Believe It or No: A Recap of This Week’s Fun Facts (April 24)
Every weekday about 3:20pm, Adam shares some facts and trivia in a fun little segment called Believe it or No (the Minnesotan version, you could say, of Ripley's Believe it or Not!).
Here are this past week's fun facts and trivia from Believe it or No:
- The press briefing room in the White House used to be an indoor swimming pool. It was installed in 1933, but Nixon had it converted to the press room in 1970. (Source: WhiteHouseMuseum.org)
- In the '60s, McDonald's considered changing their logo from the Golden Arches to something else. But they got talked out of it by a design consultant who said the arches were great because of a, quote, "Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing (female anatomy) breasts." (Source: Business Insider)
- The first e-book was the Declaration of Independence. A student at the University of Illinois digitized it to distribute around the world in 1971. (Source: GutenburgNews.org)
- Kellogg's ripped off the idea for Pop-Tarts from Post. Post announced they were going to be making a pastry for your toaster called Country Squares, so Kellogg's quickly developed their own version, and got them out first in 1964. (Source: Wikipedia)
- The Algerian national anthem was originally written on a prison wall in BLOOD. It was written by an Algerian poet in 1956 when Algeria was a French colony, and he was being held by the French troops. (Source: Wikipedia)
- Bolivia has the most official languages of any country, with 36. Four of them are indigenous languages that are extinct. (Source: Wikipedia)
- There's no official difference between the definition of a hill and a mountain. The U.S. Geological Survey used to define a hill as being less than 1,000 feet, but they got rid of that rule in the mid 1900s. (Source: National Geographic)
- The average human being sprints at 15 miles-per-hour . . . and that makes us slower than the average hippopotamus, which runs at 19 miles-per-hour. (Source: Reference.com)
- The word "dibs" comes from a children's game from the 1600s called dibstones. It was sort of like jacks, and kids would try to win little pieces of animal bones by yelling "Dibs!" (Source: Wordspy.com)
- Alanis Morissette gets credit in the "Oxford English Dictionary" for creating the phrase "friends with benefits." She used it in the lyrics of her song "Head Over Feet" in 1995. Quote, "You're my best friend, best friend with benefits." (Source: Blog.Fantasycourts.ca)
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