The Totally Awesome Book of Useless Information Read online

  THE

  Totally Awesome

  BOOK OF USELESS

  INFORMATION

  Noel Botham

  Illustrations by Travis Nichols

  A PERIGEE BOOK

  A PERIGEE BOOK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Some of the material in this book previously appeared in the following titles:

  The Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society copyright © 2006 by Noel Botham.

  The Ultimate Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham &

  The Useless Information Society copyright © 2007 by Noel Botham.

  The Best Book of Useless Information Ever by Noel Botham &

  The Useless Information Society copyright © 2008 by Noel Botham.

  The Amazing Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham &

  The Useless Information Society copyright © 2008 by Noel Botham.

  The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society

  copyright © 2009 by Noel Botham and Perigee Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  PERIGEE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “P” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First edition: June 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Botham, Noel. 1940–

  The totally awesome book of useless information / Noel Botham; illustrations by Travis Nichols.

  p. cm.

  “A Perigee book.”

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58945-8

  1. Curiosities and wonders. 2. Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc. I. Nichols, Travis.

  II. Useless Information Society. III. Useless Information Society. IV. Title.

  AG243.B6638 2012

  031.02—dc23 2012002186

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Most Perigee Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

  For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  THE

  Totally Awesome

  BOOK OF USELESS

  INFORMATION

  Table of Contents

  Chapters

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground.

  “Happy Birthday to You” is the most often sung song in America.

  A bumblebee beats its wings about 160 times a second.

  Sleeping Beauty slept for one hundred years.

  Queen Elizabeth I had more than two thousand dresses.

  More presidents have been born in the state of Virginia than any other state.

  Sharks are the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

  Christopher Columbus had blond hair.

  A starfish doesn’t have a brain.

  The oldest-known goldfish lived to forty-one years of age. Its name was Fred.

  The most money that can be lost in one turn in Monopoly is $5,070.

  One in every four Americans has appeared on television.

  Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, wasn’t a fan of raw carrots.

  An iguana can hold its breath for twenty-eight minutes.

  Crocodiles cannot stick their tongues out.

  President John Quincy Adams owned a pet alligator, which he kept in the East Room of the White House.

  A pig always sleeps on its side.

  Scooby-Doo’s real first name is Scoobert. Shaggy’s real first name is Norville.

  Mosquitoes are more attracted to the color blue than any other color.

  Mickey Mouse was the first nonhuman to win an Oscar.

  There are 225 spaces on a Scrabble board.

  Bees must visit around five thousand flowers to make a spoonful of honey.

  People in Iceland read more books per capita than any other people in the world.

  In the United States, 12,500 puppies are born every hour.

  Dalmatians are born pure white. Their spots don’t begin to appear until after they are born.

  The longest Monopoly game ever played was 1,680 hours (seventy days). The longest Monopoly game in a bathtub was ninety-nine hours long.

  Telephonophobia is the fear of telephones.

  Cats have four rows of whiskers.

  Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

  Rats can tread water for three days without stopping.

  The tallest man on record was 8 feet, 11.1 inches tall.

  Venus and Uranus are the only planets that rotate clockwise.

  The only insect that can turn its head is a praying mantis.

  The world’s longest name is Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft Sr.

  The tallest mammal is the giraffe.

  The human brain stops growing at the age of eighteen.

  The world’s tallest mountains, the Himalayas, are growing about 2.4 inches taller every year.

  The female lion does more than 90 percent of the hunting, not the male.

  Termites eat through wood twice as fast when listening to rock music.

  The Bible is the most shoplifted book in America.

  Rhinos belong to the same family as horses and are thought to have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

  The gap between two upper front teeth is called diastema.

  The night vision of tigers is six times better than that of humans.

  A horologist measures time.

  A baby panda is smaller than a mouse when it is bor
n.

  Fingernails grow nearly four times faster than toenails.

  A fox’s tail is called a brush.

  Your thumb is the same length as your nose.

  Spain literally means “the land of rabbits.”

  Identical twins do not have identical fingerprints.

  The killer whale is not actually a whale but is the largest member of the dolphin family.

  The world’s largest shopping mall (by total area) is in China, but has been 99 percent vacant since opening. Some of its features are a canal with gondolas and an indoor-outdoor roller coaster.

  The average person blinks more than ten million times a year.

  A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

  The word karate means “empty hand.”

  To see at night as well as an owl, you would need eyeballs as big as grapefruits.

  A sneeze travels out of your mouth at more than one hundred miles per hour.

  It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

  The largest ever jack-o’-lantern was carved from a 1,469-pound pumpkin on Halloween 2005.

  The most difficult tongue twister is “The sixth sick Sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.”

  The ostrich has only two toes.

  The oldest word in the English language is town.

  There are 450 hairs in an average eyebrow.

  Diet Coke was invented in 1982.

  “I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

  The faces on Mount Rushmore are sixty feet tall. They are of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

  The most used letter in the English alphabet is E; Q is the least used.

  In England in the 1880s, pants was considered a dirty word.

  Rats can’t vomit.

  Men get hiccups more often than women do.

  No word in the English language rhymes with mouth, orange, silver, or purple.

  Women blink twice as often as men do.

  Lightning strikes the ground about six thousand times per minute.

  November 19 is Have a Bad Day Day.

  The most commonly used word in English conversation is I.

  The largest school in the world is in the Philippines and has around twenty-five thousand students.

  Ronald Reagan was the oldest man to be elected president of the United States.

  Less than 2 percent of the water on Earth is fresh.

  Most spiders have eight eyes.

  About one-tenth of the world’s surface is permanently covered in ice.

  Pearls melt in vinegar.

  Seven percent of Americans eat McDonald’s every day.

  The world’s largest yo-yo is 1,625 pounds.

  In Indiana, there is a town named Santa Claus.

  A can of Diet Coke will float in water, while a can of regular Coke sinks.

  Guinness World Records holds the record for the book most often stolen from public libraries.

  Australia is the only continent without an active volcano.

  Eating raw onions is good for unblocking a stuffed nose.

  The penguin is the only bird that walks upright.

  The peanut is a vegetable and a member of the pea family.

  The world’s heaviest man was more than 1,400 pounds.

  French fries were invented in Belgium.

  The average person laughs thirteen times a day.

  The longest snake ever captured measured twenty-four feet.

  In a lifetime, the average person in America spends eight years watching television.

  The oldest known vegetable is the pea.

  The Statue of Liberty’s fingernails weigh about one hundred pounds each.

  Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits.

  There is a house in New Jersey built in the shape of an elephant, a house in Oklahoma shaped like a chicken, and a house in Massachusetts made entirely of newspapers.

  The largest cabbage ever grown weighed 125.9 pounds.

  The most widely eaten fruit in America is the banana.

  There are no penguins anywhere in the northern hemisphere except in zoos.

  The Great Wall of China is the world’s longest wall and runs for more than 4,000 miles. It took more than 1,700 years to build.

  The heaviest sumo wrestler ever recorded weighed in at a thundering 560 pounds.

  Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.

  A cucumber consists of 96 percent water.

  John Hancock was the only one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence to actually sign it on the Fourth of July.

  Thirty-five billion emails each day are sent throughout the world.

  More than a third of all pineapples come from Hawaii.

  The gray whale is not really gray. It is black.

  Eyeglasses were invented in China.

  There are an average of two earthquakes every minute in the world.

  There are more brown M&M’s in plain M&M’s than in peanut M&M’s.

  The winters of 1911 and 1932 were so cold that Niagara Falls froze.

  Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair.

  There are more doughnut shops per capita in Canada than in any other country.

  The shoelace was invented in England in 1790. Before then, all shoes were fastened with buckles.

  Mickey Mouse’s birthday is November 18.

  There is a Historical Museum of Spaghetti in Pontedassio, Italy.

  The most popular ice cream flavor is vanilla.

  The flounder swims sideways.

  The average American chews 190 sticks of gum, drinks 600 sodas and 800 gallons of water, and consumes 135 pounds of sugar and 19 pounds of cereal per year.

  In Disney’s Cinderella, Cinderella loses her left shoe at the ball.

  Saturday night is the biggest night of the week for eating pizza.

  Everyone is color-blind at birth.

  More popcorn is sold in Dallas than anywhere else in the United States.

  Ancient Egyptians believed eating fried mice would cure a toothache.

  Two million different combinations of sandwiches can be created from a Subway menu.

  Fingernails are made from the same substance as a bird’s beak.

  The chocolate chip cookie was invented in 1933.

  A pair of human feet contains two hundred and fifty thousand sweat glands. There are about one trillion bacteria on each foot.

  In the summer, walnuts get a tan.

  Turnips turn green when sunburned.

  The screwdriver was invented before the screw.

  In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.

  Fish can learn more quickly than dogs.

  Ketchup originated in China.

  Crickets hear through their knees.

  Potato chips were invented in Louisiana in 1853.

  The shortest president was James Madison at five feet, four inches.

  Mosquitoes have teeth.

  Beijing boasts the world’s largest Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  Sheep snore.

  The largest apple pie ever baked was forty feet by twenty-three feet.

  A squirrel’s brain is approximately the size of a walnut.

  It is estimated that Americans eat 10 million tons of turkey on Thanksgiving Day.

  Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

  For a deck of cards to be mixed up enough to play with properly, it should be shuffled at least seven times.

  The pupil of an octopus’s eye is rectangular.

  More people use blue toothbrushes than red ones.

  A man once had the hiccups for sixty-eight years.

  The bestselling chocolate bar in Russia is Snickers.

  Toilets in Australia flush counterclockwise.

  A snowflake can take up to an hour to fall from a cloud to the surface of the Earth.

  The largest pumpkin pie ever made weighed 3,699 pounds.

&
nbsp; In 1825, the first toilet was installed in the White House.

  The world’s oldest piece of chewing gum is nine thousand years old.

  The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

  The peach was the first fruit eaten on the moon.

  Most people button their shirts starting at the bottom.

  Dunkin’ Donuts serves about 112,500 doughnuts each day.

  On average, humans fart once per hour.

  The armhole in clothing is called an armsaye.

  Jeans were named after Genoa, Italy, where the first denim cloth was made.

  More than 189 billion Lego pieces in two thousand different shapes have been produced since the first one was made in 1949. This is enough for about thirty Lego pieces for every person on Earth.

  The biggest-selling restaurant food is french fries.

  The largest hamburger in the world weighed in at 777 pounds.

  The world’s longest carrot was a little more than nineteen feet.

  There are more Barbie dolls in Italy than Canadians in Canada.

  Dinosaur droppings are called coprolites.

  Totally Hair Barbie is the best-selling Barbie of all time.

  The habit of nose picking is called rhinotillexomania.

  Slinkys were invented by an airplane mechanic.

  Roosters cannot crow if they are not able to fully extend their necks.

  Seven percent of Americans claim they never bathe.

  If you took a standard Slinky and stretched it out, it would measure eighty-seven feet.

  A total of 364 gifts are given in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  Carrots are not always orange and can also be purple, white, red, or yellow.