FACTS OF LIFE

As a public disservice, bobcrespo.com has been scouring the world for oddball facts. Just in case you don’t have enough useless information stored up between your ears, try these on for size:

A lactating Holstein dairy cow produces about 150 pounds of waste each day, one third urine and two thirds wet feces. Is it any wonder why so few of us want to be dairy farmers?

Bulls are really colorblind and the red cape that bullfighters use to infuriate them appears gray to them. The real reason the bulls are so pissed off is because they have already been stabbed several times by picadors before the matador starts waving his cape around and stabbing him some more. The red cape, however, looks really smokin’ with the matador’s flashy duds.

Enough about bovines. The new thing with turkeys is to deep fry them. Not that the taste of this dry ass bird is any better deep-fried, it’s just than some people want to cut to the chase and swiftly move on to the Thanksgiving Day football games. Only problem is that a great many homes have been burned down by people who figure it’s okay to have a few drinks before tossing a 25 pound frozen bird into 5 gallons of boiling oil. Not exactly the most brilliant idea to come down the pike lately, but often a pretty spectacular sight.

To those who are critical of American industry, there’s hope. Almost 90% of all pornography is produced right here in the good old U.S. of A, with 260 brand new porn websites going online every single day. Fastest growing genre? Hot Asian Babes Doing All Kinds Of Weird Stuff. Take that, China!

The smallest nation on Earth in both area and population is Vatican City, 110 acres and 800 people. It’s also one of the most influential nations on earth, what with the Pope living there and all, and him being the boss of all bosses of more than a billion Roman Catholics. While its power is not quite what it was in the Middle Ages when kings and emperors kissed papal ass, the Vatican still packs an ideological punch.

Good news for the Pope: Christianity is the world’s fastest growing religion.

Speaking of tiny countries, the only nation on earth with more personal computers per capita than The United States is San Marino, properly known as The Most Serene Republic of San Marino, with 738 computers per thousand citizens as opposed to a mere 574 per thousand in America. There are 30,000 Most Serene Marinans in a 23.5 square mile landlocked nation surrounded by Italy. This nation also boast the world’s oldest Constitution, dating from 1600, and has been independent since the year 301, when they split from the remnants of the Roman Empire. That’s about as much information as is needed about San Marino. More, probably.

The top of the food chain is occupied not by humans, but by the smallest of living creatures, bacteria, which eat us when we die. So much for our big brains, appetizers for microbes.

In the World’s Record For Futility Department, the structure that was the biggest failure and took the longest time to build and is the longest wall ever is the Great Wall of China, 800 years in the making and completely useless for keeping out invaders, its only intended purpose. It did however, begin paying dividends in the 20th century as a popular tourist attraction.

We’re #3! We’re #3! As it turns out, America is not the nation with the highest percentage of fat people. Australia tops us for the #2 slot, but the real connoisseur of corpulence, the champion of chops, the lord of lard, the Supreme Leader of Eaters is Samoa, where an impressive 93.5% of the population is obese. Well done! Or rare, medium, medium well, whatever…  just get it to the table and watch it evaporate!

At least the good old US of A still leads the world in teenage binge drinking, even if we are only a paltry #43 in average alcohol consumption per capita. The number one drinking country is, get this; Uganda! When you consider that the only other thing you’ve ever heard about Uganda is the genocidal misadventures of Idi Amin, that figure becomes understandable.

While we’re doing meaningless records, guess which country has the most bicycles per capita? No, not China, but The Netherlands. When you consider that drugs are practically legal there and driving cars while really stoned is problematic, and sort of dangerous, that brings the bicycle thing into sharper focus, even if that’s about the only thing in sharp focus over there.

The record for the most autobiographies is held by the late Winston Churchill, who apparently never had an unexpressed thought. While the man led a riveting life and was a major player in one of  history’s most fascinating  epochs, you’d think that two or three “The Story of My Life” books would have sufficed, but good old Winnie figured a dozen or more (many with several volumes) would be more like it. No one recognized the man’s indisputable greatness more than himself.

The person holding the record for the most Google searches ever is Michael Jackson. Second and third on the list? Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. You have to go a very long way down the list to find people like Einstein, Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Caesar, Christ, Newton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Washington, Mandela and yes, good old Winston Churchill, who is hundreds of millions of Google hits behind Madonna, who has written about a dozen fewer autobiographies.

The most nutritious food in the world is seaweed, possibly explaining why whales and Japanese senior citizens are in such great shape.

The Million Man March in Washington D.C. on October of 1995 was 600,000 men short of its title, but the “400,000 Man March” is nowhere near as cool a title.

Deserts cover one third of the world’s land masses, while water covers two third of the entire earth. Factor in all the swamps and uninhabitable mountain ranges and that pretty much explains why the subways are so crowded.

The movie phrase that is heard least often in real life is: “The Force is strong in this one!” The most often used movie line? “Feeling lucky, punk?”

The world’s biggest ball of yarn? Who gives a crap where it is and who put it there? Nobody’s making any detours to see that! There’s a limit to skull space for oddball facts and bobcrespo.com draws the line at gigantic balls of yarn.

There’s lots of facts about Canada, none of them remotely interesting. Again, there are limits to our curiosity and Canada is a guaranteed eye-glazer.

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