Fun Facts

The oldest known customer complaint is a clay tablet from around 1750 BC. A man named Nanni wrote to a merchant named Ea-nasir about bad copper and rude service.

Nearly four thousand years later, Ea-nasir still hasn’t called back.

The longest recorded flight by a chicken lasted 13 seconds.

By our math, that’s a Five-Second Rule violation.

Botanically speaking, bananas are berries. Strawberries are not.

Whoever labeled the fruit aisle did not consult a botanist.

Scotland’s official national animal is the unicorn. It has stood on the Scottish royal coat of arms for centuries.

Proof of existence was not required.

The shortest war in recorded history was fought between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896. It lasted about 40 minutes.

Most staff meetings run longer.

In the 1830s, tomato ketchup was sold in America as medicine, promoted as a cure for indigestion.

Take two fries and call me in the morning.

A day on Venus is longer than its year. Venus takes 243 Earth days to spin once, and only 225 to circle the Sun.

Your birthday would come before bedtime.

A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

Some words were just waiting for the right bird.

The first fax machine was patented in 1843, the same year the first great wagon train rolled west on the Oregon Trail. The telephone was still 33 years away.

People were faxing before anyone could call to ask if the fax came through.

Wombats produce cube-shaped poop. They stack it on rocks and logs to mark their territory.

Nature’s building blocks, in the worst possible sense.

Students were being taught at Oxford by 1096. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, wasn’t founded until 1325.

Oxford had been assigning homework for two centuries before the Aztecs had a city.

An octopus has three hearts and blue blood. One of those hearts stops beating when it swims, which may be why octopuses would rather crawl.

Same, octopus. Same.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

To her, the pyramids were already ancient history.