Absolutely have to know facts

• You can dunk an Oreo cookie in milk for three (3) seconds without it losing its structural integrity.
• On average, it takes about 9 hours for a ship to travel through the Panama Canal, as opposed to two weeks if it made the journey around Cape Horn. Each commercial ship that passes through the canal has to pay a toll based on its weight with the average toll be roughly $150,000, but the record is held by a cargo ship called MOL Benefactor from Hong Kong, which paid over $829,400 to pass through the canal.
• While ships regularly pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to pass through the Panama Canal (even privately-owned boats have to pay between $800 and $3,200), the lowest toll ever was paid by American Richard Halliburton, who swam the entire length of the canal in 1928. Since the toll price is based on weight, he only had to pay thirty-six cents.
• Las Vegas is sometimes known as Sin City and other times as the Entertainment Capital of the World, but people usually just call it, “Vegas;” however, in Spanish its name has a much simpler meaning – “The Meadows.”
• The Hiroshima bombing took place 77 years ago today (but you probably already knew that 🙂
• Jousting is the official sport of one of our Eastern seaboard states – I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one.
• And speaking of the Milky Way, when dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago the earth was on the the other side of the galaxy.  It takes the sun (and thus the rest of the solar system) roughly 250 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way.
• Did you know only about 1 in every 3,000 Calico cats is male. These tricolor kitties — which are most often but not always, white, orange, and black get their distinct coat from their chromosomal makeup.  Female cats have two X chromosomes, which carry the coding gene for black and orange coloration, and the only way for calico coloring to occur is for a kitten to get one black-coded X and one orange-coded X.
• My favorite presidential quotes:
  • “Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”—George Washington
  • “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”—John Adams
  • “If I were two-faced, would I show you this one?”—Abraham Lincoln
  • “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”—Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”—John F. Kennedy
  • “Putin knows, if I am President of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”— Joe Biden
• What we see when we look at the Moai heads on Easter Island are only the top half of the statues, the other halves are buried in the ground.
• James Madison and his wife, Dolly, helped to popularize ice cream in America. Their tastes, however, might be considered questionable by today’s standards with flavors such asparagus, chestnut, and parmesan – Dolly’s personal favorite was oyster.
• “On January 15, 1919, the workers and residents of Boston’s North End were enjoying the noontime sun of an unseasonably warm day when suddenly without warning a huge cast iron tank of the Purity Distilling Company burst open and a great wave of black molasses two stories high poured out onto Commercial Street and oozed into the adjacent waterfront area. Neither pedestrians nor horse-drawn carriages could outrun it as more than two million gallons of molasses engulfed scores of people.  One hundred and fifty people were injured, several buildings crumbled from the force of the “brown wave,” and Boston harbor ran brown all summer.
• Before time zones were established in 1883, North America alone had at least 144 local times. Noon was when the sun reached its zenith, and in many places the only thing making the time of day official was a town clock.
• Lake Baikal in Russia is the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume and contains nearly a quarter of the world’s fresh water.
• When Forrest Gump ran through a jungle in Vietnam or when he showed his table tennis skills, that was computer generated imagery. Even the feather at the opening scene was computer-generated. The movie Forrest Gump has more minutes of CGI screen-time than Jurassic Park.
• You cannot get a coke in North Korea or Cuba and Pringles aren’t really ‘potato’ chips because they’re almost 60% wheat.
• And lastly, 54 four years ago today, flying a U.S. Navy T-28C Trojan, serial #190967 from Training Squadron VT-5, 23-year-old 2^nd Lieutenant L.S. ‘Butch’ Mazzuca, USMC made his first arrested carrier landings (1 touch & go and 6 ‘traps’) aboard CV-16, the USS Lexington.

So now you know…