The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (2 page)

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

Six of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren were married to rulers of countries—England, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Romania. Queen Victoria’s native language was German.

Queen Victoria eased the discomfort of her menstrual cramps by having her doctor supply her with marijuana.

The first thing Queen Victoria did after her coronation was to remove her bed from her mother’s room.

One of Queen Victoria’s children gave her a bustle for Christmas that played “God Save the Queen” when she sat down.

All of Queen Anne’s seventeen children died before she did.

Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I’s mother, had six fingers on one hand.

Elizabeth I suffered from anthophobia—a fear of roses.

Princess Anne competed in the 1976 Summer Olympics.

Queen Berengaria (1191 C.E.) of England never lived in nor visited England.

ARTISTIC ENDEAVORS

The famous painting Whistler’s Mother was once bought from a pawn shop.

The Mona Lisa was completed in 1503. It was stolen from the Louvre on August 21, 1911.

A Flemish artist is responsible for the world’s smallest painting in history. It is a picture of a miller and his mill, and it was painted onto a grain of corn.

Artist Constantino Brumidi fell from the dome of the U.S. Capitol while painting a mural around the rim. He died four months later.

Leonardo da Vinci spent twelve years painting the Mona Lisa’s lips. He could also write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

On a trip to the South Sea Islands, French painter Paul Gauguin stopped off briefly in Central America, where he worked as a laborer on the Panama Canal.

Salvador Dalí once arrived at an art exhibition in a limousine filled with turnips.

When young and impoverished, Pablo Picasso kept warm by burning his own paintings.

Michelangelo carved the famed Medici tombs in Florence.

GOGH CRAZY

Vincent van Gogh decided to become an artist when he was twenty-?seven years old.

Van Gogh cut off his left ear. His Self-?Portrait with Bandaged Ear shows the right one bandaged because he painted his mirror image.

During his entire life, van Gogh sold only one painting, Red Vineyard at Arles.

Van Gogh committed suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.

BRAINIACS

Alexander Graham Bell made a talking doll that said “Mama” when he was a young boy in Scotland. He never telephoned his wife or mother. They were both deaf.

Aristotle thought blood cooled the brain.

Despite his great scientific and artistic achievement, Leonardo da Vinci was most proud of his ability to bend iron with his bare hands.

Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher who died in 1832, left his entire estate to the London Hospital, provided that his body was allowed to preside over its board meetings. His skeleton was clothed and fitted with a wax mask of his face. It was present at the meeting for ninety-?two years and can still be viewed there.

Thomas Edison had a collection of more than five thousand birds. He once saved a boy from the path of an oncoming locomotive.

NEWTONIAN PRINCIPLES

Isaac Newton was an ordained priest in the Church of England.

Isaac Newton was only twenty-?three years old when he discovered the law of universal gravitation.

Isaac Newton dropped out of school when he was a teenager.

Isaac Newton was a Member of Parliament.

Nobody knows where Voltaire’s body is. It was stolen in the nineteenth century and has never been recovered. The theft was discovered in 1864, when the tomb was opened and found empty.

Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.

Socrates committed suicide by drinking the poison hemlock. He left no writings of his own.

At age sixteen, Confucius was a corn inspector.

RELATIVITY SPEAKING

Albert Einstein couldn’t speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be mentally retarded.

In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect.

Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952.

When Einstein was inducted as an American, he attended the ceremony without socks.

Einstein’s last words were in German. Because the attending nurse did not understand German, his last words will never be known.

THAT EXPLAINS IT

Hitler and Napoleon both had only one testicle.

A LITTLE EGO

Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats.

Napoleon conducted his battle plans in a sandbox.

Napoleon favored mathematicians and physical scientists but excluded humanists from his circle, believing them to be troublemakers.

Napoleon had his servants wear his boots to break them in before he wore them.

LARGER THAN LIFE

Attila the Hun was a dwarf. Pepin the Short, Aesop, Gregory the Tours, Charles III of Naples, and the Pasha Hussain were all shorter than three and a half feet tall.

BIG BEN

Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national bird.

Benjamin Franklin was the first head of the United States Post Office.

Benjamin Franklin’s peers did not give him the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence because they feared he would conceal a joke in it.

DID IT RUN WINDOWS?

Bill Gates’s first business was Traff-?O-?Data, a company that created machines that recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.

WE LIKE TO CALL HIM “ECCENTRIC”

Henry Ford believed in reincarnation and flatly stated that history is bunk.

GLOBETROTTERS

Marco Polo was born on the Croatian island of Korcula (pronounced Kor-?chu-?la).

Christopher Columbus had blond hair.

American explorer Richard Byrd once spent five months alone in Antarctica.

Harry Houdini was the first person to fly an airplane on the continent of Australia.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Bruce Willis’s real name is Walter.

Cher’s real name is Cherilyn La Pierre.

Hulk Hogan’s real name is Terry Bollea.

Ice Cube’s real name is O’Shea Jackson.

John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison.

Judy Garland’s real name was Frances Gumm.

Tom Cruise’s real name is Thomas Mapother.

Tina Turner’s real name is Annie Mae Bullock.

Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Van Winkle.

Albert Brooks’s real name is Albert Einstein.

Ralph Lauren’s real name is Ralph Lifshitz.

Jim Carrey’s middle name is Eugene.

Keanu Reeves’s first name means “cool breeze over the mountains” in Hawaiian.

Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.

FAMILY TIES

Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.

Sophia Loren’s sister was once married to the son of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Julie Nixon, daughter of Richard Nixon, married David Eisenhower, grandson of Dwight Eisenhower.

Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana, according to U.S. genealogists.

Tom Hanks is related to Abraham Lincoln.

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-?UP

Andy Garcia was a Siamese, or conjoined, twin.

Arnold Schwarzenegger bought the first Hummer manufactured for civilian use, in 1992. The vehicle weighed in at 6,300 pounds and was seven feet wide. He also paid $772,500 for President John F. Kennedy’s golf clubs at a 1996 auction.

Tommy Lee Jones and Vice President Al Gore were freshmen roommates at Harvard.

Sarah Bernhardt played a thirteen-?year-?old Juliet when she was seventy years old.

Although he starred in many gangster films, James Cagney started his career as a chorus boy.

As a child, Jodie Foster appeared in Coppertone commercials.

Bruce Lee was so fast that his films actually had to be slowed down so audiences could see his moves.

David Niven and George Lazenby were the only two actors who played James Bond only once.

The first actress to appear on a postage stamp was Grace Kelly.

Tom Cruise at one time wanted to be a priest.

Peter Falk, who played Columbo, has a glass eye.

Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the first three Star Wars movies, was a hospital porter in London before starring as the Wookie.

Shirley Temple made $1 million by age ten.

Keanu Reeves once managed a pasta shop in Toronto.

Mae West did not utter her infamous line, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” until her last film, Sextette. It had been floating around for years and has always been attributed to her, but its exact origins are unknown.

Mae West was once dubbed “the statue of Libido.”

Melanie Griffith’s mother is actress Tippi Hedren, best known for her lead role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button.

Rita Moreno is the first and only entertainer to have received all four of America’s top entertainment industry awards: the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, and the Grammy.

James Doohan, who played Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott on Star Trek, was missing his entire middle finger on his right hand.

In 1953, Marilyn Monroe appeared as the first Playboy centerfold.

Jack Nicholson appeared on The Andy Griffith Show twice.

Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.

Jill St. John, Jack Klugman, Diana Ross, Carol Burnett, and Cher have all worn braces as adults.

Orson Welles is buried in an olive orchard on a ranch owned by his friend, matador Antonio Ordonez, in Seville, Spain.

Kathleen Turner was the voice of Jessica Rabbit in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Amy Irving was her singing voice.

James Dean died in a Porsche Spyder.

Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with her role in Midnight Cowboy. Her entire role lasted only six minutes.

Katharine Hepburn is the only person to win four Oscars for Best Actress.

Clark Gable used to shower more than four times a day.

Elizabeth Taylor has appeared on the cover of Life magazine more than anyone else.

MAKE ’EM LAUGH

Charlie Chaplin started in show business at age five. He was so popular during the 1920s and 1930s he received more than 73,000 letters in just two days during a visit to London.

Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-?alike contest.

Howdy Doody had forty-?eight freckles. His twin brother was named Double Doody.

Dan Aykroyd’s cone head from Saturday Night Live was auctioned off for $2,200.

Roseanne Barr used to be an opening act for Julio Iglesias.

In high school, Robin Williams was voted the least likely to succeed.

Bill Cosby was the first black man to win an Emmy for Best Actor.

I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND

The Beatles featured two left-?handed members: Paul, whom everyone saw holding his Hoffner bass left-?handed, and Ringo, whose left-?handedness is at least partially to blame for his “original” drumming style.

The Beatles performed their first U.S. concert in Carnegie Hall.

The Beatles song “A Day in the Life” ends with a note sustained for forty seconds.

The Beatles song “Dear Prudence” was written about Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence, when she wouldn’t come out and play with Mia and The Beatles at a religious retreat in India.

The license plate number on the Volkswagen that appeared on the cover of The Beatles’ album Abbey Road is 281F.

“When I’m Sixty-?Four” was the first song to be recorded for the Sgt. Pepper album. “Within You Without You” was the last.

When John Lennon divorced Julian Lennon’s mother, Paul McCartney composed “Hey Jude” to cheer up Julian.

John Lennon’s first girlfriend was named Thelma Pickles.

John Lennon’s middle name was Winston.

Ringo Starr was born during a World War II air raid.

ONE-?MAN SHOW

An eighteenth-?century German named Matthew Birchinger, known as The Little Man of Nuremberg, played four musical instruments, including the bagpipes; was an expert calligrapher; and was the most famous stage magician of his day. He performed tricks with the cup and balls that have never been explained. Yet Birchinger had no hands, legs, or thighs, and he was shorter than twenty-?nine inches tall.

INSTRUMENTAL VERSION

The bagpipe was originally made from the whole skin of a dead sheep. Carnegie Mellon University offers bagpiping as a major.

A penny whistle has six finger holes.

The tango originated as a dance between two men for partnering practice.

The harmonica is the world’s most popular instrument.

There are more than thirty-?three thousand radio stations around the world.

A single violin is made of seventy separate pieces of wood.

Glass flutes do not expand with humidity, so their owners are spared the nuisance of tuning them.

In 1990, there were an estimated seventy-?five thousand accordionists in the United States.

The first U.S. discotheque was the Whisky A Go-?Go in Los Angeles.

Gandhi took dance and music lessons in his late teens.

CLASSICALLY SPEAKING

More than one hundred descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach have been cathedral organists.

When Beethoven was a child, he made such a poor impression on his music teachers that he was pronounced hopeless as a composer.

Beethoven’s Fifth was the first symphony to include trombones.

Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head.

Mozart’s real name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolf-?gangus Theophilus Mozart.

Mozart wrote the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” at the age of five.

Mozart is buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC

At age forty-?seven, The Rolling Stones’ bassist, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with thirteen-?year-?old Mandy Smith, with her mother’s blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after, Bill’s thirty-?year-?old son, Stephen, married Mandy’s mother, age forty-?six. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father’s father-?in-?law and his own grandfather.

The music hall entertainer Nosmo King derived his stage name from a NO SMOKING sign.

Jonathan Houseman Davis, lead singer of Korn, was born a Presbyterian but converted to Catholicism because his mother wanted to marry his stepfather in a Catholic church.

Nick Mason is the only member of Pink Floyd to appear on all the band’s albums.

The naked baby on the cover of Nirvana’s album Never-?mind is named Spencer Eldon.

The 1980s song “Rosanna” was written about actress Rosanna Arquette.

The B-52s were named after a 1950s hairdo.

The band Duran Duran got their name from a character in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie Barbarella.

The Beach Boys formed in 1961.

The bestselling Christmas single of all time is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

The first CD pressed in the United States was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.

The Grateful Dead were once called The Warlocks.

The Mamas and Papas were once called The Mugwumps.

The only member of the band ZZ Top to not have a beard has the last name Beard.

There is a band named A Life-?Threatening Buttocks Condition.

The song with the longest title is “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with My Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-?O, Beat-?O Flat-?On-?My-?Seat-?O, Hirohito Blues,” written by Hoagy Carmichael. He later claimed the song title ended with “Yank” and the rest was a joke.

Tommy James got the inspiration to write his number-?one hit “Mony Mony” while he was in a New York hotel looking at the Mutual of New York building’s neon sign flashing repeatedly: M-?O-?N-?Y.

ABBA got its name by taking the first letter from each of the band members’ names (Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anni-?frid).

The opera singer Enrico Caruso practiced in the bath, while accompanied by a pianist in a nearby room.

Enrico Caruso and Roy Orbison were the only tenors in the twentieth century capable of hitting the note E over high C.

The song “I Am the Walrus” by John Lennon was inspired by a two-?tone police siren.

In every show Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) wrote, there was at least one song about rain.

Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady” was written about Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe.

Andy Warhol created The Rolling Stones’ emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the Sticky Fingers album.

“Happy Birthday to You” is the most often sung song in America.

The band Steely Dan got its name from a sexual device depicted in the book Naked Lunch.

Al Kooper played keyboards for Bob Dylan before he was famous.