Trivia

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• The average kitchen refrigerator in the United States contains six items that are more than two years old.

• The average roll of toilet paper in the developed world is consumed within two months of manufacture.

• Server-side programming has been declared ‘the wave of the future’ each year from 2003 through 2011.

• Eighty percent of people born in the northern hemisphere never visit the southern hemisphere.

• Approximately 95,000 people cross the equator more than four times a day.

• CBS Commentator Andy Rooney’s first assignment as a US Army enlisted man was as Tuba player at Fort Knox even though he had never played any instrument prior to that point.

• Former US Senator and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine went to the same High School as the characters in Wayne’s World.

• Geographically strictly speaking, Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, is not a booth, a bay, nor a harbor, earning it the title of most misnomered town in the United States.

• In 2010, 28 percent of stained glass windows manufactured were actually acrylic and not glass.

• When he discovered that Nor’easters actually came up the east coast of North America from the south, Benjamin Franklin campaigned to have the term for that type of storm changed to sou’easters. Politicians from Georgia and South Carolina successfully derailed that effort.

• Animator and studio magnate Walt Disney, long suspected of anti-Semitism, was half Jewish by way of his mother.

• Jude Law stipulates in his film contracts that none of his movies may be preceded in theaters by any previews in which he also appears.

• Universal Pictures, now a major entertainment empire, was established as a real estate holdings firm in 1908.

• No wide-release American film since 1981 has actually shown an automobile being driven through a pane of glass.

• Most of the world’s French fries are neither French nor fried.

• The average trip on the Metrorail transit system in Washington, D.C. spans 8.8 stops and includes 0.9 transfers.

• Pakistan is the only non-English-speaking country that observes Daylight Saving Time.

• Geneticists discovered in 2004 that humans’ ability to see the color red stems from a genetic mutation that took place in a common ancestor two million years ago. Projections indicate that, in another million years, red color receptors will be a recessive gene and appear only in a minority of humans.

• NBA basketball players average a one in 11 success ratio for three-point shots.
• The sale of one percent milk has declined nearly 26 percent since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

• A 2010 survey found 3.1 percent of Americans claim to celebrate one or fewer holidays in a year. Of the holidays observed by these single-day celebrators the top reported was Kwanza, followed closely by the birthday of individual or their spouse.

• The title lyric of the Old English carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” was originally a sexual innuendo.

• In 2007, “Season’s Greetings” replaced “Happy Holidays” as the most-used holiday banner text in American retail stores, which replaced “Merry Christmas” in 1979.

• Based on a global sample of 2009 symphony season programs, G.F. Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” is performed eight times each December for every one time it is sung during the rest of the year.