This is a random grab bag of facts, factoids, and funny stuff I’ve run across. Feel free to send me yours or post them as comments.
QUOTE
Where they make a desert, they call it peace.
- Tacitus

FACT
Half the airplanes in the U.S. are in Alaska.

FACT
In the winter of 2007, the average temperature in Alaska was 40 degrees above the norm.

FACT
Polar bears and grizzly bears are two different versions of the same bear: if they mate, they produce viable offspring, offspring that can also mate and reproduce, just as a dachsund and a golden retriever can.

FACT
Sixty countries in the world have an annual gross national product smaller than the endowment of Harvard University.

FACT
In the middle ages, knowing grammar made a man so extremely cool that the word “glamour” derives from “grammar.”

QUOTE
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
                                                     - James Madison

JOKE
It’s 2009. Every day a guy comes to the White House gates and tells the guard he’d like to have a word with President George W. Bush. Every day the guard tells him “George W. Bush is no longer president.” Yet the next day the man is always back, making the same request. Finally the guard says, “Why do you keep coming back and asking to see President George W. Bush? I’ve told you again and again: George W. Bush is not the president anymore.” The man replies, “I just like hearing those words.”

JOKE
A man overheard Mullah Nasruddin telling someone, “I’m one year older than my brother.” He had to intervene: “Mullah Sahib, you told me were one year younger than your brother!” The Mullah replied, ‘That was two years ago.”
QUOTE
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
                                                     - A. J. Liebling

QUOTE
I would have made a good Pope.
                                                     - Richard M. Nixon

QUOTE
It is noble to be good; it is still nobler to teach others to be good - and so much less trouble.
                                                     - Mark Twain

FACT
The U.S. Department of Agriculture directive on cabbage pricing weighs in at 15,629 words.

FACT
The national database of possible terrorist targets has expanded from an original list of about 300 items and locations to over 300,000. They include such “potential targets” as the Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

FACT
Cost of planting one landmine: $3.
Cost of removing one landmine: $1000.

FACT?
Some scholars estimate that 10 to 20% of the Africans dragged to the Americas as slaves were Muslims.

FACT
In 1942, GM turned its production over to the war effort and was soon building a plane an hour.

QUOTE
The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.
- William Faulkner

QUOTES
“Alcohol is the fuel of the future,” said Henry Ford.
“And it always will be,” said his critics.

QUOTE
“If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow

FACT
Almost every day, over the last four years, about ten million dollars worth of oil has gone missing from Iraq. This was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 17, 2007.

FACT
Elephants can hear through their feet.

FACT
The first city to reach a population of a million people was Baghdad.

QUOTE
“If you want peace, work for justice.”
Pope John Paul II

FACT
Pope Benedict says the Catholic Church never imposed alien cultural ideas on the indigenous people of the Americas because those people were already “silently longing for Christ … without realizing it.”

QUOTE
What gets us in trouble is not the things we don’t know, but the things we do know that aren’t true.
                                                     - Mark Twain

QUIP
No writer ever suffered from writer’s block whose standards were low enough.
                                                     - William Stafford

 

 

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