Winking at women, even to express friendship, is considered bad manners in Australia.

In many countries, urine was used as a detergent for washing. One of urine's major components, ammonia, is used in cleaning products.

The flagship known as Queen Anne's Revenge belonged to the famous pirate, Blackbeard. The ship sank in 1718. Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach.

Of the million-plus species of insects on earth, 3,000 of them are mosquitoes. More than 165 of those live in the United States.

Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was the last public act of Benjamin Franklin.

The hides of mature female blue sharks are more than twice as thick as those of males, probably as a protection against courtship bites.

Starting from his farm near Philadelphia during the 1700s, John Bartram traveled north to Lake Ontario, south to Florida, and west to the Ohio River in search of plants and natural history specimens for his own botanic garden and for collectors at home and abroad. He and his son William are credited with identifying and introducing into ...Read more

The brass family of instruments include the trumpet, trombone, tuba, cornet, flügelhorn, French horn, saxhorn, and sousaphone. While they are usually made of brass today, in the past they were made of wood, horn, and glass.

During his heyday, John Quincy Adams was nicknamed a oeOld Man Eloquent.a

Gold salts are sometimes injected into the muscles to relieve arthritis.

St. Amand of Maastricht is the patron saint of beer and wine sellers.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to ride in an automobile.

Pecans vary in size, from thirty to ninety nuts per pound. No nuts are produced until the trees are at least five years old.

In A Little Book of The Green Man Mike Harding gives some examples of similar figures in Borneo, Nepal and India: the earliest is a foliate head from an 8th century Jain temple in Rajasthan. He also notes that heads from Lebanon and Iraq can be dated to the 2nd century and that there are early Romanesque foliate heads in 11th century ...Read more

The chiao is an official unit of currency in China. Also known as jiao, it is a copper-zinc coin that is one-tenth of a yuan and equal to 10 fen.

Every year an inmate spends in prison costs taxpayers an average of $22,000. As prisoners get older, the cost of maintenance rises, ultimately reaching an average of $69,000 per year for those over the age of fifty-five. A study by a Stanford University professor estimated that the cost of a life term for an average California prisoner is $1.5 ...Read more

In 1951, Jack in the Box opened its first restaurant in San Diego, California, pioneering the drive-thru concept and featuring 18-cent hamburgers.

Shotgun houses were most popular before widespread ownership of the automobile allowed people to live further from businesses and other destinations and when building lots were kept small out of necessity, 30 feet (9 m) wide at most. An influx of people to cities, both from rural areas in America and from foreign countries, all looking to fill ...Read more

Arguably Miyzaki's most accessible film is My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a story of two sisters taken to the countryside by their father while their mother is hospitalized with a serious illness. While exploring their environment they come in contact with a number of magical creatures, including the Totoro characters in the title. The great ...Read more

St. Francis, founder of the Franciscan religious order in 1209, was a layman born rich. When he embarked on a career of charity, his father disowned him.