50 Awesome Facts About Everything |shahzadi789 blog
50 Awesome Facts About Everything
Here at Mental Floss, we're big fans fun facts and all things trivia. We learned a lot from reading National Geographic Kids’s book 5,000 Awesome Facts (About Everything!) 2. If you need a great conversation starter, here are 50 awesome facts from the book.
1. In 1889, the Queen of Italy, Margherita Savoy, ordered the first pizza delivery.
Legend has it that she wanted to dine on something a commoner would eat.
2. You can buy eel-flavored ice cream in Japan.
The unusual ice cream flavor is a summer delicacy.
3. It's considered rude to write in red ink in Portugal.
The color red is said to be associated with negative actions.
4. The elusive bobcat is the most common wildcat in North America.
Bobcats thrive in regions that stretch from Canada to Mexico. Good luck finding one, though.
5. A cat's tail contains nearly 10 percent of the bones in its body.
A cat's tail has anywhere from 19 to 23 vertebrae.
6. Gecko feet have millions of tiny hairs.
The hairs stick to surfaces with a special chemical bond. This lets the geckos climb walls and hang on by just one toe.
7. The word Astronaut is rooted in the Greek language.
It comes from words that mean "star" and "sailor."
8. We really are made of stardust.
The calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood come from the ancient explosions of giant stars.
9. The Nile crocodile can hold its breath underwater for up to two hours.
It does this while waiting for prey.
10. Jellyfish are not fish.
Jellyfish, or jellies as scientists call them, have no brain, heart, or bones.
11. The Chinese Giant Salamander can grow up to 6 feet long.
It's the largest salamander in the world.
12. People reportedly prefer blue toothbrushes over red ones.
The color really doesn't make a difference. Just keep an eye out for any gross things that could be on your toothbrush.
13. Some people used to believe that kissing a donkey could relieve a toothache.
This is just one strange old-timey medical treatment.
14. Scientists say the best time to take a nap is between 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.
This is because a dip in body temperature occurs and makes people sleepy.
15. A day in the age of dinosaurs was just 23 hours long.
This is because the speed of Earth's rotation changes over time.
16. A hummingbird's wings can beat up to more than 200 times per second.
Hummingbirds are built for performance.
17. There are more than 1200 water parks in North America.
Some of them, like Action Park, were downright dangerous.
18. A seahorse can move its eyes in opposite directions.
This makes it easier for seahorses to scan the water for food and predators.
19. It would take 100 Earths, lined up end-to-end, to stretch across the face of the sun.
The sun is massive—it's 99.8 percent of all the mass in our solar system.
20. To cook an egg, a sidewalk needs to be 158°F.
Anything colder will just make a mess.
21. A group of jellyfish is called a smack.
Just make sure you don't get smacked by their venomous tentacles.
22. Less than 1 percent of Antarctica is ice-free.
A whopping 90 percent of the world's total ice is in the Antarctica ice sheet.
23. The highest wave ever surfed was as tall as a 10-story building.
The terrifying achievement was recognized by Guiness World Records.
24. The beagle brigade is used in more than 20 international airports in the U.S.
The dogs keep a yearly average of 75,000 illegal items out of the country.
25. Some apples can weigh about as much as half a gallon of milk.
More apple means more apple pie.
26. Corn is grown on every continent except Antarctica.
For obvious reasons.
27. Unlike most fish, seahorses are covered in bony plates.
Most other fish are covered in scales.
28. You lose a lot of hair each day.
The average person sheds about 50 to 100 strands of each day.
29. The utricle is the world's smallest fruit.
The tiny fruit is the size of a small ant.
30. Armadillo is a Spanish word.
It means "little armored one."
31. New Jersey has the highest concentration of shopping malls.
The state has 66 malls and shopping centers.
32. Komodo dragons can devour 5 pounds of meat in less than a minute.
They store any extra fat in their tails.
33. Not all moons are dry and dusty like ours.
Our solar system has some magnificent moons. Jupiter's Europa has a liquid ocean under an icy crust.
34. Some viking chiefs were buried inside their ships.
Others were merely buried in mounds that looked like ships.
35. Clouds cover about 60 percent of Earth at any moment.
Here are some strange cloud types and what they mean.
36. apes make laugh-like vocalizations when they are tickled.
It's similar to human laughter.
37. Spotted hyenas can digest skin and bones.
Spotted hyenas are also cunning killers.
38. The quills on Africa's crested porcupines are as long as three pencils.
It's best not to write with one, though.
39. Scientists believe people who dream about an activity will actually get better at it in real life.
Surprisingly, this is not a misconception about dreams. Practice really does make perfect—even if you're not awake.
40. Your hair contains traces of gold.
Human hair also contains traces of other minerals.
41. In Japan, people don't see a "man in the moon."
Instead, they see a rabbit.
42. Some clouds travel up to 100 miles per hour across the sky.
It all depends on the speed of the wind.
43. Naked mole rats are sometimes called "sand puppies."
Not to be confused with actual puppies, of course.
44. Opal has been discovered on Mars.
The Martian opal could potentially provide information about ancient life.
45. George Washington loved exploring caves.
George Washington's name was found on a cave wall.
46. It takes a gallon and a half of milk to make a gallon of ice cream.
That's almost 13 pounds of milk.
47. Your TV remote is filthy.
A TV remote is the dirtiest item in a typical household, hospital, or hotel room.
48. The Hercules beetle can grow big enough to cover an adult human hand.
The massive beetle is still tiny compared to the world's biggest spider.
49. The finest quality emeralds are more valuable than diamonds.
Emeralds are rarer than diamonds.
50. Hearing is the fastest human sense.
A person can recognize a sound in as little as 0.05 seconds.
This story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2022.
9 Facts About the 'Hell House LLC' Horror Movie Franchise
9 Facts About the 'Hell House LLC' Horror Movie Franchise
What’s scarier than a Halloween haunted house? A haunted house that’s haunted for real, and whose props come to life. That’s the premise of writer/director Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC, a low-budget, found footage masterpiece that has spawned a full-on franchise.
Shot in documentary style, the story of the search for answers as to what happened on a tragic and unexplainable October night in the spirit-filled Abbadon Hotel excelled in terrifying audiences with its clown-based jump scares and doom-laden, labyrinth-like setting.
The 2015 original spawned two sequels—Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018) and Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire (2019)—as well as a brand-new spinoff, Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, which is currently streaming on Shudder. In the spirit of spooky season, read all about the original trilogy below. But note: Spoilers ahead!
1. Stephen Cognetti drew inspiration from Lake Mungo.
Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008) flew under the radar when it was initially released. But Cognetti has cited the eerie, faux-documentary from Australia—about a grieving family attempting to come to terms with their daughter’s drowning and subsequent haunting of the family home—as a major as inspiration on the Hell House LLC trilogy.
“I learned a new style of found footage through Lake Mungo, which was showing scares through the documentary style,” Cognetti told the Let the Right Films In podcast. “Found footage is supposed to make the scares feel more real and when you do it through a documentary style like Lake Mungo did it just takes that feeling to a whole new level, because it makes you feel like you’re watching an episode of 60 Minutes.”
2. The Hell House LLC trilogy was conceived as a single movie.
Cognetti’s ambitions for Hell House LLC were high—some might say a little too high, in part due to some questionable VFX employed throughout the films, which don’t do justice to the storyteller’s grand vision. Fortunately, the backstory Cognetti created regarding the Abbadon’s owner, Andrew Tully—a “latter-day Dante” who sought to create a gateway to hell on the hotel’s premises—provided plenty of material for the sequels.
“I lost a lot of the bigger story I wanted to tell in the first film,” Cognetti told Geeks of Doom in 2019. “Parts II and III wrote very easily for me because I knew where I was going with them the whole time.”
3. There is an “official“ scariest scene.
Wheresthejump.com ranks crew member Paul’s (Gore Abrams) final encounter with an unwelcome bedroom visitor as the original movie’s most frightening scene.
We’ve already seen weird specters pop up in Paul’s room during his end-of-day round-ups. But when the cameraman wakes up in the middle of the night to discover a pale-eyed ghost slumped in his room, he does what anyone in that situation would do: hides under the covers.
This old trick somehow doesn’t work this time, and when he eventually peeks the camera out, he finds the girl moving closer and closer ... until one final jump scares sees his sanity truly unravel. Original and effective, the scene manages to be simultaneously funny and terrifying.
4. Viewers find the first and second movies equally scary.
Somewhat surprisingly, Where’s the Jump? has both the first movie and its original sequel,The Abaddon Hotel, equal in terms of its scariness (2.5 out of five)—though the latter has more jump scares flagged (10 to the original’s six). In this case though, quality clearly trumps quantity: Stick to the first movie if you truly want to experience the goosebump factor.
5. The scariest ghosts are the ones hiding in plain sight.
The opening scene of Hell House LLC includes a clip of “leaked“ YouTube footage, taken from a haunted house goer’s phone, from inside the Abbadon Hotel on October 9, 2009. Audiences have not yet been introduced to the movie’s main cast members, which may be why the sweary, slurring bartender and that guy with the massive axe go completely unremarked upon.
It's only when viewers rewatch the footage after the movie’s end that they realize the full significance of these hidden scares. Doesn’t that bartender have pale-white eyes, just like many of the Abaddon Hotel’s many permanent guests? These are crew members who aren’t on the payroll—or even alive. This hidden-in-plain-sight theme continues throughout the saga, so searching for ghosts in the background makes for a fun game with repeated viewings.
6. You can visit the Abbadon Hotel in real life.
Though the fictional Abbadon Hotel is located in upstate New York, the movies were shot inside a real haunted house attraction: The Waldorf Estate of Fear in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, which has its own (very real) tragic backstory. The former hotel, which is located about two hours west of New York City, is open to the public for several nights around Halloween. Several of its themed events in 2023 have links to the Hell House LLC trilogy, including Hell House PARACON, which drew together speakers from the horror and paranormal industries—including writer/director Cognetti.
7. The trilogy’s producer has made more than one ill-fated cameo.
Hell House LLC producer Joe Bandelli gets acting credits across the series due to his portrayal of the possessed clown mannequin. However, he also gets his two of his own behind-the-camera death scenes.
He’s uncredited as Jonathan, the doomed documentary cameraman who makes the unfortunate mistake of following his colleague into the hotel in the first movie’s conclusion. He’s then demon food in the sequel as Brock’s cameraman Malcolm, who also meets his unfortunate end within the walls of the Abaddon.
8. The eye-popping content is for real.
Approximately 40 minutes into the first film, Joey—one of the newly hired haunted house actors—shows off a trick where he pops his eyeball out of its socket. There’s no trickery involved. Joey is played by Phil Hess, a real-life actor at the Waldorf Estate who really can pull off the gruesome talent.
9. The trilogy is now a quadrilogy.
Hell House LLC III: The Lake of Fire wrapped up the tale of the first three films nicely, which explains why Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor features a change of scenery. The official summary reads as follows: “Internet sleuths travel to Carmichael Manor in Rockland County, New York—site of the 1989 Carmichael family murders. They find a terror that’s lurked in the shadows long before Hell House LLC.“ The movie, which is again written and directed by Cognetti, is currently streaming on Shudder.
‘Lyrically Correct’: Put Your Hip-Hop and R&B Knowledge to the Test With This Y2K Music Trivia Game
‘Lyrically Correct’: Put Your Hip-Hop and R&B Knowledge to the Test With This Y2K Music Trivia Game
If you’re a walking, talking catalog of R&B and hip-hop songs from the ’90s and 2000s, you might find a regular trivia night a little lacking. Sure, there could be a “name that tune” category, and maybe a couple tunes fall in your wheelhouse.
But even in that best-case scenario, you may entertain dreams of a trivia game that lets you flex the full extent of your expertise. Lyrically Correct is that game.
The rules are simple: Players split into two teams, and a player from one team reads trivia questions to a player from the other team. The respondent has 60 seconds to answer as many questions as they can, and they earn one point for each correct answer. There’s a twist, though: Once during each turn, anyone from the question-reading team can issue a challenge card. The timer stops, and the respondents’ team has 30 seconds to answer the question on the challenge card. If they get it right, they get three points. If they fail, the other team gets three points.
The name of the game tells you everything you need to know about what kind of questions you’ll encounter—they’re all about identifying the correct lyrics in a song. But it’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds: You can’t count on being told the name of the song. One multiple choice question, for example, just asks “How long did Mary J. Blige sacrifice?” (The answer’s in the second verse of her song “Not Gon’ Cry.”)
Lyrically Correct is the brainchild of two married couples who love a good game night: Dee (CEO) and Tiffany (COO), and Juelz (vice president) and Nikki (executive administrator). The 1990s and 2000s hip-hop and R&B edition debuted in September 2020, and the team has since launched a few other versions that focus on other music genres—including Revival: The Gospel Edition ($24), an Oldies But Goodies Edition ($25), and an 80’s Mixtape Edition ($25).
For hip-hop and R&B fans, don’t worry about breezing through the original version ($24) too quickly: There’s an expansion pack available for $14, too.
10 Facts About Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, North America’s Most Famous (Probably) Extinct Bird
10 Facts About Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, North America’s Most Famous (Probably) Extinct Bird
If you’ve seen news stories about ivory-billed woodpeckers over the past few years, you might, very understandably, be confused: It seems like some expert is always announcing either that the birds are definitely extinct, or, that they definitely still exist somewhere. But how much do you really know about the charismatic “Lord God bird”? Here are 10 facts to introduce this legendary (maybe?) extinct avian—and a look-alike species that might be the source of all the rumors.
1. The first description of the ivory-billed woodpecker was published in 1731.
English naturalist Mark Catesby dubbed the bird the “largest white-billed woodpecker” and wrote that they “subsist mainly on ants, woodworms, and other insects, which they hew out of rotten trees.” In 1751, Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus drew on this description when he named the species Picus principalus, or “first woodpecker.” Their official, modern scientific name is Campephilus principalis . And their famous nickname—the “Lord God bird”—comes from the exclamations of amazement uttered by birdwatchers seeing one for the first time.
2. They depended on huge trees in large, uninterrupted areas of forest.
Ivory-billed woodpeckers were considered birds of lowland swamps; famed 19th-century naturalist Alexander Wilson wrote that they “seek the most towering trees of the forest, seemingly particularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps, whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted or moss-hung arms midway to the skies.” However, swamps may simply be where the last untouched forests able to support them remained, following extensive logging.
3. They sometimes hung out in groups, searching for tasty beetle larvae.
Nineteenth- and early 20th-century naturalists described as many as 11 ivory-billed woodpeckers foraging together in the same dead tree, stripping off the bark in search of the enormous beetle larvae that were their favorite food. They were probably nomadic, seeking out places where large numbers of trees had recently been killed by flooding or storms. In spring, they paired off and excavated huge cavities in the snags, in which they raised one to four young.
4. The last 100 percent-confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the U.S. was in 1944.
Habitat destruction and fragmentation led to these birds’ downfall. Their last stronghold in the United States was a patch of old-growth forest in Louisiana called the Singer Tract. Seven pairs were believed to have nested there in the 1930s, but the logging company that owned the rights to the land ignored pleas from the Audubon Society and multiple state governors and federal agencies to preserve it as a refuge—and began clear-cutting. The final universally accepted sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in the remnants of the Singer Tract in April 1944.
5. A population in Cuba persisted into at least the 1980s.
A distinct subspecies of ivory-billed woodpecker lived in montane pine forests on the island of Cuba. Although scientists hadn’t thoroughly documented its population since before the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, sporadic sightings continued to be reported through the 1960s and ‘70s. Finally, an international team of ornithologists observed a male and female in a remote area of Cuba in 1986 and 1987. Return trips in the 1990s failed to turn up any trace of them, however, and logging in the region was ongoing. Experts now believe that Cuba’s ivory-billed woodpeckers went extinct around 1990.
6. Ivory-bills were the third-largest woodpecker species in the world.
They were very large birds: over a foot-and-a-half long from beak to tail. They ranked just behind their close cousin the imperial woodpecker (native to Mexico, now extinct due to habitat loss) and the more distantly related great slaty woodpecker (extant but vulnerable) of Southeast Asia.
7. An extremely similar-looking species is still relatively common in forested areas across North America.
Pileated woodpeckers are smaller than ivory-billed woodpeckers and lack their namesake white bills and large white wing patches. But pileated woodpeckers are still pretty big (at well over a foot long, they’re the largest woodpecker still present in North America), and they do share ivory-billed woodpeckers’ distinctive red crests and white-striped necks. The pileated species may be responsible for at least some of the supposed ivory-bill sightings that continue to be reported occasionally in the U.S.
8. Some ornithologists claimed to have rediscovered the ivory-billed woodpecker in the 2000s.
In 2005, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology-led team published a paper in the journal Science assembling evidence that ivory-billed woodpeckers still lived in eastern Arkansas, based on sightings, call recordings, and one short, low-quality video clip. Further searches of the area failed to turn up additional proof, however, and other bird identification experts believe that the video likely showed a pileated woodpecker.
9. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed declaring ivory-bills officially extinct.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was officially listed as an endangered species in 1967. A 2021 proposal to remove the birds from the endangered species list and formally declare them extinct—which cited the continued lack of proof that living ivory-bills still exist—was immediately controversial: Ivory-billed woodpecker proponents worried it would eliminate any incentive to protect what they believed to be the birds’ last remaining areas of habitat in Arkansas, Louisiana, and other states.
10. New (but still inconclusive) evidence was released in 2023.
Another paper claiming the woodpeckers’ continued existence, this time led by scientists from the National Aviary in Pittsburgh and drawing on data collected in Louisiana, was published in May 2023 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The most noteworthy new bit of evidence this time around consisted of drone footage that appeared to show possible ivory-billed woodpeckers flying between trees. Many ornithologists and birders remain unconvinced (those pesky pileateds again!), but as of 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has yet to make an official decision on the plan to remove them from the endangered species and declare them extinct once and for all. Hope lives on.
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