AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CLXXXII
1. Mama elephant is pregnant for 22 months before giving birth.
2. The axis of the earth is tilted toward the sun at an angle of 23.5 degrees.
3. McDonald's sells 6.5 million hamburgers each day, for which 2-3,000 cows give their all.
4. The word "oxymoron" comes from two Greek words which translate to "sharp" and "dull."
5. You can't name your baby Jesus in Norway. The Norwegian Personal Names Act strictly protects children from [what are considered offensive] names that might cause the child embarrassment, inconvenience, or harm the child's dignity.
6. Before cars, city streets were shared, public spaces for pedestrians, carts, and horses. As automobiles became popular, the growing auto industry heavily promoted the concept of jaywalking. They wanted to shift the blame for traffic accidents onto pedestrians and establish the idea that roads were exclusively for cars, not people. By characterizing pedestrians who crossed outside designated crosswalks as foolish "jays", the auto industry successfully shamed the public into accepting new traffic laws that restricted where people could walk.
7. Martha Ann Lillard is an American polio survivor who, following the death of long-term survivor Paul Alexander in 2024, became the last known person who still relies on an iron lung. She contracted polio in 1953, when she was five years old. At 78, she lives in Shawnee, Oklahoma and sleeps in the iron lung every night. One of her major concerns is that there may not be replacement parts if the 1950's iron lung malfunctions.
8. The iconic, eponymous Mason jar was invented in 1858 by an a 26-year old tinsmith named John Landis Mason. He revolutionized food preservation by patenting a screw-threaded glass jar paired with a metal lid and a rubber seal, creating an airtight environment that allowed families to store harvests safely through the winter.
9. The first item to be scanned by a UPC Barcode was a ten-pack of Juicy Fruit gum, on June 26, 1974 at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
10. The Bledisloe Cup is a fierce and historic annual rivalry between the national rugby teams of Australia's Wallabies and New Zealand's All Blacks - contested since the 1930s.
