Some Useless Knowledge You Might Be Interested to Know

• Unlike humans, the oyster is usually ambisexual. It begins life as a male, then becomes a female, then changes back to being a male, then back to female. It may go back and forth many times—and without paying for an operation, either!
  
• A spider is not an insect. It is an arachnid—it has 8 legs instead of 6, and has no wings or antennae. The same is true of the daddy longlegs, scorpion’s mite, and tick—none is technically part of the insect class.
  
• The first jukebox was installed at the Palais Royal Hotel in San Francisco in 1899.
  
• The full name of Rhea Perlman’s award-winning character on TV’s Cheers was Carla Maria Victoria Angelina Teresa Apollonia Lozupone Tortelli LeBec.
  
• Scurf is another word for dandruff.
  
• Dr. Samuel A. Mudd treated the leg of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. His actions produced the expression "his name is Mudd," signifying utter disgrace.
  
• Cooking and salad oils could lubricate machinery, such as cars and boats, according to Penn State chemical engineers. Tests found that when blended with an additive developed at Penn State, some vegetable oils perform as well as or better than commercial oils.
  
• Jack Broughton was one of the most revered boxing figures in England. He was entombed at Westminster Abbey, the burial place of British nobility, although he was a commoner.
  
• A pride of lions
  
• A plague of locusts
  
• A tiding of magpies
  
• A stud of mares
  
• A labour of moles
  
• A barren or span of mules
  
• A parliament of owls
  
• A company of parrots
  
• A shrewdness of apes
  
• A troop of baboons
  
• A shoal of bass
  
• A sleuth or sloth of bears
  
• A sounder of boars
  
• An army of caterpillars
  
• A clowder or clutter of cats
  
• A brood or peep of chickens
  
• A clutch or chattering of chicks
  
• The cover of the very first issue of Rolling Stone magazine featured John Lennon.
  
• Every 3 days, your body makes a new protective lining for your stomach. Without it, the stomach would literally eat itself alive in about 2 weeks. The hydrochloric acid of the human digestive process is so powerful a corrosive that it easily can burn its way through a cotton handkerchief, and even penetrate the iron of an automobile body. Yet, it doesn’t endanger the stomach’s sticky mucous walls.
  
• During the nineteenth century, Michigan was a key stop on the Underground Railroad, and many runaway slaves decided to make their homes there. Currently, 14 percent of Michigan’s population is African-American.
  
• On Sesame Street, one man—Carroll Spinney—plays Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. From within the 8’ 2" yellow feathered suit, Spinney watches a small monitor with the same view as the audience. He operates Big Bird’s head with one hand while working the bird’s hand with the other. When Oscar and Big Bird are in the same scene, Spinney speaks for both Muppets, while another puppeteer operates Oscar.
  
• The dread Black Plague in Europe was partially due to the belief that people thought cats were witches. Therefore, all the felines were hauled away and incinerated, which left the rats (who hosted the true culprits: plague-breeding fleas) to run around towns and villages and multiply. Ironically, cat lovers giving felines safe haven were a large part of those who survived.
  
• Strabismus is the condition of a person’s eyes going in different directions.
  
• Should members of these actual clubs be considered slightly deranged: Committee for Immediate Nuclear War, the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Mushrooms, the Order of Manly Men, and our favorite, the Institute of Totally Useless Skills?
  
• The average elephant produces 50 pounds of dung each day.
  
• Birds do not sing because they are happy. It is a territorial behavior.
  
• It appears the sheep and cattle in Australia are farting up such a storm that all the released gas is aggravating the Greenhouse Effect. To help plug up the problem, and motivate ranch owners to take action, the government in Sydney has considered putting a tax on the critters’ emissions.
  
• Lassie was played by several male dogs, despite the female name, because male collies were thought to look better on camera. The main "actor" was named Pal.
  
• The first person to work out the use of fingerprints for identification purposes, English anthropologist Francis Galton, was a first cousin of Charles Darwin.
  
• It may be possible to attend your own funeral. The human brain continues sending out electrical wave signals for up to 37 hours following death.
  
• Peter de Jager was the world’s foremost expert on the Y2K problem, which many believed would cause computer systems to collapse because their software would mistake the double zeroes of 2000 to mean 1900. He wrote the "Doomsday 2000" article that initially publicized the problem, then spent the 1990s helping companies all over the world fix their computers. When at midnight, January 1, 2000, planes did not fall from the sky, de Jager was angrily accused of setting the hysterical stage for billions of dollars to be wasted
  
• By the end of the U.S. Civil War, 33 percent of all U.S. paper currency in circulation was counterfeit. This was a devastating situation for a nation struggling to recover economically from such a destructive war. On July 5, 1865, the Secret Service was created as a part of the Department of the Treasury to help suppress counterfeit currency.