Zen and the art of blogging

I love random, useless, non life-changing trivia. The following handy batch of 'impress your friends' tid bits comes from my favorite place to get my fix: Mentalfloss.com


Your foot is the same size as the distance between your wrist and elbow. You can put your foot in that area and it will fit. Your forearm and foot are the same size.

After going into heat, an unaltered female ferret can actually die if she does not mate. Similarly a spider can die when molting because it requires using every muscle and tremendous energy.

Goosebumps are actually caused by a muscle. It is called the arrector pilli muscle.

Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hiearchical Officious Oracle.”


“Britney Spears” is an anagram for “Presbyterians”.


Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world that lies in two continents.

Over 1/2 the population of Uganda is under 15 yrs. old.

The first seedless grapes were kind of an accident. Thousands of years ago in the Middle East, a random genetic mutation caused a group of grapes to spontaneously abort their own seeds before the seeds could develop hard casings. The result: seedless produce. To reproduce the fruit, a sly farmer simply cloned the vine (with no seeds, there’s nothing to plant)—meaning that all seedless grapes today are direct descendants of that one mutated grape vine.

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare side effect of brain trauma, whereby a patient’s enunciation is altered to the point where it begins to resemble a foreign accent. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1941, when a young Norwegian woman began speaking with what sounded like a German accent after being hit in the head with shrapnel. Her community, thinking she had Fascist sympathies, shunned her.