Interesting Facts

20th June 451 – Flavius Aetius' defeated Attila the Hun. 1214 – The University of Oxford received its charter. 1631 – The Irish village of Baltimore was attacked by Algerian pirates. 1685 – James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth declared himself King of England at Bridgwater. 1756 – A British garrison was imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta. 1782 – The U.S. Congress adopted the Great Seal of the United States. 1791 – King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family began the Flight to Varennes during The French Revolution. 1837 – Queen Victoria succeeded to the British throne. 1840 – Samuel Morse received the patent for the telegraph. 1976 - Hundreds of Americans and Britons were moved from Beirut and taken to safety in Syria by the US military, following the murder of the US ambassador. 1979 – ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart was shot dead by a Nicaraguan soldier under the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The murder was caught on tape and sparked inte...

10th June 1184 BC – The city of Troy was sacked and burned. 1509 – Henry VIII of England married Catherine of Aragon. 1692 - Salem Village. Bridget Bishop, the first colonist tried in the Salem witch trials, was hanged after being found guilty of the practice of witchcraft. (In 1956 the Massachusetts General Court passed an act exonerating her. Well that's alright then.) 1776 - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston were appointed to the Committee of Five to draft the American declaration of independence. 1788 – Russian explorer Gerasim Izmailov reached Alaska. 1955 – Eighty-three people were killed and at least 100 injured after an Austin-Healey and a Mercedes-Benz collided at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. 1959 - The Hovercraft, invented by Christopher Cockerell, was officially launched in Southampton. 1962 – Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin became the only prisoners to successfully escape from Alcatraz I...

20th March 1956 - Tunisia gained independence from France. 1993 - Johnathan Ball, aged 3, died in a bomb attack in Warrington. He was in town with his babysitter buying a Mothering Sunday Card. Tim Parry, 12, was fatally injured and died five days later in hospital. 1997 - The Liggett Group, the fifth-largest U.S. tobacco company, admitted that smoking was addictive and caused health problems and that the tobacco industry had sought for years to sell its products to children as young as 14. 2003 - American launched missiles hit the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Civilian casualties were not counted.

6th March 1988 – Three Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers were murdered by the SAS on the territory of Gibraltar. 1987 – The British car ferry MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsized just outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, in about 90 seconds killing 193 people. 1974 -  The miners' strike came to an end following a pay increase of over 30%. 1970 - The British Government announced an indefinite ban on the importation of domestic pets to prevent rabies. 1964 – Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole) officially gave boxing champion Cassius Clay the name Muhammad Ali. 1961 – George Formby, British comedian and singer, died. 1957 – Ghana became the first Sub-Saharan country to gain Independence from the British 1945 – Cologne (Köln) was captured by American Troops. 1899 – Bayer registered aspirin as a trademark. 1836 - Mexican forces captured the Alamo in San Antonio killing the last of 187 defenders who had held out...

20th February 1962 - John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. 1986 - The Soviets launched the Mir space station.

There is a language taking over the world, and it isn't English; it's Emoji. (In a survey conducted by TalkTalk Mobile, 8 in 10 people use emoji symbols in emails and text messages, and 72% of British 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emoji icons than in text. The 10 most popular emojis are as follows:- 1- Smiley Face 2- Crying with laughter 3- Love heart 4- Blushing 5- Thumbs up 6- Cheeky face 7- Blowing a kiss 8- Winking face 9- Confused 10- See no evil monkey However, different language speakers have their own preferences:- Canadians seemingly enjoy using the smiling poop emoji. The French use four times as many heart emojis than other languages. Flower and plant emojis, particularly the rose, are used at more than 4 times the average rate by Arabic speakers. Russian speakers use 3 times as many romantic emojis. Australians like emojis with a...

According to research conducted by eHarmony.co.uk, Queen's English is Britain's favourite accent. (Yes, good old RP (received pronunciation) came top in nine out of ten positive character traits including: attractiveness, intelligence, honesty, charm, sophistication and reliability. 1. Received pronunciation (RP) 2. Edinburgh 3. Australian 4. Irish (Republic of Ireland) 5. Yorkshire 6. American 7. Geordie 8. Mancunian 9. Glaswegian 10. Welsh RO is still perceived as a little posh. That's me! LOL)

There are over 130 flavours of jelly beans. (The flavours range from the traditional fruity ones to tabasco and beer-flavoured beans. Americans are mad for them: according to the National Confectioners Association, Americans buy 16 billion beans over Easter. It even has its own holiday today (22nd April). I had a box for Easter too, but some of the weirder flavours are simply not nice.)

Wool&Prince, an American company claims to have invented a shirt that can be worn for 100 days without being washed. (It says its new shirt, made of wool of all things, can go months without being cleaned because the fabric is naturally resistant to odours. This could only appeal to the kind of person who sniffs their clothes to see if they're clean or not.  If you've worn it - wash it!)

The island of Ikaria is almost as far east as Greece gets,  just 100 square miles in size, the mountainous island is 30 miles off the coast of Turkey, but that's not what makes it interesting. What is interesting is the people there live longer and better than almost anywhere else on the planet. (According to longevity expert, Dan Buettner, Ikaria has that certain je ne sais quoi, and he has added Ikaria to the list of places in the world that have come closest to cracking the secret of eternal life.  A study showed that people on Ikaria were reaching the age of 90 with two and a half times the frequency of Americans. Ikarian men, in particular, are four times as likely to reach 90, often in better health. Other places on the list are: the island of Okinawa in Japan, the town of Loma Linda in California, certain parts of Costa Rica and the hills around the province of Nuoro in Sardinia. So, now you know. Oh and there's a web site (of course) of all these blue zone...

An American dime has 118 ridges around the edge, or in numismatic terms, reeds. (Seemingly the penny and nickel have no reeds (ridges), and even though they are worth less than the dime, they are larger in size. Of course British coin collectors have their own terminology, and call the reeded ridged edge, graining and the reeds (grooves) are called crenellations.)

According to a survey carried out by the Public Religion Research Institute, 27% of Americans believe God plays a role in the outcome of sporting events. (53% think that faithful athletes are rewarded with good health and success on the field. If this is true, I must have been a very bad girl, I was always last to be picked for the netball or hockey team.)

For over 70 years Briton Josie Ellis and American Mary Lasch have been penpals. (Through WWII and beyond, they shared all the significant milestones of their lives. After decades of letter writing the pair came face to face for the first time in 2006, but as far as I know they are still writing to each other.) Source

Before you go off in a huff, love is a number - in tennis. (In France, where tennis became popular, the round nought on the scoreboard looked like an egg and was called 'l'oeuf,' which is French for 'the egg.'  Legend has it that when tennis was introduced in the US, Americans (mis)pronounced it 'love.') More about numbers here. Thanks Marianne

American-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the organisation in charge of the expansion. (They received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.  The breakdown of requests is as follows:- North America: 911 applications Europe: 675 applications Asia-Pacific: 303 applications Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications Africa: 17 applications 116 of the applications were for non-Latin alphabets.) Source

The last American space shuttle flight rolled to a stop at 5:58 a.m.

According to a poll in Time magazine, women now make up nearly half of the US workforce. (40 years ago this was only a third, but the vast majority of Americans think it's a good thing. 80 percent of women said they thought it was positive and 76 percent of men said the same. But, 57 percent of men and 51 percent of women still believe it is better for a family if the father works and the mother stays at home to look after the children. So things haven't changed that much.)

According to a survey commissioned by recruitment firm Kelly Services, Americans are less likely to move abroad than Brits. (Seemingly a whopping 11 million Brits are thinking of taking a job overseas within the next two years, but according to the findings of the mobility study, 66% of Americans would consider moving to another city for the right job opportunity, but only about a third would consider moving to another country. This figure drops even lower to 28% when there's a requirement to learn a foreign language, which should come as no surprise.)

Americans consume three times more paper per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China. (The average per capita paper use in the USA in 2001 was 700 pounds (320 kg). The average per capita paper use worldwide was 110 pounds (50 kg). Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin wood. There's nothing wrong with recycled paper, the United States Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA) found that recycling causes 35% less water pollution and 74% less air pollution than making virgin paper.)

A survey by the Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project found that the median age of a user of micro-blogging service Twitter is 31 years old as opposed to 27 for MySpace, 26 for Facebook and 40 for LinkedIn. (Ha! I put on my MySpace account that I was 99 years old - so much for statistics!)