AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CLXXI

1.  The "heads" side of a coin in called the obverse, and the "tails" side the reverse.

2. The winner of the Memorial Day Indy 500 auto race traditionally celebrates by drinking milk. 

3. The first transatlantic commercial jet flight was operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) on  October 4, 1958.

4. The specific phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword", was coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. However, the idea that words are more powerful than physical force is ancient, with similar sentiments expressed by many others throughout history. For example, Thomas Jefferson ended a letter to Thomas Paine in 1792 with, "Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword." The irony is that Bulwer-Lytton was not a great writer. In fact he was a notoriously bad writer who also coined the phrase, "It was a dark and stormy night" - which has become a metaphor for bad writing.  

5. Thanks to oil money, Alaska has no sales tax and no state income tax. 

6. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their first Ben and Jerry's ice cream shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont on May 5, 1978, after taking a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making. 

7. Janet Leigh refused to take showers after filming the iconic shower scene in  Psycho and only took baths, a fact confirmed by her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. She (Janet Leigh) later said that when taking a bath, she would make sure the door was open and she could see the door and the bathroom's entrance. 

8. Panama has dual currencies - the US dollar and the Panamanian balboa, which is exactly equivalent to the US dollar. The balboa is named after explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa and is divided into 100 centesimos.

9. Pluto was discovered in 1930 and demoted from planet status in 2006 before it even completed one orbit around the sun. To be fair, astronomers would have had to wait until 2178 for Pluto to make that orbit - one Plutonian year being equivalent to 248 earth years. 

10. 95% of the population of Egypt lives on 5% of its land area - a narrow strip of fertile land along the Nile. Cairo has a population density of 45,000 people per square mile. By comparison, New York has about 29,000 per square mile.