Fun Facts For March

We get the pleasure of learning something every day in the group. Our member Lea Bella Green gives us our daily fun fact, and it does wonders for our need to be fed with information.

Fun Facts – March Recap:

Day 1: Female kangaroos have three vaginas, and are capable of being in three different stages of pregnancy with three different joeys (baby kangaroos) at the same time.
Day 2: If you have the very rare disease porphyria, your urine will turn purple over time when exposed to the sun.
Day 3: Competitive art used to be in the Olympic games from 1912-1948, including metals for sculpture, music, painting, and architectures.
Day 4: A chef’s tall hat, called a toque, is traditionally made with 100 pleats, meant to represent the 100 ways to cook an egg.
Day 5: 60% of human brain matter consists of fat.
Day 6: Oranges are not naturally occurring fruits. They are hybrids of tangerines and citrines.
Day 7: High heels were originally made for, and worn by, men (originally created by the Persian Cavalry for riding horses).
Day 8: New York was once briefly named “New Orange” while under brief control by the Dutch.
Day 9: Dr. Seuss’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” started off as a $50 bet between him and his editor, who bet Seuss that he “could not write a book using fewer than 50 different words.”
Day 10: Drinking too much water too fast can kill you, causing water intoxication, (hypoatremia), resulting in the rupturing of the body’s cells and other ailments.
Day 11: The hottest temperature ever recorded on earth was a lab superheated gas measuring 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Farenheit/about 2 billion degrees Celsius.
Day 12: Queen Elizabeth II is a trained mechanic, with knowledge of basic truck repairs, the deconstruction and reconstruction of engines, changing tires, and driving ambulances as well as several other types of vehicles, and more, learned at age 16 during her time in the army.
Day 13: Moonshiners wore “cow shoes”, or shoes with wooden blocks on the bottom, to disguise their footprints as cow footprints during the Prohibition to prevent their whiskey stills from being spotted.
Day 14: It takes 364 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (according to some studies), recorded using a “licking machine”.
Day 15: Hot water freezes faster than colder water as shown in the “Mpemba effect”, with no certain proven reason for this, though suggested causes include one that posits warm containers conduct heat more efficiently, and another that suggests warm water evaporates faster.
Day 16: Dolphins have names for eachother, using unique whistles to distinguish between different members of their pods.
Day 17: The famous children’s book author, Shel Silverstein, wrote the well known Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue”, as well as songs for Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, and more.
Day 18: The famous British leader Winston Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born in the United States, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Day 19: In the original 1902 stage version of “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz”, Dorothy had a faithful cow named Imogene, not a dog named Toto.
Day 20: Giant squids have the largest eyes of any known animal on earth, measuring at 11 inches (27.94 centimetres) across.
Day 21: Speed dating was invented in 1998 by a rabbi named Yaacov Deyo in the Beverly Hills, California coffee shop, Peet’s Coffee.
Day 22: The blob of toothpaste that sits on the end of your toothbrush has a name, called a “nurdle”, and there have been lawsuits over who has the right to depict it.
Day 23: There’s a 1 in 4,400,000 chance of a left-handed person being killed from using right-handed equipment, the deadliest being the right-handed power saw.
Day 24: There are around 2,000 thunderstorms happening on Earth at all times, around an estimated 100,000 each year in the United States, and 16 million thunderstorms annually on Earth.
Day 25: In 1927, Santa Claus was given an official pilot’s license, got his picture taken, and was given airway maps and “the assurance that the lights would be burning on the airways on Christmas Eve” by the assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics, William P. MacCracken.
Day 26: Woolly mammoths were still alive and around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, around 2580 to 2560 BC, the last disappearing only 4,000 years ago from Wrangel Island, in Russian territory in the Arctic Ocean.
Day 27: If you sneeze one time while driving at 60 miles per hour, (96.6 kilometers per hour), your eyes are closed for around 50 feet (15.24 meters). Drivers who temporarily lose vision due to sneezing are the cause of 2,500 accidents every week in England.
Day 28: You can figure out the colour of a chicken’s egg by looking at a chicken’s earlobes. The colour of the chicken’s earlobes will match the colour of its eggs. Chicken’s with white earlobes will lay white eggs, brown earlobes means brown eggs, blue/blue-green earlobes means blue/blue-green eggs, and so on.
Day 29: The Nintendo company has existed for over 130 years, having been founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, and originally made playing cards, going through several changes over the decades, before finally branching to video games in the 1970s.
Day 30: The US “Pledge Of Allegiance” was written as a PR stunt in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, as part of a contest designed to promote sales of the weekly children’s magazine Youth’s Companion.