an average of 15 minutes.
• Adults spend an average of 16 times as many hours selecting clothes (145.6 hours a year) as they do on planning their retirement.
• Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet, didn’t pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with ‘return to sender’ stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb; he opened it and was blown to bits.
• Peter the Great hated the Kremlin, where, as a child, he had witnessed the brutal torture and murder of his mother’s family.
• The shortest human on record was Pauline Musters of the Netherlands. She measured 12 inches (30cm) at her birth in 1876, and was 23 inches (58cm) tall with a weight of 9lb (4kg) at her death in 1885.
• Two German motorists each guiding their car at a snail’s pace near the centre of the road, due to heavy fog near the town of Guetersloh, had an all-too-literal head-on collision. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries, though their cars weren’t scratched.
• About 18 per cent of animal owners share their bed with their pets.
• Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs – all 2,000 of them – escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two helpless protesters to death.
• Couples who diet while on holiday argue three times more often than those who don’t; and those who don’t diet have three times as many romantic interludes.
• Two out of every three women in the world are illiterate.
• In Britain, two women were killed in 1999 by lightning conducted through their under-wired bras.
• Women who snore are at an increased risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
• Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roast turkey from foil packets for their first meal on the moon.
• About 24 per cent of alcoholics die in accidents, falls, fires or suicides.
• US Army doctor D W Bliss had the unique role of attending to two US presidents after they were shot. In 1865, he was one of 16 doctors who tried to save Abraham Lincoln; in 1881, Bliss supervised the care of James Garfield.
• King John did not sign the Magna Carta in 1215, as he could not write his name. Instead he placed his seal on it.
• Notorious bootlegger Al Capone made £34,000,000 during Prohibition.
• One in ten people admit that they would buy an outfit intending to wear it once and return it.
• Only 29 per cent of married couples agree on most political issues.
• It is estimated that 74 billion human beings have been born and died in the last 500,000 years.
• Thirty-nine per cent of people admit that, as guests, they have snooped in their host’s medicine cabinets.
• Trying to prevent ageing, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill and Christian Dior all had injections of foetal lamb cells. The process failed.
• In a test of Russian psychic Djuna Davitashvili’s powers, a computer randomly selected a San Francisco landmark for her to predict. However, not only had she managed to predict it correctly six hours before it made the selection, Djuna also gave an incredibly detailed description of the site, though she was 6,000 miles away in Moscow at the time.
• A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe, leaving her mentally retarded.
• The average person receives eight birthday cards annually.
• More than 50 per cent of adults say that children should not be paid money for getting good grades in school.
• Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was present at the assassinations of three presidents: his father’s, President Garfield’s, and President McKinley’s. After the last shooting, he refused ever to attend a state affair again.
• Leonardo da Vinci wrote notebook entries in backwards script, a trick that kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death. It is believed that he was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Da Vinci observed.
• Peter the Great of Russia was almost 7 ft (2 m) tall.
• On his way home to visit his parents, a Harvard student fell between two rail-road cars at the station in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was rescued by an actor on his way to visit a sister in Philadelphia. The student was Robert Lincoln, heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The actor was Edwin Booth, the brother of the man who, a few weeks later, would murder the student’s father.
• When a thief was surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, he fled out of the back door, clambered over a 9-ft (3 m) wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
• A flower shop entrepreneur named O’Banion held the greatest ever funeral for a gangster in Chicago. The shop, at the corner of State and Superior Streets, was a front for O’Banion’s bootlegging and hijacking operations. Ten thousand mourners were in attendance, and the most expensive wreath, costing $1,000, came from Al Capone, who had ordered that O’Banion be killed.
• When a thief was surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, he fled out of the back door, clambered over a 9-ft (3 m) wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
• About 25 per cent of alcoholics are women.
• Levi Strauss was paid £3.35 in gold dust for his first pair of jeans.
• Adolf Hitler’s third-grade school report remarked that he was ‘bad tempered’ and fancied himself as a leader.
• Robert Peary, discoverer of the North Pole, included a photograph of his nude mistress in a book about his travels.
• The first women flight attendants in 1930 were required to be unmarried, trained nurses, and weigh no more than 115lb (52kg).
• One of Napoleon’s drinking cups was made from the skull of the famous Italian adventurer Cagliostro.
• When King Edward II was deposed from the throne in the 14th century, there were strict instructions that no one should harm him. To avoid leaving marks on his body when he was murdered, a deer horn was inserted into his rectum then a red-hot poker was placed inside it.
• Pamela Anderson is Canada’s Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversary of Canada’s independence.
• A woman weighing less than 100lb (45kg) ran a fever of 114°F (45.5°C) and survived without brain damage or physiological after-effects.
• Seventy-five per cent of people who play the car radio while driving also sing along with it.
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