Pointless fact of the day

[Ray Stafford]

I'll start.

When James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickock was murdered in a Deadwood saloon in 1876, the poker hand he was holding was reputedly two pairs - black aces and black eights, known since the 1920s (nearly 50 years later) as the dead man's hand. History does not record the 5th card.

However, several other combinations of cards have also held that nick-name, including the full houses Jacks and tens and Jacks and sevens. Some of these were recorded between 1876 and the appearance of the Wild Bill legend in the twenties.

Your turn.

The fact must be a) vaguely interesting and b) utterly pointless. Conveying useful information on this thread is very poor form old boy, very poor form.

Toodle pip.

 

[gasmanrob]

When I was living at the out laws no one used to speak at meal times so I decided to start the useless fact of the day. Everyone had to come up with a true but useless fact if you didn't then you got dishwasher duty.

 

[kris]

In 1386 a pig was hanged and executed for the murder of a child.

 

[gasmanrob]

Al Capones business card said he was a used furniture dealer

 

[kris]

When we are born were born with 300 bones and when we die we have only 206.

 

[julesverne]

Coca cola would be green if colour wasn't added to it.

 

[SimonG]

The residents of Hartlepool hung a monkey as they thought it was a French spy in Napoleonic times.

 

[gasmanrob]

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

uses every letter of the alphabet

 

[SimonG]

If you count out the letters from numbers starting at 1, you would get to 1 thousand before saying 'a'.

 

[SimonG]

All polar bears are left handed.

 

[bright spark]

In the US more people are killed by storms/tornadoes with women's names than men's names. They reckon that the yanks take the 1's with ladies names less serious. Don't know how true that is but nothing would surprise me

 

[Ray Stafford]

Peter the Great, Tsar of all the Russians, visited both Holland and England "incognito" in the 1690s - pretending to be a humble shipwright.

He was humoured by both states, who officially pretended to ignore him, whilst actually providing bodyguards, liaison officers etc.

 

[SimonG]

Bats alwayscturn left when leaving a cave.

 

[kris]

Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand,,

 

[kris]

We have alot of useless things inside our heads

 

[Ray Stafford]

Bookkeeper is the only word (along with its derivatives like bookkeeping) in the English language with three successive pairs of double letters.

 

[Ray Stafford]

We have alot of useless things inside our heads

I predict that this thread will run and run.

 

[kris]

What i wrote was my fact , yours too ray hehe

 

[kris]

Theres no word in the english dictionary that rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple

 

[Ray Stafford]

the longest palindrome in the English language is "rotavator"

 

[kris]

In 1912 a law passed in Nebraska where drivers in the country at night were required to stop every 150 yards, send up a skyrocket, wait eight minutes for the road to clear before proceeding cautiously, all the while blowing their horn and shooting off flares.

 

[Dotty]

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only ONE testicle.

 

[villa_tom]

Pablo Escobar spent $2500 a month on elastic bands just to hold his money together

 

[Dotty]

The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes

 

[Dotty]

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law, which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

 

[wetdrip]

 

[Dotty]

Middlesbrough, which has about 0.24 per cent of the UK's population, is responsible for 2.5 per cent of kerb-crawling convictions.

 

[Toxic Ted]

Sharks cannot swim backwards.

 

[JCplumb]

Lesbian sheep were the cause of the European foot and mouth crisis in the 90's.

 

[WHPES]

The term "White Elephant" originates from the white elephants that far Eastern monarchs kept. The beasts were considered sacred so could not be put to work, therefore the person receiving it as a gift was lumbered with having to feed and care for it whilst receiving no benefit from it other than as a status symbol.

 

[wetdrip]

Albert Einstein was named an honorary member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union after saying publicly that he would become a plumber if he had to do it all over again.
The world’s most famous plumbers are probably video game superstars Mario and Luigi, of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers series.
Copper piping, which is the #1 material used for plumbing work in today’s world, is the same material that the Egyptians used to lay their own pipe – some 3000 years ago!
Archeologists have recovered a portion of a water plumbing system from the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The evidence of indoor plumbing in palaces has dating back to 2500 B.C.E.
Since 1963 (the year CDA was established), more than 28 billion feet or about 5.3 million miles of copper plumbing tube has been installed in U.S. buildings. That’s equivalent to a coil wrapping around the Earth more than 200 times. The current installation rate now exceeds a billion feet per year.
In a typical home, more than 9,000 gallons of water are wasted while running the faucet waiting for hot water. As much as 15% of your annual water heating costs can be wasted heating this extra 9,000 gallons.
Though we all have heard the many slang-words of which his cognomen is probably responsible for, the truth is… there is no hard evidence anywhere that English plumber, Thomas Crapper, was the inventor of the modern-day amenity that often bears his less-than-flattering name (it’s believed Crapper may have bought the patent rights from another man – Albert Giblin – and marketed the concept as his own).
If a drip from your faucet fills an eight ounce glass in 15 minutes, it will waste 180 gallons per month and 2,160 gallons per year.
A low flush toilet can save you up to 18,000 gallons of water per year.
In the tomb of a king of the Western Han Dynasty in China (206 BC to 24 AD), archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old “toilet” – complete with running water, a stone seat and even a comfortable armrest! The finding: marked the earliest-known water closet, which is quite like what we are using today, in the entire world.
The Earth has somewhere in the neighborhood of 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of water on the planet. Roughly 98% of our water’s in the oceans of the world, and therefore is unusable for drinking because of the salt content. That means only around 2% of the planet’s water is fresh, but 1.6% of that water is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36% is found in very deep, underground sources – meaning only about 0.036% of the planet’s total water supply is found in lakes and rivers (our main supplies of drinking water)!

 

[Riley]

Donkeys kill more people than plane crashes.

 

[Riley]

There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.

But how many by members of this forum :wink:

 

[wetdrip]

At any one given time 45 million people are drunk.

 

[Riley]

At any one given time 45 million people are drunk.

That must relate to#33!?!?!?