Trivia Factoids 8

When you see most stars, you're essentially looking hundreds or thousands of years into the past.

About 1% of the static seen on old analog TVs is residual radiation from the Big Bang.

If you cut up a hologram, the entire image is retained in each piece.

Jet lag was once called boat lag, back before jets existed.

The Soviet Sukhoi-34 is the first strike fighter with a toilet in it.

If Earth weren't tilted on its axis, we wouldn't have woodgrain, just "tree brown".

The tango originated as a dance between two men, mostly sailors (for partnering practice).

Leon Trotsky, the seminal Russian Communist, was assassinated in Mexico with an ice-pick.

The Bronx, New York got its name from explorer Henry Bronk.

The Kentucky Derby is the oldest continually held sports event in the United States (1875); the second oldest is the Westminister Kennel Club Dog Show (1876.)

The 'Easter Island Heads' actually have bodies, they're buried under the ground.

The amount of tropical rainforest cut down each year is an area the size of Tennessee.

The face of a penny can hold about thirty drops of water.

The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.

Grover Cleveland's real first name is Stephen, Grover is his middle name.

Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams missed almost five full baseball seasons (1943, 1944, 1945, 1952 and 1953) fighting as a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War and still managed to hit 521 home runs.

It takes a photon, on average, 200,000 years to travel from the core of the Sun to the surface, then just a little over 8 minutes from the Sun's surface to your eyeball, sliding in at 700,000,000 MPH.

The nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosey is about the plague. Infected people would get red circular sores ("Ring around the rosey..."), these sores would smell badly so common folks would put flowers on their bodies inconspicuously so that it would cover the smell ("...a pocket full of posies..."). People who died from the plague would be burned to reduce the spread of the disease ("...ashes, ashes, we all fall down!")