Twelve percent of American 20-year-olds are left-handed, but only 5 percent of 50-year-olds and fewer than 1 percent of people over 80.
Does this mean that more lefties are being born today? Or that older generations were forced to switch hands? Or that southpaws die sooner? No one knows.
Color values of Crayola’s most popular crayons:
Americans think of the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as a patriotic anthem — which is ironic, because everyone else does, too. We stole the tune from the British, who know it as “God Save the Queen,” and the same melody has served as the national anthem of Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.
When England met Liechtenstein in a Euro 2004 qualifying football match, they had to play the same music twice.
The King and I has never been performed in Thailand.
The elephant is the only animal with four knees.
What’s the largest living thing in the world? It depends:
The largest bacterium ever discovered, by the way, is Thiomargarita namibiensis — it grows to 0.75 mm in diameter, which means you can see it with the naked eye. Eww.
By coincidence, John Ritter died in the same hospital in which he was born.
ERIC CLAPTON is an anagram of NARCOLEPTIC.
The United Kingdom has 59 million people and 67 million credit cards.
One can hypnotize a chicken by holding its head against the ground and drawing a line straight outward from its beak.
“I recollect particularly a case of catalepsy produced in a cock,” writes Gaston Tissandier in Popular Scientific Recreations (1882). “We place a cock on a table of dark colour, rest its beak on the surface, where it is firmly held, and with a piece of chalk slowly draw a white line in continuation from the beak, as shown in our engraving. If the crest is thick, it is necessary to draw it back, so that the animal may follow with his eyes the tracing of the line. When the line has reached a length of about two feet the cock has become cataleptic. He is absolutely motionless, his eyes are fixed, and he will remain from thirty to sixty seconds in the same posture in which he had at first only been held by force.”
Most chickens will stand immobile and stare at the line for about 30 minutes. The record, reported by Hamilton Bertie Gibson in Hypnosis: Its Nature and Therapeutic Uses (1980), is 3 hours 47 minutes.
