Foot soldiers in the South Pacific during WW II saw 40 days of fighting, on average, over 4 years.
Their counterparts in Vietnam saw, on average, 240 days of fighting in a single year.



(Source:  Medal of Honor, Thomas Kelly, Hyperion, 2002)

The reason why it is so unique is because as it turns to a solid, the solid is less dense than the liquid.  This causes solid water to float, and lakes to freeze from the top down.  Everything would die if water froze from the bottom up.

Damn thermodynamics class...

Smell your meat before you cook it. If it smells bad don't bother cooking it.

The three m's in the company "3M" stands for:

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.

70% of enemy casualties/fatalities are the result of indirect fire, 30% are the result of direct fire on the modern battlefield. Janes Defense.

- 3.6 cans of Spam are produced every second.

- If laid end-to-end, the total number of cans of Spam produced since 1937 would circle the Earth almost 13 times.

- Hawaiians eat more Spam per person than any people in any other state.

- There is a 16,500 square-foot Spam museum in Austin, MN.

(That factoid I had forgotten.)

Vietnam was the first time the Navy practiced riverine (brown water) warfare since the Civil War.

Roasted coffee beans are only good for 28 days before they are no longer considered fresh.

Female pigs' orgasms last for as much as 30 minutes.

42.7% of all FACTIODs are made up on the spot.

And there's always someone much smarter than me !

Men have penises women have vaginas - Jerry McGuire

Well, If you knew that you were going to end up on someones plate as bacon, you would want a 30 minute orgasm too!!!

  Vulcan94

And this was first spoken in Kindergarden Cop with Arnold!

Gore - Tex, the water proof, breathable material works because the holes in the gore-tex material are too small to let rain [water molecules] in, however, sweat molecules are smaller than rain molecules sooooo, they pass through the material and allows your body, feet, whatever to breathe. Gore-Tex is such a good material.

The human "funny bone" isn't even a bone at all.  It is a bundle of nerve fibers that become exposed when you bend your arm at the elbow.  It is thought that the name "funny bone" dervies from the name for the bone in your upper arm - the humerus.

the_reject

I don’t like broccoli.

SSD

The human intestine curls around inside the lower abdomen to minimize the space it needs.  If you were to pull a man's intestines out and stretch them...
...he'd be dead.

the_reject

> WWII bizarreness for you.
>
> 1.  The first German serviceman killed in the war was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps. So much for allies.
>
> 2.  The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress)
>
> 3.  At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was Called CINCUS (pronounced "sink us"), the shoulder patch of the US Army's 45th. Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler's private train was named "Amerika". All three were soon changed for PR purposes.
>
> 4.  More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions your chance of being killed was 71%.
>
> 5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.
>
> 6.  It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers have different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
>
> 7.  When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).
> 8.  German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn't worth the effort.
>
9.  German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

> 10.  Among the first "Germans" captured at Normandy were several Koreans.
They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army
until they were captured by the US Army.
>
11.  Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska. 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese on the island.

> Two U.S. Air Force F-15s shoot down two U.S. Army helicopters on a diplomatic mission over Iraq, mistaking them for hostile aircraft in the "no-fly zone," killing 26 people. No one was found criminally responsible.
>
> A "siesta" ordered by Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to his troops during a conflict between the Mexicans and Texans caused theinfantry to be overtaken in just 18 minutes.
>
> Fort Douaumont at Verdun in France was captured in 1916 by a single German soldier after French General Chretien forgot to pass on orders to defend the fort to the last man to his successor.
>
> The Russians tried to wreak havoc on German Panzer divisions during the WWII by strapping bombs to the backs of dogs and teaching them to associate food with the underneath of their enemies' tanks. Unfortunately, the dogs only associated food with their own tanks and forced an entire Soviet division to retreat.
>
> Japanese soldier Hiroo Onodo refused to stop fighting long after WWII was over, claiming that stories of the war's ending were mere propaganda. It wasn't until his commanding officer flew out to the remote Pacific island where Onoda was  holed up and ordered him to lay down his arms that he finally complied.
>
> Probably the most famous mistake in U.S. military history occurred in the Civil War, when Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was mistakenly shot by one of his own troops after the Confederate triumph at Chancellorsville.

I still need a date.

Oink! Oink! [sex]

The main reason that water is unique is the angle at which the two hydrogen atoms stick out from the oxygen atom.  Instead of sticking out at 180 degrees, they stick out at (I think) 135 degrees.  Since hydrogen atoms are only made of a proton and an electron, and is therefore positively charged, a water molecule is unbalanced - it is more charged on one side than the other.  This feature is very important in ways too numerous and detailed to describe in this post, but suffice it to say that if water had its hydrogen atoms 180 degrees apart, there would be no life on Earth.

Goretex was invented by Al Gore's father.

And . . . the most common solvent on earth is -- you guessed it -- WATER!

Not true either.

You are correct, but Al did invent the internet.  OK, how about something real:  The Roebling suspension bridge in Cincinnati was, in a way, a prototype for the Brooklyn bridge.  It gave John Roebling an opportunity to prove his design on a smaller scale.

Indian swastikas go the other way, anyway.

WWII didn't start until 1939. If you're using 1937 as your starting date, then your first American is wrong as well. The USS Panay was attacked in 1937 in China by the Japanese. Include those casualties. Your highest ranking general is incorrect, too. LTG Simon Bolivar Buckner was killed by a shard of rock on Okinawa. Read about him [url=http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/HallofFame/ww2.htm#buckner]here[/url]. Here's a picture of his grave on Okinawa in 1945.

[img]http://groups.msn.com/_Secure/0PgAAAM8VXpq3YtCx9hAGujs5z4O7b7nSPMBFr6jl9Zh!cNBS!5quPRWlwJnUVQeGriAKEhnt5AuMi2tBfn4Cw8ozkKpt5BrS/Cemetery-1.bmp[/img]

Time for the day shift to add.  (If they choose.)

The second ingredient in a slim Jim is:

Mechanically Separated Chicken.[xx(]

The platypus is venomous.  It has fangs on the inside of its rear legs, and its venom is unique in that it acts directly on the pain receptors, making it (arguably) the most intense pain possible.

Honey is the only food that can't spoil, or go bad.

so, this is our compendium of useless facts?


Ok...


A right handed man's left testicle will hang lower than his right.  Opposite for left handed men.

...a section of cleaning rod and a blank round can turn an AR15 into a killer, speargun.

Above the equator, water drains from a sink in the counterclockwise direction. Below the equator, it will drain clockwise.

Is what the robot VP AL-GORE's synthetic skin is made from.

No matter how hard I try I still can't bend a cracker.

The smallest bones in your body are in your ear.

Approx. 80% of all shootings involve one criminal shooting another criminal.

Shok

tip for next time you go to the grocery store:

the color of the plastic tab or wire tie designates what day of the week it was baked.


blue   = mon
green  = tues
red    = wed
white  = thurs
yellow = fri

I told you to quite switching hands.

Ok, here are a few taking up valuable real-estate in my brain:

Post It notes, Teflon, and X-Rays were all accidental discoveries.

Post It notes were developed by 3M (the before mentioned Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing CO) after one of their scientists developed a glue that was too weak for the original purpose. He played around with the "failed" glue and it was perfect for making a piece of paper temporarily stick to another.

Related Factoid: In marketing post it notes, 3M had two strategies: Sell them in some markets, Give samples away on down town street corners in others. Where sold, no one bought them. In markets that they were given away, people quickly learned that they couldn't live without them.

Teflon was discovered when a scientist discovered his tank of fluorine was mysteriously empty when he went to use it. Rather than just sending it back to the supplier, he weighed it and, ????, it weighed full. When it was opened, the fluorine had polymerized into this weird, never before seen material. More curiosity and the rest is history.

X-Rays were discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895 during experiments with high energy vacuum tubes. Roentgen was doing tests that involved photographic plates, but when he developed the plates, they were all mysteriously fogged. Curious, he developed plates were unused in their paper, which also turned out to be fogged. The rest is history.

Related Factoid: Roentgen won the very first Nobel prize for his discovery. Another scientist (don't recall the name) had noted the same fogging of photographic plates during his (earlier) experiments, but attributed it to bad plates.

Related Factoid: The Nobel Prize (all of them) were begun by Albert Nobel, who made his fortune by inventing a new way to stablize nitroglycerine and make it a practical explosive. Dynamite, as it was called, was the most powerful explosive then yet discovered and it's destructive power was almost "doomsday" in potency.