Did you know

• Sometime around 1325, the Aztecs were looking for a place to build their capital.  A priest had interpreted an omen to mean the site should be where the found an eagle, perched on a cactus, devouring a snake.  And thats why they chose what is now Mexico City; they found the eagle eating a snake while resting on a cactus.  The scene is depicted on the Mexican flag.
• The designer of the Statue of Liberty, French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, used his wife as the model for the body and his mother as the model for the face.
• On July 4, 1776, King George III of England noted in his diary: Nothing of importance happened today.
• Before the 984 foot high Eiffel Tower was built in 1889, the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. was the tallest building in the world at 555 feet. The height of the Eiffel Tower in France varies , depending on the temperature, by as much as 6 inches.
• According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the most common job in the United States in the 1890s was a farmer.  Today, its a salesman.
• Louis XVI of France was captured at Varennes in June 1791 while trying to flee his country. He was stopped at an inn when he tried to pay with a coin that carried his likeness.
• The first telephone book ever issued contained only fifty names.  It was published in New Haven, Connecticut, by the New Haven District Telephone Company in February, 1878.
• Many Roman statues were made with detachable heads, so that one head could be removed and replaced by another.
• King Henry III of France, Louis XIV of France, and Napoleon all suffered from ailurophobia - the fear of cats.
• Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew marijuana on their plantations.
• Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day. So they sacrificed 15,000 men a year to appease their sun god, Huitzilopochtli. Most of the victims were prisoners taken in wars, which were sometimes started solely to round up sacrificial victims.
• The military salute originated during the medieval times.  Knights in armor used to raise their visors to reveal their identity, and the motion later evolved into the modern-day salute.
• The Mesopotamians were the first people to keep records of lunar eclipses. The earliest records show that they started sometime around 2200 B.C.
• Army doctor D.W. Bliss attended to two presidents after they were shot by assassins. In 1865 he was one of the 16 doctors who tried to save Abraham Lincoln. In 1881 he supervised the care of James Garfield.
• The town of Modesto, California was named in honor of its founders, who were too modest to name it after themselves.
• At 3,108 square miles, Juneau, Alaska has a greater land area than any other city in the Western Hemisphere, yet it can only be reached by boat or plane.
• The Chinese city of Chinkiang, now 150 miles inland, was once a seaport.  Silt of the Yangtze River has built up the land for that distance.
• Antarctica is the only continent that does not have land areas below sea level.
• If you measure a mountain from its base, the tallest is not Mount Everest; its the island of Hawaii, which is all mountain.  Hawaiis tallest peak, Mauna Kea, is 13,784 feet above sea level, but it rises from a sea bottom that is 18,000 feet below sea level.  From base to peak, Hawaii is over 31,000 feet.  Mount Everest is 29,000 feet.
• Tornados always move in an easterly direction and most often in a northeasterly direction.
• Coney Island in New York got its name from rabbits.  In early days it was overrun by rabbits, which were often referred to as coneys.
• Pakistan was named in 1933 and is derived from the first letters of Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sind, and Tan.  All of these are districts or states of what is now Pakistan.
• In the United States only 80 miles separate the highest point of land and the lowest point in the lower 48 states. Mount Whitney on the eastern border of Sequoia National Park in California is 14,496 feet high, and a pool called Badwater in Death Valley is 280 feet below sea level.
• While sailing along the Caribbean coast of South America in 1499, the Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojedo saw Indian houses built on stilts over the water. The area reminded him of Venice, and he named it Little Venice, which in Spanish is Venezuela.
• La Pax, Bolivia is a virtually fireproof city. At an altitude of about 12,000 feet above sea level, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is barely able to support fire.
• The lowest point that a person can reach on Earth, outside of riding a submarine or going down a mine shaft, is where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea. Its 1,290 feet below sea level.
• Greenland has more ice on it than Iceland does. In fact, Iceland has more grass and trees than Greenland does. Now where did they get their names from.
• The Dutch acquired Surinam in exchange for Manhattan Island in 1667. Manhattan Island from end to end is less than one million inches long.
• Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes located entirely within the United States.
• The country of Tanzania has an island called Mafia.
• Portugal is the worlds largest producer of cork.
• With the exception of Antarctica, all continents are wider in the north than in the south.
• Panama is the only place in the world where someone can see the sun rise on the Pacific Ocean and set on the Atlantic.
• Jacksonville, Florida has the largest total area of any city in the United States. It takes up 460 square miles, almost twice the area of Los Angeles.
• More than one quarter of the worlds forests are in Siberia.
• There are thirteen languages spoken by more than 100 million people. They are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu.
• According to a US Navy scientific study of recorded shark attacks, men are attacked almost ten times more often than women are.
• The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
• Human birth control pills also work on gorillas.
• Houseflies hum in the key of F.
• Every year in the United States, four times the amount of money spent on baby food is spent on pet food.
• The nearest relative of the hippopotamus is the common pig.
• The number of cricket chirps you count in a fifteen-second span, plus 37, will tell you the approximate current air temperature.
• The big differences between pythons and boa constrictors: pythons are longer and lay eggs.  Boas give birth to live babies.
• Smith is the most common last name in the United States.  A little over 1% of all Americans share that last name.
• The chow-chow and the Chinesse Shar-Pei are the only dogs that have a black tongue.  The tongues of all other dogs are pink.
• A rattlesnakes fangs fold inward when its mouth is closed so it does not bite itself.

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