Taking matters into my own hands.

I have one class left before I finish my college degree and it is a statistics class. And I don't like it. It's a lot easier than I though (I was all geared up for certain death but it isn't that bad) so sometimes I get bored. So, this is what I learned today in my stats class, although my professor didn't mention any of these things. Huzzah for the internet and a laptop.

• The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. (Two questions: What are they drinking and who on earth decided to test this?)

• Almonds are members of the peach family. (Peeled peaches.)
  

• A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise's car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore -- where a tree blew over and killed him. (A true Italian tragedy.)
  

• In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record. Suffering from the flu he came down eight hours short of the 400 day record, his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him, and his phone and electricity had been cut off. (Four hundred days? On a flagpole? I'd dump him too.)
  

• There is a hill in New Zealand called "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu", which translates roughly as The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one". (I'm so mad... I wanted to discover a hill and use this exact name but someone got to it first.)
  

• In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak. (Oh England...)
  

• A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and over fly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs."(If I was stationed on the Falkland Islands, I'd make up games like this too. You've got to use what you've got. In Italy, we made up games where we'd pretend the nuns were either on my "team" or my companion's depending and what color their wimple was. Whoever had sighted the most team members by the end of the week owed the other one a gelato.)
  

• On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year. ( I should stop chewing on my pens.)
  

• The "dot" over the letter "i" is called a tittle. (The phrase "jot or tittle" from the scriptures all of a sudden makes some sense!)

• Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. (If I were Charlie, I would go and shake hands with the other two politely. Come on, man, they look more like you than you do! That is tough to do.)
  

• By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand. (Duly noted.)
  

• Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously. (Okay... seriously, who discovered this one?)

And now, my all time favorite random and useless fact:

• If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. (WOW. Just, w0w.)
  
  

Hope you learned as much as I did today!