André the Giant was an actor and professional wrestler who began his career early at the height of 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m) and 6 ft 11 in (2.10 m). By the 70s, his height had inflated to 7 ft 10 in (2.38 m) but the height restrictions in the wrestling entertainment business (7 ft 5 in), forced Andre to keep his real height confidential. It was later announced that Andre was 7 ft 4 in with a weight that ranged between 460 and 540 lb.
When the Jolly Green Giant first appeared in television commercials in 1958, he did not exactly leave the desired impression. Kids were afraid of him because he looked like a monster. Del Monte worked on his image, added “Ho, ho, ho,” and the jingle, “Good things from the garden” to soften his image.
David and Goliath is an age-old story from the Old Testament of a young boy who defeats a giant with a slingshot. In the early 60s, the Italians used the same character of Goliath as an action superhero in a series of Biblical adventure films. A 1959 Steve Reeves film, Terror of the Barbarians, was renamed Goliath and the Barbarians in 1960 in the USA. It did so well that it spawned a series of four more films including Goliath Against the Giants (1960), Goliath and the Rebel Slave, Goliath and the Masked Rider (1964) and Goliath at the Conquest of Baghdad (1964).
Ginseng
Wausau, WI, is the ginseng capital of the world.
Ginseng is an aromatic root that has been used for medicinal purposes in Asia for thousands of years. It has been reputed to cure cancer, diabetes, aging, sexual dysfunction, high blood pressure, and many other disorders.
Soviet cosmonauts were issued pieces of ginseng to take along on missions into space as a preventative against possible ailments.
Both the Native Americans and the early colonists used ginseng for a variety of medicinal purposes themselves. The colonists made it into tea to stimulate the appetite or strengthen digestion, particularly of elderly persons or physically underdeveloped children. A tonic made of ginseng, black cherry, and yellow root, and a tea of ginseng root and chamomile flowers were popular as well.
A 100-year-old wild ginseng was sold for 1.88 million Yuan ($250,000) in an auction in Guangzhou, China, on November 6, 2007. Sure it seems like a pricey piece of root but not when compared with an earlier sale in August. That 300-year-old ginseng was sold for $400,000.
Pregnant or nursing women or children should avoid ginseng. People with hormone-dependent illnesses such as endometriosis, uterine fibroids, or cancers of the breast, ovaries, uterus, or prostate should avoid Panax ginseng, Asian/Chinese or Korean grown, due to its estrogenic effects.
Glue
Using “UHU Alleskleber Super Strong & Safe,” a commercially-available household adhesive, the heaviest weight lifted by glue was a Ford Pickup truck suspended for an hour in Buhl, Germany on October 11, 2007.
Neanderthals as far back as 80,000 years made glue from birch bark.
The gods must be crazy…The oracle at Delphi had lent her wisdom to many events: she advised generals about invasions; and even warned Oedipus about murdering his father and marrying his mother. However, scientists now discovered that she was not blessed with prophetic vision. Rather, she was high from alcoholic vapors. The oracle chamber was built over a geological fault, which seeped ethane and ethylene gases. Consequently, the oracle, the temple maiden who uttered Delphi’s prophecies, was likely in a permanent narcotic state.
In December 2008, a doctor performed surgery on a three-month-old girl who had a vein of Galen malformation, or arteriovenous malformation, which caused her blood to flow too quickly from the arteries to the veins. He inserted a hollow tube containing medical glue through her groin and plugged the holes in the arteries. So by plugging the holes with the glue, Berenstein decreased the demand on her heart, which has already begun to repair itself.
Elmer’s glue is the glue of choice for students across the nation. It is estimated that over 47 million elementary school students use Elmer’s Glue on a weekly basis.
God
The name of God is spelled with four letters in almost every known language. In Latin, it is Deus; Greek, Zeus; Hebrew, Adon; Syrian, Adad; Arabian, Alla; Persian, Syra; Irish, Dich; French, Dieu; Spanish, Dios.
The name God in the Anglo-Saxon language means good.
Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of the sun and of war. He was the patron god of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now stands. The Aztecs built a great temple there in his honor and sacrificed many humans to him.
Hurakan was the Mayan god of storms and winds. When the first humans made him angry, he swept them away in a violent flood. The word “hurricane” comes from his name.
The hit film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), ran for 532 days in a row at a theater in Cupertino, California—the longest run of a movie in northern California. The only reason it didn’t go for 533 days is because the film reels were damaged beyond repair and a section actually caught fire.
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge has approximately 1,200,000 rivets.
Closed encounters…The Golden Gate Bridge has been closed due to weather conditions only three times: December 1, 1951, December 23, 1982, and December 3, 1983. It had also been closed down briefly on two separate occasions for visiting dignitaries President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Charles de Gaulle of France. Lastly, it was also closed on its fiftieth birthday.
The bridge was the longest span in the world from its completion until the Verrazano Narrows Bridge was built in New York in 1964. Today, it still has the seventh-longest main span in the world.
Only eleven workers died during construction, a new safety record at the time. In the 1930s, bridge builders expected one fatality per $1 million in construction costs. One of the bridge’s safety innovations was a net suspended under the floor. This net saved the lives of 19 men during construction, and they are often called the members of the “Half Way to Hell Club.”
The Golden Gate Bridge’s paint color is orange vermillion, also called international orange. Architect Irving Morrow chose the color as it blended with the bridge’s environment.
Suicide leaps off the Golden Gate Bridge are fatal 98% of the time. An average of 19 people a year take the jump, and the body count has clocked past the 1000 mark.
Golf
Head’s up! Wooden balls were used until the early 17th century, when the featherie ball was invented. A featherie is a hand sewn leather pouch stuffed with goose feathers and coated with paint. Due to its superior flight characteristics, the featherie remained the standard ball for more than two centuries. Since 1901, a one-piece rubber ball has been universally adopted.
Dimples are put onto golf balls to eliminate aerodynamic drag. The drag acts as an anchor and the ball reduces in speed. Most golf balls today have about 250-450 dimples.
In 1994, the year’s leading PGA money winner was Nick Price, who earned $1,499,927. A decade later in 2004, Vijay Singh earned $10,905,167 as the year’s leading PGA money winner, which made him the first golfer to earn over $10,000,000 in a single season.
St. Andrews in Scotland is the world’s oldest golf course and was used as early as the 16th century.
The longest golf cart measures 6.68 m (21 ft 11 in) from bumper to bumper and was created by HSBC Champions.
In the early days of golf, the clubs were much flatter and longer than they are today. They were made of ash or hazel and had a head made of apple, pear, beech or blackthorn wood.
These days, full-length golf courses have 18 holes. However, until the mid 19th century, there was no set length and the size of golf courses varied.
The Great Wall of China
The Great Wall spans 4,000 miles from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur in the west, along an arc that roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia, but it actually stretches to over 4,160 miles in total. At its peak, the Ming Wall was guarded by more than one million men.
Before the use of bricks, the Great Wall was built with Earth or Taipa, stones, and wood. Rice flour was also used to
strengthen some of the bricks and mortar that make up the wall.
The purpose of the Great Wall of China was not only built to keep out the Huns from the north, but also to prevent them from bringing their horses across. Without their horses, they weren’t very effective warriors.
The Great Wall is thought to be a single structure when in fact it is not. It actually consists of numerous walls built by different dynasties over more than 2,000 years.
In every marathon, there is the psychological barrier of “hitting the wall.” In the Great Wall Marathon, the course takes runners through rural villages surrounding the wall and at least 4 miles on the actual wall. On Saturday May 17, 2008, The Great Wall Marathon® supported over 1700 runners from 49 countries.
Gutenberg, Johann
Johann Gutenberg, a German, invented the printing press in the 1450s. It made new ideas available to a much larger audience and thus allowed the Renaissance to spread.
Johann Gutenberg was a German goldsmith. In those days, people laboriously copied books by hand or printed them from wooden blocks where each letter of every page was carved individually. Gutenberg learned to make metal letters that he called “type.” He could pick up the letters and place them in rows to build pages. A frame held each page together. Gutenberg fixed the frame to a press and pressed the inky surface of his type onto sheets of paper. Gutenberg’s movable type helped him to make copies of books faster and more cheaply than ever before. Surprisingly, despite the importance of his achievement, he never made much money from it.
The Gutenberg Bible was completed between 1450 and 1455. Early documentation states that a total of 200 copies were scheduled for print on rag cotton linen paper and 30 copies on vellum animal skin—though there is no record of how many copies were actually printed. Today, only 22 copies are known to exist, 7 of which are on vellum.
Though it remains to be seen, an entire Gutenberg Bible is valued at an estimated 100 million dollars. An individual leaf (a single two-sided page) from the original Gutenberg Bible can bring in around $100,000. Gutenberg’s work is the most rare and valuable printed material in the world.
H
Handcuffs
The English word “handcuff” is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon word handcops, an obsolete word meaning “to fetter.”
In February 2008, an eight-year-old boy in New Hampshire had to be freed by firefighters after getting stuck in a pair of handcuffs he found in his mother’s bedroom.
For over 15 years TUFF-TIES, plastic disposable handcuffs, have been used and approved internationally by the Military and over 3,000 federal, state, county, local police agencies, and security forces in all types of arrest and restraint situations.
A standard pair of modern handcuffs weighs no more than 15 oz and the minimum opening of the bracelet is 2 inches. The maximum overall length of the handcuffs is 9.4 in (24 cm).
Some might say she was served…twice. Jean Merola, a 75-year-old grandmother of eight, was arrested for disorderly conduct after she refused an officer’s orders to move her car while she waited for the coffee and fries she ordered at the drive-through window. Merola was handcuffed behind her back and put in the cruiser.
In 1910, Houdini published the book Handcuff Secrets to discourage hack imitators. In the book, he wrote, “you can open the majority of the old-time cuffs with a shoestring. By simply making a loop in the string, you can lasso the end of the screw in the lock and yank the bolt back, and so open the cuff in as clean a manner as if opened with the original key.”
Helium
Helium is the second lightest element and next to hydrogen, it is the second most abundant in the universe. In fact, all natural gas contains some traceable quantity of helium.
In 1965, helium use in the United States was more than eight times the peak wartime consumption.
Helium is a very light, inert, colorless gas and has the lowest melting point of any element. No matter how low the temperature, helium is the only liquid that cannot be solidified and remains a liquid to absolute zero.
Helium is often mixed with oxygen for deep sea diving to help reduce the effects of narcosis. The mixture is called cold heliox.
Henry VIII
Henry’s attempt to have his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled set in motion a chain of events that led to England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. It also lead him to marry Anne Boleyn on the judgment of clergy in England, without reference to the Pope. Anne was consequently crowned queen consort on June 1, 1533. She gave birth to Elizabeth on September 7, 1533.
Henry was an avid gambler and a fan of dice playing.
He was also quite the womanizer. He had several mistresses, and at least one illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, who was given the title Duke of Richmond and Somerset. One of Henry’s mistresses was Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn.
In his early life he enjoyed physical activities including hunting, hawking, horseback riding, jousting, tennis, archery, and wrestling. He was also well-educated and intelligent and enjoyed writing and composing music. Henry loved court life with its pageants, dancing and masques. After a leg injury gave rise to an ulcer in his later life, Henry indulged in eating and drinking to become large and bloated.
His dying words were supposed to be “Monks, Monks, Monks!”
Hiccups
Hiccups are also known as “singulitis.” The American Cancer Society reports that 30% of chemotherapy patients suffer singulitis as a side effect of treatment.
Though nobody knows for sure why we hiccup, one theory suggests that it was a handy function to have when we first evolved to air-breathing lungs, as we also had gills.
Hiccups are treated medically in severe cases only. One such case occurred in 2007 when a 15-year-old girl hiccupped continuously for five weeks.
American man Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 68 years, from 1922 to 1990, and earned himself the Guinness World Record as the man with the Longest Attack of Hiccups. The hiccups began in 1922 at a rate of 40 times per minute, slowing to 20 hiccups per minute and eventually stopping on June 5, 1990, a total of 68 years.
Ultrasound scans show that two-month-old babies hiccup in the womb, before any breathing movements appear.
Hieroglyphs
The Rosetta stone was made up of three different languages: one single passage had two Egyptian language scripts (Hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. Jean-François Champollion who finally deciphered it stated, “It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.”
One of the most interesting facts about hieroglyphs is that one symbol alone could have up to three meanings and could be either phonetic or simply a representative of the picture it depicted.
Hieroglyphs could be written left to right, up and down, or right to left.
Honey dates back for 150 million years, and it’s written about in hieroglyphics. Egyptians would use honey as a form of payment, like the Aztecs used cocoa beans.
Each Pharaoh had his own hieroglyph. When the Pharaoh died, his mummy would have a nametag with his hieroglyph symbol on it, identifying the mummy.
Himalayas
When translated, the Himalayas means the “abode of snow.”
70 million years ago, a tremendous collision between India and Asia (via the Indo Australian and Eurasian plates) occurred, and the Himalayas were born.
The largest lake in the Himalayas is the Pangong Tso, which is spread across the border between India and Tibet. It is situated at an altitude of 4,600 m and is 8 km wide and nearly 134 km long.
75% of Nepal is covered by the Himalayas.
The Utterly, Completely, and Totally Useless Fact-O-Pedia Page 9