Over the years, I have discovered that useless facts are very good for starting conversations in social events, and thus I have filled my head with endless amounts of utterly useless facts in order to be prepared and never encounter an uncomfortable silence in said events.
I have looked far and wide for useless facts all over the world in search of the perfect one. The perfection of a useless fact is measured in it’s ability to contain no possible knowledge, or any possible use what so ever, yet for some unknown reason it is still very interesting.
The doping community I figure is a perfect place to learn more useless facts in my never ending quest to come up with the perfect one, so I have created this post to hear everyone’s favorite useless fact, starting with my own:
The longest word you can type on a typewriter using only one row of keys is “typewriter”
and also:
The last year an official execution was carried out in France using the Guillotine was 1974
a flea can jump 260 times its body length.
rubber bands last longer if they are refrigerated
the male preying mantis is unable to inseminate the female until it is decapitated. Talk about a once in a lifetime sexual experience.
Giraffes, while their tongues may be 18" long and prehensile (yes, my good friend Giraffe, I do pay attention), have no vocal cords.
And; most bizarrely: Texas’ Department of Criminal Justice posts last meals of death row inmates on its website.
Catherine the Great was not a Russian and her name wasn’t origanally Catherine. She was a member of German royalty named Sofia (I think).
The melody of the alma mater of Syracuse University is also the melody of the alma maters of Cornell, Shippenburg, the Citadel, Michigan State, and Clemson to name a few.
The Cairn terrier comes in every color except for white. A white Cairn is a West Highland Terrier.
The longest word you can type only using one hand is “stewardesses.” A close second is the first show composed of ABBA tunes ABBACADABRA. Which is also a useless fact-athon in itself.
One of the bestsellers in Shakespeare’s day was a Puritan treatise entitled “The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven” – by Arthur Dent. Douglas Adams later claimed never to have heard of the man.
Sir Walter Raleigh had a cousin named Butshead Gorges. Spain once had a king called Henry the Impotent.
A sixteenth-century poet named Barnabe Barnes wrote a rather bizarre sonnet sequence in which the speaker fantasizes about raping his lady-love as she rides backward on a goat. In real life, Barnes was accused of trying to murder a man with a poisoned lemon.
A man known as Roland Le Fartere received a land grant from England’s Edward III for giving “a leap, a whistle, and a fart” before the king.
While scientists at the Geodetic Survey have stopped calculating the centers of land masses due to the imprecise nature of such an undertaking, the geographical center of the lower 48 states (not taking into account the curvature of the Earth) is believed to be in the middle of a hog farm just outside of Lebanon, Kansas.