AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING LXXIII

1. If you want to live on King George Island, 75 miles off the coast of Antarctica, you have to have your appendix removed. The island is so remote, an attack of appendicitis could be fatal. Known as Villas Las Estrellas, it is an actual town in Antarctica - under the jurisdiction of Chile. Most of the people who live there are research scientists and their families. 

2. Greenland is the largest island in the world - by 500,000 square miles. At 822,700 square miles, it is followed by New Guinea and Borneo.

3. Fiddlehead is an edible fern, compared in taste to asparagus or green beans.

4. A hemidemisemiquaver is a 1/64 note in music. The legend is that George Szell, long-time conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, could conduct one. 

5. Blues guitar great B.B. King named his guitar Lucille.

6. Davy Crockett named his rifle Old Betsy.

7. The letter Z wasn't always the last letter of the alphabet. Up to the 1800's, the alphabet ended with the symbol "&" - called ampersand. It meant "and" then too, and, like "A" and "I", was both a letter of the alphabet and a word. No one knows for sure when "&" was booted from the alphabet, but it didn't make the cut when the "Now I Know by ABCs" ditty was copyrighted in 1835.