Bogus trivia list

Factual Questions
1

A user posted the following list on a message board I often read. I’m pretty sure it’s not copyrighted. Actually, it’s all over the web. Cecil’s columns, among other sources, such as snopes, have been handy in debunking some of the entries.

  1. The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

  2. Coca-Cola was originally green.

  3. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

  4. Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

  5. The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska

  6. The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% now get this…

  7. The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%

  8. The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400

  9. The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000

  10. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

  11. The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

  12. The youngest pope was 11 years old.

  13. The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

  14. Those San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.

  15. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades - King David, Hearts - Charlemagne, Clubs-Alexander the Great, Diamonds - Julius Caesar

  16. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

  17. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

  18. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn’t added until 5 years later.

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

  20. Hershey’s Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it’s kissing the conveyor belt.

  21. No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Super bowl.

  22. The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

  23. How about this… The nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosy” is a rhyme about the plague. Infected people with the plague would get red circular sores (“Ring around the rosy…”), these sores would smell very bad, so common folks would put flowers on their bodies somewhere inconspicuously so that they would cover the smell of the sores ("…a pocket full of posies…"). People who died from the plague would be burned so as to reduce the possible spread of the disease ("…ashes, ashes, we all fall down!").

  24. In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes when you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase goodnight, sleep tight".

  25. It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month or what we know today as the “honeymoon”.

  26. In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It’s where we get the phrase “mind your P’s and Q’s”.

  27. Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. “Wet your whistle” is the phrase inspired by this practice.

  28. In ancient England a person could not have sex unless you had consent of the King (unless you were in the Royal Family). When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King, the King gave them a placard that they hung on their door while they were having sex. The placard had F...*. (Fornication Under Consent of the King) on it. Now you know where that came from.

  29. In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden… and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.

End of quote.

We have sources on the following:

  1. A very early TV show called Mary Kay and Johnny showed the couple sharing a bed. http://www.snopes2.com/radiotv/tv/marykay.htm

  2. Coca Cola was never green. http://www.snopes2.com/cokelore/green.htm

Dang, I’m out of time. I’d like to continue, hopefully I can come back to edit this. I’m more interested in what can be proved true, because it’s mostly false. The multiplication one checks out, at least. I hope this hasn’t been posted before.

2
  1. St. Louis Rams, 2000.
3

Hi, Ironikinit, and welcome to the SDMB. Before you post any more … please :slight_smile: just do some searching for what may already have been discussed.

The search link in the upper right-hand part of the page will take you to a screen where you can enter search terms, choose which forum to search, and how far back. I would recommend searching each of the 39 items one at a time, picking key words (e. g., item 3 deals with Monopoly money and the US Treasury so search for “monopoly treasury”), searching for it in GQ and going back a year or so. You’ll have to sift through a good many false hits, but you’ll almost certainly find info on most of the items you’ve brought up.

Hope this helps.

4

Oh, and 22 is wrong now that the WNBA plays without respect for the Midsummer Classic.

I’m just guessing you got hold of some really old glurge, there. :wink:

5

I cannot cover all ov them, but I’ll start.

Covered by the master:
In statues, does the number of feet the horse has off the ground indicate the fate of the rider?

Rings a bell, and I beleve I’ve seen it verified, possibly in “Viruses, plague and history” by Michael BA Oldstone. (Oxford University Press 1998)

The jury is still out, according to worldwidewords

6

No.

7

The Hershey website mentions this theory but says the source of the name is unknown.

8

Who can give a shorter example?

I.

9

Bogus.

Also bogus.

Partly true. According to the San Francisco Cable Car Site, they are National Historic Landmarks, not Monuments. They seem to be the only ones that move, though.

10

The NFL has never broken the no-play rule for baseball’s All-Star break.
Now who can tell the class why? (And I don’t want to see the same hands all the time).

11

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tc *

False, and Snopes, as always, is your friend.

12

The 16th claim is correct, of course. Anyone running Windows can open Accessories > Calculator and verify it in a jiffy.

13
  1. “I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

The Master speaks:
Is “I am” the shortest English sentence?

14

  1. The monololy money thing was covered previously in this thread. Not true.

  2. can, of course, be easily verified (as Jomo Mojo point out).

  3. According to Merriam-Webster, the etymology of “honeymoon” is: “from the idea that the first month of marriage is the sweetest; Date: 1546”

Seems like I’ve seen others on the list discussed in GQ, but I’m too lazy to search on all of them.

15

  1. I believe I have read this in several sources. I would like to hear evidence refuting this. Did Mark Twain write Tom Sawyer on a typewriter?

  2. 111,111,111 X 111,111,111 does equal 12345678987654321. I just ran it through a calculator and it came out with the answer you provided. Not to be snotty, but did it ever occur to you to run it through a calculator? In case the calculator is part of the conspiracy, I am going to multiply it out long hand when I have the time.

  3. I bow to Snopes on this. I was going to defend the “Ring Around the Rosy”/Bubonic plague connection, but now I’m not so sure. The assertion that it couldn’t have been about the plague because that would required children to remember this rhyme for 500 years is not, in my opinion, such a strong argument. First of all, there were later plagues (as Snopes admits, and later than the 1665 plague mentioned there). Second of all, certain rhymes and other bits of information can last in a culture for quite some time.

All in all I’d say that was a good list of legends. I think some of them are true, however, or at least undetermined.

16

A note on number 16: You don’t need a calculator, nor indeed a paper and pencil. You just need to see the pattern. As a simpler example, consider 1111*1111 . Longhand, that would be done as


    1111
  x 1111
--------
    1111
   11110
  111100
+1111000
--------
 1234321

See the pattern? So clearly, 111,111,111 * 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

On some of the others:
5 is actually believable. In a rural area, more people will walk to work, and Alaska is largely rural. I can’t exactly confirm it, though.

6 and 7 will depend on how one defines “wilderness”.

10 I find very hard to believe. Last I knew, there weren’t any chemical tests which provided any indication of intelligence, beyond perhaps being free of a few forms of mental retardation.

19: Even if we don’t accept things like “no” and “I”, the sentences “I do” and “I go” are at least tied.

26: The pints and quarts is one theory that gets floated a lot; another is that it’s from printers setting type. Since the type looks reversed to the setter, it’s easy to confuse lowercase p and q (or d and b, for that matter).

17
  1. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, although some sources claimed he was only 12 on his accession to the Papacy, Benedict IX (1032-1045) was actually about 20. The youngest pope appears to have been John XII (955-964), who was elected at 18 (or perhaps 16). Both were among the worst popes in history.
18

6 and 7. True. The figures appear to come from a recent technical assessment: McCloskey, J.M. and Spalding, H. (1989). A reconnaissance-level inventory of the amount of wilderness remaining in the world. Ambio 18(4):221-227. (The actual figures are 37.5% for North America and 27.5% for Africa.) Huge areas of North America in the arctic and subarctic qualify as wilderness.

19

If we don’t accept things like “no” and “I”, there are still sentences in the imperative mood with an implied subject of “you”. How about “Go.”?

20

Hey, y’all are tops. Knead, sorry, I should’ve thought of that.

I can eliminate some more of these, and I would’ve but I had to bail earlier. I’d like to especially thank Floater for the snopes link (Ring Around the Rosy). I was a boy when I was taught that bit of useless information. I carried it with me for years, used it many times to beguile the easily impressed around the bar, and it’s not even true. Bummer.

I can think of one source that backs #25: An Incomplete Education by Archer and Jones. However, thinking on it now makes it sound a bit silly. I could see maybe an old English custom of giving mead as a bridal gift, but Babylon’s a bit of a stretch. zut’s answer is most likely correct.

I’d also like to thank Colibri, I didn’t have luck looking that up about the youngest Pope.

I’ve no luck finding out about the youngest parents, either.

sjc, yes, I’ve often heard that Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter, too, but I’m starting to get worried about a lot of trivia.

I did find information on the four kings story: http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/fracture/cardking.htm
There’s some truth to it, but really just a few early decks had the Charlemagne, Alex, Julius, and David kings.

This site has info about Ps & Qs, wet your whistle, and sleep tight:
http://www.takeourword.com/TOW113/page1.html

I swear I’ll find out how to make the nice link soon.

Thanks again everybody, and I hope y’all will go after what’s left there. Would it help if I posted a list of what’s left?