Ridiculous Facts You Never Knew

I love stuff like this. A trivia hound named Benedict LeVay has a nose for ridiculous facts and he's collected them and put them in a book called, The Secret History of Everyday Stuff.

Some of the ridiculous facts are...

-- If you try to break a full-length piece of spaghetti into two, you can't. Because of shock waves traveling down the shaft, it will always break into three.

-- The world's longest continually lit light bulb hangs in a fire station in California. It is never switched off, and has been going for 114 years.

-- The man who designed the Pringles can had his ashes buried in one in 2008.

-- Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries. Raw potatoes contain more vitamin C than oranges. So do dead rats, according to one scientist.

-- Starbucks coffee is named after a character in Moby Dick. One of the three founders wanted to name it after the ship in the book, the Pequod, but the other two overruled him.

-- When "The Sound Of Music" was first shown in Korea, one cinema owner thought it was far too long, so cut out what he thought were the uninteresting bits. Specifically, he cut out all the songs.

-- Almost every famous film was shot in the wrong place. "Casablanca" was shot in California. "Lawrence Of Arabia" was mainly shot in Morocco. Virtually no Vietnam films were shot in Vietnam.

-- The word 'avocado' comes from an Aztec word meaning 'testicle'.

And now you know. - Alan