AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CII

1. More Monopoly money is printed each year than real money. Parker Brothers, maker of Monopoly, prints 30 billion dollars of the paper stuff every year.

2. Costa Rica, a country smaller than West Virginia, has 6 active volcanoes and 61 dormant or extinct ones.

3. The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. (The schwa is the sound of an unaccented vowel - like the "i" in pencil or the "o" in lemon.)

4. All the planets in out solar system rotate counter-clockwise on their axes - with the exception of Venus.

5. Though he was dismissed as a crank, with newspapers dubbing him "the Peristaltic Persuader," the Reverend Sylvester W. Graham was a man ahead of his time. A Presbyterian preacher who traveled the country in the 1840's, Graham delivered sermons on the nutritional evils of eating white bread and meat. He also suggested the importance of moving one's bowels once a day, which earned him his peculiar nickname.  To help his followers perform their daily duty, Graham developed a special whole wheat wafer that still bears his name - the graham cracker.

6. The crown on the Statue of Liberty has seven individual points - representing the seven seas and the seven continents.

7. Salvador Dali named one of his paintings, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.

8. Freegans are people who eat out of dumpsters - not out of desperation, but to make an environmental protest to the waste of food.

9. Foggy bottom was the name originally given to low-lying land in Washington, D.C. near the Potomac River. Today it is a government and cultural hub, home to many national treasures and federal agencies - including the Department of State. Journalists and political pundits have long referred to the State Department as Foggy Bottom - to reflect the difficulty of getting any clear information from them.

10. Teeth are the only body parts that cannot repair themselves. Repairing means either re-growing what was lost or replacing it with scar tissues. Our teeth cannot do that. They are covered with enamel - which cannot regenerate itself.