The Extraordinary Book of Useless Information (10 page)

It would take 1.8 trillion pennies to fill the Empire State Building.

I CAN'T DRIVE 85

Texas Highway 130, which links Austin to San Antonio, raised its speed limit to 85 miles per hour in 2012, making it the fastest stretch of road in the United States. In October 2012, a motorist on the road was pulled over for driving 225 miles per hour.

FLAG FALLACY

Contrary to popular misconception, an American flag that touches the ground is not required to be burned.

MICKEY D'S

McDonald's original menu featured barbeque sandwiches as the top seller. Hamburgers, chili tamales, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were also available.

Americans consume some 5.5 million cows' worth of beef each year at McDonald's.

McDonald's feeds 68 million people a day, or about 1 percent of the world population.

Jay Leno, Shania Twain, Pink, Rachel McAdams, and Sharon Stone all worked at McDonald's before making it big.

The Big Mac special sauce consists of the following: soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (a preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (a preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy, and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (a colorant), calcium disodium EDTA (to protect flavor).

Over the years, the Big Mac sauce recipe went through changes. By the late 2000s, company executives had decided to go back to the original formula. The only problem was, they'd lost it. Eventually, by consulting with their old ingredient suppliers, they were able to recreate it.

CLIP JOINT

New York hairstylist Ted Gibson gets $950 per haircut, making his the most expensive haircut in the world.

GRAND OLD TIME

The oldest amusement park in the United States is Lake Compounce Family Theme Park in Bristol, Connecticut, which opened in 1846. Other ancient parks include Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio (1870); Idlewild Park in Ligonier, Pennsylvania (1878); Sea Breeze Amusement Park in Rochester, New York (1879); and Dorney Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania (1884).

The White Horse Tavern, in Newport, Rhode Island, is the country's oldest restaurant. The building has housed an eatery since 1673, the White House Tavern since 1730.

Other old eateries include Fraunces Tavern, in New York City, opened in 1762; the Griswold Inn, in Essex, Connection opened in 1776; the Union Oyster House, in Boston, opened in 1826; and Antoine's Restaurant, in New Orleans, opened in 1840.

BLACKOUT

There has never been a black Republican congresswoman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

As of early 2013, there is only one black member of the U.S. Senate, Timothy Scott; he was appointed by South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to fill the seat vacated by Senator Jim DeMint's resignation.

Scott is only the seventh black senator ever and the first from the South since 1881.

MOW TOWN

There are forty thousand square miles of lawn in America.

THE OTHER GARDEN STATE

Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden was/is in Missouri. They also believe the second coming of Christ will occur in Missouri.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr. got his start as a treasure hunter. He used magical “seeing stones” stuck inside a stovepipe hat to find buried treasure and lost items. It was one of these stones that he claimed to have used to find golden plates sent from God that he spent years translating. They are the basis of the Mormon religion.

L'CHAIM

There are 6.6 million Jews living in America. New York has the highest number, with 8.4 percent, followed by New Jersey; Washington, DC; Massachusetts; and Maryland.

BABY, I HATE YOUR NAME

The most hated baby names of 2012 in America, according to a survey of online message board postings, are as follows:

•
For girls, Nevaeh (which is “heaven” spelled backwards), Destiny, Madison, Mackenzie, Addison, Gertrude, Kaitlyn, Makayla, Bertha, and Hope were the top ten.

•
For boys, the winners/losers were Jayden, Brayden, Aiden, Kaden, Hunter, Hayden, Bentley, Tristan, Michael, and Jackson.

According to the same survey, the most liked baby names of 2012 were as follows:

•
The top ten girl names for 2012 were Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Isabella, Ava, Lily, Zoe, Chloe, Mia, and Madison. Sophia has been number one for three straight years.

•
The top ten boy names were Aiden, Jackson, Ethan, Liam, Mason, Noah, Lucas, Jacob, Jayden, and Jack. Aiden, which was also the third most hated boys name, has been number one for eight straight years.

FARE-LY OLD

Johnnie “Spider” Footman, a ninety-two-year-old New York City cabbie, has been on the job since FDR was president and was still working as of 2012.

COIN-OPS

In California (and Japan) eggs are sold in vending machines.

In Pennsylvania wine is sold in vending machines, but first you must swipe your driver's license, have your picture taken by the machine, and then blow into a Breathalyzer.

There's a Maine lobster vending game where for three dollars one gets fifteen seconds to grab with a mechanical claw a live lobster from a tank in the machine.

REGIONAL REMARKS

In Wisconsin a drinking fountain is called a “bubbler.”

In Nebraska a lottery ticket is called a “pickle.”

An edible mushroom in Kentucky and Tennessee is called a “dry-land fish.”

A tadpole is known as a “pinkwink” on Cape Cod.

A “devil strip” in northeastern Ohio is the strip of grass between the street and sidewalk.

A heavy rain is known as a “fence-lifter” in the Ozarks, a “toad-strangler” in the Gulf States, and a “turd-floater” in Texas.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

New York is the most expensive American city in which to park a car. Monthly car park rates in midtown averaged $541 and downtown averaged $533, in 2012. Over the lifetime of an average car, that's roughly $71,000. Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Seattle round out the top five.

New York state residents pay the highest state and local taxes as a percentage of income, followed by New Jersey and Connecticut. Alaska, South Dakota, and Tennessee pay the lowest.

Riders board New York City subways 8.1 million times every weekday. The next closest system in ridership is the Washington, DC, Metro with 1 million boardings a day, followed by Chicago with 738,000, Boston with 539,000, and San Francisco with 393,000.

THE PLANE TRUTH

At the time of this writing, no passenger has died in a commercial plane crash in the United States since 2009. It has been more than ten years since the last fatal crash of a large jetliner in the United States.

Before 9/11, there were only thirty-three federal air marshals. Now there are thousands (the exact number is classified).

In 2011, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) found 1,306 firearms in carry-on luggage.

AMERICAN WOMAN

Women buy 91 percent of romance novels. The average age of a print version romance novel reader is forty-nine.

Twenty-three percent of American gun owners are women.

Since 2000, 19 percent of married American women have kept their maiden names.

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

Fifty percent of American workers buy coffee at work, spending an average of twenty dollars a week.

Sixty-six percent of workers buy lunch out, spending thirty-seven dollars a week on average. Men and younger workers spend the most.

WORKING MAN BLUES

Forty-one percent of men say navy blue is their favorite color to wear to work.

Fifty-one percent of women claim that black is their favorite color to wear to work.

CHECK IT OUT

The Library of Congress has 650 miles of shelves.

The Library of Congress houses more than 127,000 U.S. telephone directories.

There is a tunnel that connects the Library of Congress with the U.S. Capitol Building.

TRICK OR TREAT

Seventy-four percent of Americans say that they hand out candy on Halloween.

WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT?

In a 2012 study, Wendy's was found to have the fastest service of the major fast-food chains. The average wait time at a Wendy's was 129.75 seconds. This compares with Taco Bell at 149.69 seconds, McDonald's at 188.83, Chick-fil-A at 190.06, and Burger King at 201.33.

As far as accuracy goes, Chick-fil-A was found to correctly fill an order 92.4 percent of the time, compared with Taco Bell at 91.2 percent, McDonald's at 90.0 percent, Wendy's at 89.9 percent, and Burger King at 83 percent.

Chick-fil-A was ranked tops in friendliness.

CHURCH CHAT

In 2012, the Catholic Church canonized its first Native American—Kateri Tekakwitha—a Mohawk woman who lived in the seventeenth century.

The largest church stained-glass window is on the north side of the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, Kentucky. It measures twenty-four feet wide by sixty-seven feet high.

A greater percentage of Republicans attend church than do Democrats.

Pennsylvania has the largest Amish population of any state, followed by Ohio.

STREET SMART

The most common street name in the United States is Second. It's not First because what would have been First is often named Main or something similar, like Broadway.

American Realtors say the name of a street a home is on can have an influence on the speed of its sale. Names like Crummy Road (in Clark Fork, Idaho) or Butt Road (Fort Wayne, Indiana) can make it harder to sell a house on such a street.

BREW MASTERS

New Hampshire leads the nation in annual consumption of twelve-ounce beers per person with 459, followed by North Dakota at 450, Montana at 433, South Dakota at 405, and Nevada at 389.

TATT'S THE FACT

About 23 percent of women and 19 percent of men in the United States have tattoos.

TURKEY TIME

Contrary to common belief, the day before Thanksgiving is not the busiest travel day of the year. The busiest travel days are usually Fridays in June, July, and August.

Calls to plumbers double the day after Thanksgiving.

Illinois grows one-half the country's pumpkin crop.

Pumpkins sold for carving are no good for making pie. Smaller sugar pumpkins with a firm, sweet flesh are used in canned pumpkin pie filling.

Cranberries did not become associated with Thanksgiving until the early 1800s.

OIL CHANGE

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that by 2020 America will be the world's biggest producer of oil, due to improved technologies, fracking, and more efficient energy use.

The United States currently imports about 20 percent of its oil needs, but is expected to be self-sufficient by 2035.

MISSISSIPPI MUD

One home in Mississippi, valued at sixty-nine thousand dollars, had thirty-four different flood insurance claims between 1978 and 2012, totaling almost ten times the house's worth.

AND THE WINNER IS . . .

American presidential elections are decided by the electoral college, not by popular vote. One of the main reasons this odd situation came to be was that at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a direct election did not sit well with the Southern slaveholding state delegates, whose states had large populations but far fewer eligible voters. The convention also agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for calculating the states' allotment of seats in Congress and thus each state's electoral college votes.

Each state is allotted a number of electors equal to its number of representatives and senators in Congress.

In theory, the electors should vote for the candidate that wins their state, but twenty-one states have no legal requirement for them to do so. In these states, electors swear a nonbinding pledge to their party to vote for the winning candidate.

There have been numerous “faithless electors” over the years, notably in 1832 when all thirty Pennsylvania electors refused to vote for Democratic vice presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, and in 1836 when twenty-three Virginia voters refused to vote for Democratic vice presidential candidate Richard Mentor Johnson.

Washington, DC, is allotted the same number of electors it would have if it were a state, but it cannot have more than the least populous state.

During the 2012 presidential election, there were several wards in Philadelphia where Mitt Romney didn't receive one vote. In these wards, Barack Obama beat Romney 19,605 to zero.

When it comes to voter apathy, Hawaii is king. In the 2008 presidential election, Hawaii had the lowest turnout—only 48.8 percent of eligible voters did so, even though Barack Obama, who is from the state, was running. In 2012, Hawaii tied with West Virginia for lowest voter turnout—44.2 percent.

The state with the highest voter turnout in 2008 was Minnesota, at 77.8 percent. Washington State was the leader in 2012, at 81 percent.

Robert McDonald finished tied with another candidate for the final seat on the Walton City, Kentucky, City Council after the 2012 election. Both candidates finished with 669 votes. McDonald would have won outright if his wife had bothered to vote. He lost a subsequent coin toss that decided the winner.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO EAT TONIGHT?

There are 980,000 eateries in the United States. They employ 10 percent of the American workforce.

T
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MASTER AND COMMANDER

Thomas Jefferson didn't like to have his slaves beaten, but when he thought it “necessary,” they would only be whipped on the arms and legs.

Jefferson only ever agreed to free five of his nearly 150 slaves. Not even on his deathbed would he relent.

William Henry Harrison had ten children with his wife and six with one of his African slaves, Dilsia. When he ran for president, he did not want his children with Dilsia around, so he gave them to his brother, who sold them into slavery.

Zachary Taylor was the last U.S. president to hold slaves while in office.

EXPAT EXPREZ

John Tyler is the only president who was not a U.S. citizen when he died. He passed away while living in Virginia, during the Civil War, which was part of the Confederate States of America at the time.

John Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives after serving as president.

YOU CAN'T WIN THEM ALL

Millard Fillmore ran for president again four years after his first term ended. He got 21.6 percent of the popular vote as a third party candidate for the Know Nothing Party. (Membership in the Know Nothings was limited to Protestant men over the age of twenty-one and of British lineage. They were opposed to the influx of Irish and German Catholics into America.)

Ulysses S. Grant tried to run for a third term as president, but didn't receive enough votes at the 1880 Republican Convention.

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt helped form the Progressive Party, also known as the “Bull Moose Party,” after he was denied the Republican nomination that year. The party got its name after a reporter asked about Teddy's health and was told, “I am as fit as a bull moose.”

William Howard Taft was the only incumbent president who ran for reelection and came in third.

Richard Nixon lost his first election, that for president of his high school class.

SLACKER-IN-CHIEF

Franklin Pierce had the worst grades in his class during his sophomore year in college.

James Buchanan was expelled from college.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was a C student while at Harvard.

Woodrow Wilson did not learn to read until after he was ten.

Harry Truman was the last president who did not have a college degree.

LEARNED LEADERS

Andrew Johnson taught himself how to read and write. His wife taught him arithmetic.

Starting at age eleven, John Quincy Adams kept a diary that reached fifty volumes by the time of his death.

Rutherford B. Hayes was the valedictorian of his college class.

George W. Bush was the only president with an MBA, which he earned at Harvard.

Theodore Roosevelt was a published ornithologist. He read several books a day in many different languages.

AFFLUENT ABE

Abraham Lincoln may have been born in a log cabin in Kentucky, but his father was in the top 15 percent of taxpaying property owners in his community.

PRESIDENTIAL PRECURSORS

James Garfield was a preacher before becoming president.

Benjamin Harrison once was a town crier for the federal court in Indianapolis, walking the streets and declaring announcements from the court. The job paid $2.50 a day.

Harry S. Truman once worked as a railroad timekeeper, sleeping in hobo camps near the line. He also worked in the mailroom of the
Kansas City Star
newspaper.

William Henry Harrison at one time ran a distillery, but closed the business out of concern for what liquor did to his customers.

Herbert Hoover had a degree in geology and worked as a mining engineer for many years.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first former Boy Scout to become president.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a teacher before entering politics.

Ronald Reagan was president of his college class.

Reagan began his career in show business broadcasting University of Iowa football games on the radio for ten dollars. He then moved on to announcing Chicago Cubs baseball games for a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station, doing play-by-play from accounts that came to the station over the newswire.

Reagan served several terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Gerald Ford washed dishes to help pay his way through college.

When he lived in Indonesia, Barack Obama had a pet ape named Tata.

As a teenager, Obama worked at a Baskin-Robbins. He now claims to dislike ice cream.

Bill Clinton sang in a chorus and played rugby in his younger days.

George W. Bush was head cheerleader at the all-male private boarding school he attended.

Like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush played rugby in college.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

William Howard Taft, who was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after he left office, was the only former president to have administered the oath of office to another president and sit on the high bench with other justices that he had appointed.

Andrew Johnson served in the U.S. Senate after he left the White House. He is the only former president to do so.

After he left office, Ulysses S. Grant lost all his money to a swindler he had invested with. William Vanderbilt bailed Grant out with a $150,000 loan.

After leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt went on an African safari to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. His hunting party killed some 11,397 animals of all types and sizes. (Roosevelt loved to kill animals, study, and stuff them. At a young age, he had his own little museum from his collection.)

THE SPORTING LIFE

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to throw out an opening pitch at a World Series baseball game and the first to watch a movie in the White House:
The Birth of a Nation
.

Wilson holds the record for rounds of golf played by a president while in office—one thousand. He would have the Secret Service agents paint his golf balls black so he could find them while playing golf in the snow outside the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt came in second in the Harvard boxing championship.

George H. W. Bush was the captain of the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series.

Gerald Ford was the starting center and linebacker on the 1932 and 1933 Michigan football teams that won national championships. After graduation, both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers offered Ford contracts.

CALL OF DUTY

Calvin Coolidge was initially sworn into office as president after President Harding's sudden death in 1923, by his father, who was a notary public, at 2:37 a.m. He took the oath and promptly went back to bed. He was later sworn in by a judge.

LBJ was the first president sworn into office by a woman—federal judge Sarah T. Hughes, aboard Air Force One, two hours and eight minutes after JFK was assassinated.

There was no Bible with which to swear in Johnson, so a Roman Catholic missal found on the plane was used instead.

HEROIC HOOVER

Herbert Hoover is credited by some as having saved more people than any other person in history, when the relief agency he headed provided food to 10.5 million Russians during the Russian Famine of 1921–23, one of the greatest human disasters in Europe since the Black Death.

Herbert Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi River, in Iowa.

HIGH SCHOOL HIGH JINX

John F. Kennedy blew up a toilet at his private high school.

Barack Obama's high school yearbook picture has the inscription “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” “Choom” was the local slang term for marijuana. His pot-smoking buddies were the Choom Gang.

NIX THAT IDEA

Richard Nixon applied for a job at the FBI. He was actually accepted, but due to budget cuts, he was never hired.

Nixon was turned away by two Manhattan apartment buildings in 1980 before finally buying a co-op. He later moved to a home in New Jersey.

MELTDOWN MAN

While serving in the U.S. Navy, Jimmy Carter helped to dismantle a nuclear reactor that had melted down. Along with others, he took turns being lowered into the reactor in a special suit for a few minutes at a time to disassemble the unit.

Carter taught Sunday school throughout his life.

ALSO RANS

In high school, Sarah Palin led her basketball team to the state title and was known as “Sarah the Barracuda.”

In high school, Mitt Romney was on the pep squad and the glee club and was manager of the hockey team and chairman of the homecoming committee.

Al Gore is worth $300 million. That's $80 million more than Mitt Romney is worth.

KILLING LINCOLN

Major Henry Reed Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, were present with Abraham and Mary Lincoln in the box at Ford's Theatre the night the president was shot. Rathbone struggled with Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, as Booth tried to jump from the box to the stage, and was severely injured by knife wounds from Booth in the process.

Rathbone was never mentally stable after the assassination and later killed Clara, his wife, with a knife and stabbed himself in a suicide attempt.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland, houses the bullet that killed Lincoln and a fragment of his skull.

The museum collection, which contains 25 million objects, also features a piece of President James Garfield's spine and the bullet that pierced it when fired by Charles Guiteau. Guiteau's brain is also on display.

PRESIDENTIAL PREROGATIVE

Since 1881, American presidents have vetoed an average of one bill every twenty days.

Grover Cleveland had the highest veto average—one every five days.

Barack Obama had the lowest average in his first term—one every 490 days.

George W. Bush averaged one every 244 days.

FDR vetoed one bill every seven days.

NO JUSTICE

Only four U.S. presidents didn't get to make any appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court—William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. Carter was the only one of the four to serve a full term.

George Washington appointed ten justices and FDR appointed eight.

Ronald Reagan appointed the most federal judges of any president—376.

THREESOMES

Twice in American history three presidents have served in the same calendar year. The first time was in 1841, when William Henry Harrison succeeded Martin Van Buren and then died thirty days into his office, making way for John Tyler to occupy the Oval Office. The second time was in 1881, when Rutherford B. Hayes was succeeded by James Garfield, who was assassinated and replaced by Chester A. Arthur.

TRAINS, PLANES, AND AUTOMOBILES

Air Force One (the president's plane) costs $179,750 an hour to operate.

FDR had a secret train terminal built deep beneath Grand Central Station in New York, so he could enter and leave the city without the public becoming aware that he was crippled from polio. The terminal still exists today and is heavily guarded and at the ready if a visiting president needs to make a quick, covert exit from the Big Apple.

FDR used an armored car confiscated from Al Capone by the Treasury Department when he was driven from the White House to give his “Day of Infamy” speech before Congress after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There were rumors that Japanese assassins would attack him, but there was no money in the budget for an armored car for the president.

The hearse that carried President John F. Kennedy after his assassination sold for $160,000 at auction.

A sixteen-cylinder Cadillac convertible, used as a presidential parade limousine by Franklin D. Roosevelt, sold for $270,000.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

Politics today may be dirty, but it pales in comparison to elections of the past:

•
The election of 1800 pitted President Thomas Jefferson against Vice President John Adams. Jefferson wrote that Adams was a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams countered with “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames . . . female chastity violated . . . children writhing on the pike? Great God of compassion and justice, shield my country from destruction.”