Actor Dean Cain, the leading man in TV's Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was signed to play professional football with the Buffalo Bills after his graduation from Princeton. However, he injured his knee three days before his first pre-season NFL game. The unfortunate injury forced

If Earth was the size of an apple, the atmospheric layer would be no thicker than the skin of the apple.

The Japanese business environment requires strict adherence to rules of etiquette. Graduating students prepare for important job interviews by first learning how to bow properly and show proper manners when entering and seating themselves in the interview room.

More than 7,000 magnets are on display at the Guinness World of Records Museum and Gift Shop, located on the Las Vegas Strip. The exhibit is a portion of the more than 26,000-magnet collection of Louise J. Greenfarb, dubbed "The Magnet Lady," whose accumulation was designated by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's "Largest ...Read more

The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost 16 feet high.

In 1996, Christmas caroling was banned at two major malls in Pensacola, Florida. Apparently, shoppers and merchants complained the carolers were too loud and took up too much space.

No, anyone can contract AIDS. One possibility for the misconception that AIDS infects only homosexual men is that AIDS was termed Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome when it was first recognized in 1981 (it was subsequently renamed after it was recognised that there were methods of transmission other than male-male intercourse). HIV appears ...Read more

For the knife fight between Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) in the 1955 blockbuster Rebel Without a Cause, the actors used real switchblades. They protected themselves by wearing chainmail under their clothes.

Electric Christmas tree lights were first used in 1895. The idea for using electric Christmas lights came from an American, Ralph E. Morris. The new lights proved safer than the traditional candles.

The Super Ball® was born in 1965, and it became America's most popular plaything that year. By Christmas time, only six months after it was introduced by Wham-O, 7 million balls had been sold at 98 cents apiece. Norman Stingley, a California chemist, invented the bouncing gray ball. In his spare time, he had compressed a synthetic rubber ...Read more

Director and screenwriter Cecil B. DeMille was one of the first film pioneers who quickly realized that how a movie looked could be a powerful magnet to draw larger audiences into theatres. He capitalized on audiences' thirst for extravagance and luxury, as evidenced in his The King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, and The ...Read more

Dimitri Tiomkin wrote High Noon's prize-winning musical score. Asked in an interview how a Russian-born concert pianist could write Western music, Tiomkin had a quick reply. "Did Strauss," he inquired hotly, "have to be an Olympic swimmer to write The Blue Danube?"

British parents like the female name Jane a lot more than do American parents. Although it has been a very poplar name in both countries for the last 100 years, it consistently ranked Number 1 in England in the 1980s.

Until the 1970s, Jessica was a very unusual name. William Shakespeare, who may even have made up the name, called Shylock’s lovely daughter Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, but it was not until recently that large numbers of people began choosing this name for their daughters.

The fur of the vicuna, a small member of the camel family which live in the Andes mountains of Peru, is so fine that each hair is less than two-thousandths of an inch. The animal was considered sacred by the Incas, and only royalty could wear its fleece.

The fortune cookie was invented in 1916 by George Jung, a Los Angeles noodlemaker.

A bronze cat, believed to be 2,300 years old, was one of the most popular sculptures in the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Despite its popularity for nearly 25 years, a few museum officials had reason to doubt the statue's authenticity. After X-raying the 15-inch-high figure and scanning a small portion of it ...Read more

A United Parcel Service delivery person typically makes up to 300 pickups or deliveries a day. That compares to someone doing 600 sets of step aerobics a day.

The only items required to play the game are the rulebooks, a character sheet for each player, and a number of polyhedral dice (a set of standard D&D dice includes: d4, d6, d8, d12, d20, and two d10s for percentile: ones and tens), although there are many optional items which can be used to supplement or enhance the gaming experience, such as ...Read more

City squirrels will eat just about anything, and often, it's the junk food that people offer them that they prefer, like Cracker Jack peanuts. Many naturalists have concluded that a peanut diet is harmful to squirrels: it seems to result in a weakening of eyesight and a thinning of the animal's