From cow paths to meadows and broken valleys
>> 30 August 2008 –
unique world
The following text is originally lifted from the trivia section of The Jakarta Post dated Tuesday, 11 March 2008.
~Compiled from various sources~
- The city of Boston was laid out by cow paths.
- Fires can break out in Kruger National Park from the sun rays being magnified when shining on dew-heavy spiderwebs.
- Sand is put on tarred roads in Kruger National Park so that the summer temperature of above 40°C does not melt them.
- Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the western Pacific.
- Ireland has no snakes.
- Residents of Tromoso, Norway, go without seeing a sunset for three months every year.
- St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally called Pigs Eye after a man who ran a saloon there.
- In Hershey, Pennsylvania, the streetlights along "Chocolate Avenue" are in the shape of Hershey Kisses.
- There are more mobile phones in UK than there are people.
- The native tribe of Tierra del Fuego has a language so guttural it cannot have an alphabet.
- Impotence is legal grounds for divorce in 24 American states.
- The oldest exposed surface on earth is New Zealand's south island.
- Las Vegas means "The Meadows" in Spanish.
- More readheds are born in Scotland than in any other part of the world.
- There are no public toilets in Peru.
- Toilets in the southern hemisphere flush counter clockwise whereas toilets in the northern hemisphere flush clockwise. The water in the toilets on the equator goes straight down.
- Hong Kong has the world's largest double-decker bus fleet in the world.
- In 1935, the police in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arrested 42 men on the beach. They were cracking down on topless bathing suits worn by men.
- During lunch breaks in Carlsbad, New Mexico, no couple should engage in a sexual act while parked in their vehicle, unless their car has curtains.
- Some of the most popular lipstick shades in Renaissance England were named: Rat, Horseflesh, Turkey, Blood and Puke.
- A Viking tribe once raided England because they had run out of beer.
- In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
- Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language.
- Martha's Vineyard once had its own dialect of sign language. One deaf person arrived in 1692 and after that there was a relatively large genetically deaf population that had their own particular dialect of sign language. From 1692-1910. nearly all hearing people on the island were billingual in sign language and English.
- Kitsap County, Washington, was originally called Slaughter County, and the first hotel there was called Slaughter House.
- Panama hats come from Ecuador, not Panama.
- Vietnamese currency consists only of paper money, no coins.
- The Hudson River along the island of Manhattan flows in either direction depending upon the tide.
- New Zealand is the only country in the world that contains every type of climate in the world.
- Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on Swedish roads. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5 p.m. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. The time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realise "this" was the day of the changeover.
- Brooklyn is the Dutch name for "broken valley".
