- Qiviut (kiv-ee-ute) is knitted into garments that are eight times as warm as wool, don't scratch, and don't shrink when washed. Qiviut is the soft undercoat of the Arctic musk ox.
- In 1778, the English captain James Cook, discoverer of Australia, was sailing around the Pacific when he came upon some islands. He named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of his friend John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich and Lord of the Admiralty. Fortunately, that somewhat silly-sounding name didn't last, and our 50th state is now referred to as the Hawaiian Islands. Ironically, when Captain Cook returned to the Sandwich Islands for ship's repairs, the inhabitants killed him, and there is some evidence that they ate him.
- The ancient Egyptians played board games. One of them, found in a tomb some 3500 years old, was called "Hounds and Jackals" and used a board that looks a lot like a cribbage board.
- If you want to play international golf, you can go to Portal, North Dakota. The Gateway Cities Golf Club has a nine-hole course featuring eight holes that are actually in Canada; one is in the U.S.
- In 343 B.C., the Persians under Artaxerxes III invaded Egypt and deposed Nectanebo II, the last of the Egyptian pharaohs. No Egyptian ruled Egypt again until 1952 A.D.
- Joe "Hooch" Simpson, co-owner of the Gold Seal Saloon in Skidoo, California (now a ghost town) has a couple of dubious distinctions: he was apparently the last living man lynched in California, dying on April 22, 1908 at the end of a "rope with a slip knot on". The other distinction: a Dr. McDonald dug Hooch up a couple of days later and suspended his body from a hangman's rope for a photograph, making Joe Simpson also the last dead man lynched in California.
- George Washington gave Peter Francisco - a giant of a man said to be either 6'6" or 6'8" - a specially made sword to match his size. While serving in the cavalry of Lt. Col. William Washington (a distant cousin of George Washington) in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, Francisco killed eleven British soldiers with this five-foot sword.
- Louis XI of France - sometimes called Louis The Cruel - suffered from melancholy (depression?). About 1480 A.D., he directed the Abbot of Baigne to create a "concert of swines' voices". The Abbot put together a sort of organ that featured pigs hidden under the keyboard. The keys caused little spikes to prick the pigs, making them squeal out a "song".
- Draco, "The Lawgiver", who gave ancient Greece her first codified laws, was too popular, perhaps. In those days, Greeks often "cheered" a speaker by throwing their garments at him. Draco died when a crowd flung so many togas that he smothered to death under them.
- It was originally marketed in 1904 as "Elijah's Manna", but outraged religious fundamentalists forced a name change. From that time on, C. W. Post's corn flakes have been called Post Toasties.
- When All Saints Church in Sedlac, Czechoslovakia was looted in the 1600s, and all the precious objects of worship stolen, the people of Sedlac dug up the bones of some 10,000 people and redecorated the church with them, including a very ornate chandelier made up largely of human femurs.
- Beluga whales living in Canada's Gulf of St Lawrence are so badly polluted with chemicals that when they die, they are treated as toxic waste.
- The era of presidential beards was a short one. Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860 as the 16th president, was the first of our bearded chief executives. Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888 as the 23rd president, was the last. Lincoln, incidentally, grew his beard because an 11-year-old girl named Grace Bedell wrote him during his campaign for president and told him he should grow a beard because his face was too thin.
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