Thread: Did you know...?

Before Google launched Gmail, "G-Mail" was the name of a free email service offered by Garfield's website.

In colonial America, lobster wasn't a delicacy but so cheap and plentiful that it was often served to prisoners.

Google's founders were willing to sell out to Excite for under $1 million in 1999, but Excite turned them down.

FAIL!

In 1999, the US gov paid the Zapruder family $16 million for the film of JFK's assassination.

Abraham Lincoln was wrestling champion of his county before becoming President. He fought in nearly 300 matches and lost only one.

Banana is a berry, not a fruit.

One April day in 1930, the BBC reported, "There is no news." Instead they played piano music.

Elvis Presley's manager sold "I Hate Elvis" badges, to make money off people who weren't buying Elvis merchandise.

LEGO has a vast temperature-controlled underground vault in Denmark, containing nearly every set they've ever made.

A reindeer's eyes change colour through the seasons, gold during the summer and blue in the winter.

Avocados don't ripen on the tree; farmers can use trees as storage to keep the avocado fresh for up to seven months.

Salvador Dali avoided paying restaurant and other bills by using cheques. After filling it in and signing it, he would draw a quick sketch on the back as the waiter watched, knowing no one would ever cash it in.

China owns all of the pandas in the world, and with rare exceptions rent them out for about $1 million a year.

Bones found at Seymour Island, one of 16 islands around the tip of Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula, indicate that 37 to 40 million years ago, penguins stood at a formidable 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds.

In America, the Highest Court in the Land is on the fifth floor of The Supreme Court building, in the gym, a basketball court.

The delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention spent much of their time boozing. One surviving document is a bill for a party on September 15th, 1787, two days before the signing of the Constitution. Items on the bill were: 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of Claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 8 bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer, and 7 bowls of alcoholic punch; for 55 people.

When girls are born, they have between 500,000 and two million eggs in their ovaries, nestled in fluid-filled cavities called follicles. Sounds like a lot, but months earlier, before birth, they may have had as many as six or seven million eggs. By the time of puberty, only about 300,000 remain. Of these, only 300 to 400 will be ovulated during a woman's reproductive lifetime.

Fertility drops as a woman ages due to decreasing number and quality of the remaining eggs, but when your mother was born she was already carrying the egg that became you.

It takes a photon some 200,000 years to travel from the core of the Sun to the surface, then just a little over 8 minutes from there to your eyeball.

Two-thirds of the people who have ever reached 65 are alive today.

A mosquito has 47 teeth, although they don't chew since blood is already in a liquid form.

Snails have around 12,000 teeth, though some species have more than 20,000.

A large percentage of the budget for Monty Python and the Holy Grail was donated by members of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, expecting to make a tax loss.

The giant foot that comes crashing down in the opening credits of Monty Python is the foot of Cupid (from the Renaissance masterpiece Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, by Bronzino).

In 2007, led By Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and the cast of Python musical Spamalot, 5,567 people in Trafalgar Square set a new world record for the largest coconut orchestra as they clip-clopped along to Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.