No culture or society has yet been discovered where the women were heavier drinkers than the men.
- William Henry Harrison, our ninth President, set two records. He stood speaking - hatless - in the cold March rain for an hour and forty-five minutes, delivering a record length inauguration speech. But his long-windedness cost him: he caught pneumonia and died a month later, thus setting the record for the shortest term in office.
- The common madake("timber bamboo") of Japan is the fastest-growing plant in the world. It can grow at the rate of two inches per hour.
- Nothing on earth is where it was when the pyramids were built. That includes the pyramids, which are three miles south of their original location. The surface of the earth is constantly moving.
- Chile's oldest mummy is 3,400 years older than Egypt's oldest mummy.
- Samuel Baldwin of Hampshire, England, died in 1736. His body was thrown into the ocean in accordance with his will. His wife had vowed to dance on his grave, and he had dedicated much of his life to seeing that she didn't get her way.
- Voltaire said William Shakespeare was "a drunken savage", "a great fool", and an author "without the slightest spark of good taste". He thought Shakespeare's writings were junk fit only for London and Canada.
- According to scholars, as much as one-fourth of all the gold ever mined is in the form of sunken treasure on the oceans' floors.
- The crater of a dormant volcano in Guatemala once filled with water. In 1541, an earthquake caused the crater walls to crack from the huge weight of the water. Ciudad Vieja, at the foot of the mountain, was flooded, and 1000 people were buried in mud. The volcano was then named Agua, meaning water.
- William Shakespeare used 1700 words that appear first in his works, leading to the conclusion that he coined them. Scholars say he used 20,138 different words in all his writings. Thus, 8.5% of his literary vocabulary consisted of words he made up.
- According to one Revolutionary War-era shipwright's notes, it took all the lumber from an 80-acre oak forest to build one 100-gun warship.
- Europe and Antarctica are the only continents without native parrots.
- Ninety-nine percent of Egyptians live in the 4% of Egypt represented by the Nile's delta and riverbank farmlands.
- Four thousand years ago, the Mayans used the sharpest knives ever in their blood rituals. Their obsidian knives were sharper than today's diamond scalpels and far sharper than razor blades.
- If the earth under Mt. Everest were to sink 15,000 feet, that would still leave "The World's Highest Mountain" as high as the tallest Alp. But it's unlikely many would bother to climb it. Fierce weather and high altitude oxygen deprivation are the problems mountaineers face on Everest. Remove those, and summitting would be little more than a strenuous hike.
- Americans grow an incredible amount of corn. We just don't eat a lot of it. For every bushel of processed or whole kernel corn we eat, we feed 42 bushels to animals, eat six bushels in the form of corn syrup, and make ethyl alcohol out of another four.
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