Fernando Rodney finished this last baseball season with a 0.60 ERA, the lowest ever by a relief pitcher.
Simo Häyhä, in the Winter War between Finland and Russia, killed 505 Russians in 100 days. No sniper has more confirmed kills. His nickname is the White Death, because his white uniform blended in with the snow on the ground.
A four man anti-poaching team in Kenya protects a single Northern White Rhino.
The largest pyramid in the world was found in 2009. It was hidden by the canopy of a Mexican jungle.
While the Titanic was sinking, not a single of the ship’s engineers escaped. They all stayed behind to keep the power on, so that others could escape.
Almost half the world’s newspapers are published in Canada and the U.S.
Italy has more elevators than any other country in the world.
In 1943, the U.S. put a ban on sliced bread. The ban was designed to conserve food for the war effort.
In 2009, Israel enforced calorie restrictions on the people in Gaza. The limit of 2,279 calories per person per day was designed to turn the population against Hamas, the local ruling faction.
Anomalocaris is a predator from the Cambrian Age that has been classified as three different animals. That’s because as it decomposed, it broke into three different parts that were each classified as a jellyfish, a sponge and a shrimp.
Bruce Lee was so fast that his fight scenes had to be slowed down.
The world’s longest movie is called “A Cure for Insomnia” and features a man reading a 4000-page poem for three days.
Hoya, as in the Georgetown Hoyas, roughly translates to “What” in Greek. The school got the name from the cheer “Hoya saxa,” which means “What rocks!”
Cashews are never sold in their shell because the oil on their shells irritates human skin.
The rock band Jethro Tull is named after an English farmer that revolutionized farming in the nineteenth century with a drill that drilled straight holes in the ground. Because of the drill, seeds could be put into the holes instead of thrown randomly about.
Mexican jumping beans jump because caterpillars (moth larvae) are living inside of them. When the beans are heated, the caterpillars wriggle around, causing the bean to “jump.”
In 1937, the German Labour Front founded Volkswagen. At the time, the average automobile was a luxury car and the “Deusthce Arbeitsfront” wanted a car that the normal German could afford. The group was a Nazi trade union.
The oldest written recipe in the world was found in a jar in the Middle East and includes instructions for making beer. The recipe, written on a stone tablet, is over 4,000 years old.
–By Jack Teague