More Fun Facts and Trivia

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No other animal gives us more by-products than the pig.

Lisa: “I’m going to become a vegetarian.” 

Homer: “Does that mean you’re not going to eat any pork?” 

Lisa: “Yes.” 

Homer: “Bacon?” 

Lisa: “Yes Dad” 

Homer: “Ham?” 

Lisa: “Dad, all those meats come from the same animal” 

Homer: “Right Lisa, some wonderful, magical animal!”

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Mexican jumping beans jump because of a moth larva inside the bean.

The jumping beans are a seed pod through which the larva of a small moth has chewed. The bean "jumps" because, when it gets in a hot place, the larva snaps its body hoping to roll to a cooler place. 

After the egg hatches, the larva eats away the inside of the bean, making a hollow place for itself. It attaches itself to the bean with many silk threads. The larva may live for months inside the bean with varying periods of dormancy. Normally, in the spring, the moth will force its way out of the seed through a round "trap door", leaving behind the pupal casing. The small, silver and gray-colored moth will live for only a few days. 

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An electric eel produces an average of 400 volts.

It can produce a shock up to 860 volts and 1 ampere of current (860 watts) for two milliseconds. This is extremely unlikely to be deadly for an adult human due to the very short duration of the discharge but it can produce a brief and painful numbing shock likened to a stun gun discharge, which due to the voltage can be felt for some distance from it.

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Anthony Scaramucci, aka The Mooch, is not only a linguist of note, financier (including founder of investment firm SkyBridge Capital) and politico, he is also a published author. The Mooch has had 3 books published:

Goodbye Gordon Gekko: How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Sou

The Little Book of Hedge Funds: What You Need to Know About Hedge Funds but the Managers Won't Tell You

Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure Into Success

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To crack a whip, the tip must be traveling faster than the speed of sound.

By the way, you know that famous scene where Indiana Jones is confronted by the sabre wielding expert and Indiana draws a gun and shoots him . . .

Harrison Ford has explained how that scene came about:

We were shooting in Tunisia, and the script had a scene in which I fight a swordsman, an expert swordsman, it was meant to be the ultimate duel between sword and whip. And I was suffering from dysentery, really, found it inconvenient to be out of my trailer for more than 10 minutes at a time. We’d done a brief rehearsal of the scene the night before we were meant to shoot it, and both Steve and I realised it would take 2 or 3 days to shoot this. And it was the last thing we were meant to shoot in Tunisia before we left to shoot in England. And the scene before this in the film included a whip fight against 5 bad guys that were trying to kidnap Marian, so I thought it was a bit redundant. I was puzzling how to get out of this 3 days of shooting, so when I got to set I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son a bitch and Steve said “I was thinking that as well.” So he drew his sword, the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job, and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in 5 minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.

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Sugar was first added to chewing gum in 1869 by a dentist named William Semple.

Semple's process involved dissolving vegetable gums in naphtha and alcohol until they reached the consistency of jelly. Then he mixed in powdered chalk, powdered licorice root, and other materials to provide texture and flavor. Those included sugar, orris root, and myrrh. Finally, he evaporated the solvents -- naphtha and alcohol -- so that the jelly-like material dried and hardened. Semple thought that people would buy the gum not just to chew for fun, but to help keep their teeth clean and breath fresh. The chalk would have a scouring effect in rubbing away food particles and dental plaque,

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In 1903 at the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company in Jackson Mississippi an employee named Albert J. Parkhouse decided that the coat hook needed a firm evolutionary advancement. He took a simple piece of wire and shaped two ovals then twisted them together. He finished the contraption with a bent hook shape at the top which enabled the hanger to be hung over a bar. This was the first known design which most closely reflects the common wire coat hanger designs of today. This revolutionary hook design when used with a hanging bar, enabled many more clothes to be stored together in one place.