The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (10 page)

HOLY MATTERS

DIFFERING OPINIONS

Christianity has more than a billion followers. Islam is next in representation, with half this number.

The Norsemen considered the mistletoe a baleful plant that caused the death of Baldur, the shining god of youth.

In Turkey, the color of mourning is violet. In most Muslim countries and in China, it is white.

Voodoo originated in Haiti.

MONK-?EYING AROUND

Ukrainian monk Dionysius Exiguus created the modern-?day Christian calendar.

The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline.

HOLY MOLY

The practice of exchanging presents at Christmas originated with the Romans.

The Book of Useless Information

The Book of Useless Information

The Book of Useless Information

The three cardinal virtues are faith, hope, and charity.

It was only after 440 C.E. that December 25 was celebrated as the birth date of Jesus Christ.

Two-?thirds of Portugal was owned by the Church in the early eighteenth century.

Kerimaki Church in Finland is the world’s largest church made of wood.

Las Vegas has the most chapels per capita than any other U.S. city.

Sister Boom-?Boom was a transvestite nun who ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1982. He/she received more than twenty thousand votes.

St. Stephen is the patron saint of bricklayers.

IS THE POPE CATHOLIC?

Pope Adrian VI died after a fly got stuck in his throat as he was drinking from a water fountain.

The youngest pope was eleven years old.

The election of a new pope is announced to the world with white smoke.

Pope Paul IV, who was elected on May 23, 1555, was so outraged when he saw the naked bodies on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that he ordered Michelangelo to paint clothes on them.

OY VEY!

According to ceremonial customs of Orthodox Judaism, it is officially sundown when you cannot tell the difference between a black thread and a red thread.

A young shepherd boy discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, Jordan, in 1947.

Snow angels originated from medieval Jewish mystics who practiced rolling in the snow to purge themselves of evil urges.

BUDDHA-?OLOGY

Contrary to popular belief, there are almost no Buddhists in India, nor have there been for about a thousand years. Although Buddhism was founded in India around 470 B.C.E. and developed there at an early date, it was uprooted from India between the seventh and twelfth centuries C.E. and today exists almost exclusively outside the country, primarily in Sri Lanka, Japan, and Indochina.

A temple in Sri Lanka is dedicated to one of the Buddha’s teeth.

HINDU WHO?

Hindu men once believed it to be unlucky to marry a third time. They could avoid misfortune by marrying a tree first. The tree (the third wife) was then burned, freeing the man to marry again.

Husbands and wives in India who desire children whisper their wish in the ear of a sacred cow.

On the stone temples of Madura in southern India, there are more than thirty million carved images of gods and goddesses.

IT’S A PARTY

A third of Taiwanese funeral processions include a stripper.

BUSINESS RELATIONS

BRANDING THE COW

A single share of Coca-?Cola stock purchased in 1919, when the company went public, would have been worth $92,500 in 1997.

IBM’s motto is “Think.”

NERF, the popular foam children’s toy company, doesn’t actually stand for anything.

Nestlé is the largest company in Switzerland, yet more than 98 percent of its revenue comes from outside the country.

The three most valuable brand names on Earth are Marlboro, Coca-?Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

THEY’RE IN THE MONEY

Japan’s currency is the most difficult to counterfeit.

John D. Rockefeller was the first billionaire in the United States.

Howard Hughes once made half a billion dollars in one day. In 1966, he received a bank draft for $546,549,171 in return for his 75 percent holdings in TWA.

Ted Turner owns 5 percent of New Mexico.

Organized crime is estimated to account for 10 percent of the United States’ national income.

LOSE SOME TO MAKE SOME

It takes about sixty-?three thousand trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.

The average bank cashier loses $310 a year.

THE JOB MARKET

Sixty percent of big-?firm executives say the cover letter is as important as or more important than the résumé itself when you’re looking for a new job.

The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system, employing more than a million people.

The most dangerous job in the United States is that of sanitation worker. Fire fighters and police officers are a close second and third, followed by leather tanners in fourth.

COMPANY POLICY

Workers at Matsushita Electric Company in Japan beat dummies of their foremen with bamboo sticks to let off steam. The company has enjoyed 30 percent growth for 25 consecutive years.

SELLER’S MARKET

The sale of vodka makes up 10 percent of Russian government income.

In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

THE SPORTING GOODS

YOU’RE OUT!

Fifty-?six million people go to Major League baseball games each year.

A baseball has exactly 108 stitches.

Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his hat to keep his head cool. He changed it every two innings.

Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.

Baseball games between college teams have been played since the Civil War.

Baseball was the first sport to be pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.

Baseball’s home plate is seventeen inches wide.

Before 1859, baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs behind home plate.

It takes about eight seconds to make a baseball bat in a baseball bat factory.

The first formal rules for playing baseball required the winning team to score twenty-?one runs.

NOTHING BUT NET

Basketball was invented by Canadian James Naismith in 1891.

The theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters is “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

I WANT TO BE LIKE…

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

Michael Jordan shaves his head on Tuesdays and Fridays.

RUN ON

In 1936, American track star Jesse Owens beat a racehorse over a one-?hundred-?yard course. The horse was given a head start.

Sprinters on track teams started taking a crouching start in 1908.

The expression “getting someone’s goat” is based on the custom of keeping a goat in the stable with a racehorse as the horse’s companion. The goat becomes a settling influence for the Thoroughbred. If you owned a competing horse and were not above some dirty business, you could steal your rival’s goat (it’s been done) to upset the other horse and make it run a poor race.

Anise is the scent on the artificial rabbit that is used in greyhound races.

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Bulgaria was the only soccer team in the 1994 World Cup in which all the players’ last names ended with the letters “ov.”

Soccer is played in more countries than any other sport.

Soccer legend Pele’s real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.

The band Simply Red is named for its love for the soccer team Manchester United, which has a red home strip.

BLUE 42! HUT!

Green Bay Packers backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck has been struck by lightning twice in his life.

It takes three thousand cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.

An American football has four seams.

O. J. Simpson had a severe case of rickets and wore leg braces when he was a child.

The Super Bowl is broadcast in 182 countries. That is more than 88 percent of the countries in the world.

When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state’s third largest city.

FORE!

Rudyard Kipling, living in Vermont in the 1890s, invented the game of snow golf. He painted his golf balls red so he could locate them in the snow.

Americans spend more than $630 million a year on golf balls.

Before 1850, golf balls were made of leather and stuffed with feathers.

The fastest round of golf (18 holes) by a team was 9 minutes, 28 seconds, a record set in Worcester on September 9, 1996, at 10:40 A.M.

Golfing great Ben Hogan’s famous reply when asked how to improve one’s game was, “Hit the ball closer to the hole.”

In the United States, there are more than ten thousand golf courses.

Many Japanese golfers carry hole-?in-?one insurance, because it is traditional in Japan to share one’s good luck by sending gifts to all your friends when you get an ace. The price for what the Japanese term “an albatross” can often reach $10,000.

Pro golfer Wayne Levi was the first PGA pro to win a tournament using a colored (orange) ball. He did it in the Hawaiian Open.

Twelve new golf holes are constructed every day.

The only person ever to play golf on the moon was

Alan Shepard. His golf ball was never found. The Tom Thumb golf course was the first miniature golf course in the United States. It was built it 1929 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by John Garnet Carter.

The United States Golf Association was founded in 1894 as the governing body of golf in the United States.

The youngest golfer recorded to have shot a hole-?in-?one is five-?year-?old Coby Orr of Littleton, Colorado, on the 103-yard fifth hole at the Riverside Golf Course in San Antonio, Texas, in 1975.

A regulation golf ball has 336 dimples.

Two golf clubs claim to be the first established in the United States: the Foxberg Golf Club in Clarion County, Pennsylvania (1887), and St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, New York (1888).

KNOCK OUT

Boxing is considered the easiest sport for gamblers to fix.

Boxing rings are so called because they used to be round.

In 1985, Mike Tyson started boxing professionally at age eighteen.

Boxing is the most popular sport to create a film about.

Four men in the history of boxing have been knocked out in the first eleven seconds of the first round.

OLYMPIC FANFARE

Canada is the only country not to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympic Games while hosting the event.

Only two countries have participated in every modern Olympic Games: Greece and Australia.

The 1900 Olympics were held in Paris, France.

Tug-?of-?war was an Olympic event between 1900 and 1920.

The five Olympic rings represent the continents.

Olympic badminton rules say that the birdie has to have exactly fourteen feathers.

The city of Denver was chosen to host and then refused the 1976 Winter Olympics.

FISHING FOR SWIMMERS

A top freestyle swimmer achieves a speed of only four miles per hour. Fish, in contrast, have been clocked at sixty-?eight miles per hour.

Captain Matthew Webb of England was the first to swim the English Channel using the breaststroke.

SURPRISING SPORTS

In the United States, more Frisbee discs are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.

Kite-?flying is a professional sport in Thailand.

There are at least two sports in which the team has to move backward to win—tug-?of-?war and rowing.

Badminton used to be called “Poona.”

PIN AND CONQUER

The national sport of Japan is sumo wrestling.

Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, once pinned a sumo wrestler using only a single finger.

Nearly all sumo wrestlers have flat feet and big bottoms.

The 1912 Greco-?Roman wrestling match in Stockholm between Finn Alfred Asikainen and Russian Martin Klein lasted more than eleven hours.

LORDS OF THE ICE

A hockey puck is one inch thick.

Canada imports about 850 Russian-?made hockey sticks on an average day.

Professional hockey players skate at average speeds of twenty to twenty-?five miles per hour.

ON STRIKES

Three consecutive strikes in bowling are called a turkey.

Tokyo has the world’s largest bowling alley.

The bowling ball was invented in 1862.

FIRST CONTACT

The game of squash originated in the United Kingdom.

Australian Rules Football was originally designed to give cricketers something to play during the off-?season.

Karate actually originated in India.

DANGEROUS GAMES

The only bone not broken so far during any ski accident is one located in the inner ear.

AND THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD IS…

Sports Illustrated has the largest sports magazine circulation.

AND MAYBE THIS IS WHY…

Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated.

THROW THE GAME

A forfeited game in baseball is recorded as a 9–0 score. In football, it is recorded as a 1–0 score.

TEAM SPIRIT

In the four professional major North American sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), only eight teams’ nicknames do not end with “s.” These teams are the Miami Heat, the Utah Jazz, the Orlando Magic, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Minnesota Wild.

I’M SO HIGH RIGHT NOW…

Pole vault poles used to be stiff. Now they bend, which allows the vaulter to go much higher.

SCIENTIFICALLY SPEAKING

AMAZING DISCOVERIES

A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero, about the time of the birth of Christ, is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.

Construction workers’ hard hats were first invented and used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.

Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept of the parachute, but his design was fatally flawed in that it did not allow air to pass through the top of the chute. Therefore, the chute would not fall straight, but would tilt to the side, lose its air, and plummet. He also invented the scissors.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, was afraid of the dark.

NOT-?SO-?GREAT MOMENTS

The first atomic bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico.

India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974.