This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Collarless sweaters that button down the front were named for the man who was fond of wearing them–James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan.  In addition to starting a fashion trend, Brudenell led the famous Change of the Light Brigade in 1854, during the Crimean War.

“Wicked” author Gregory Maguire chose Elphaba as the name of the Wicked Witch of the West in tribute to “Oz” author L. Frank Baum.  The name is a phonetic take on Baum’s initials, L-F-B.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Although often thought to be a contraction for the phrase “Swiss watch,” the name “Swatch” actually stems from “second watch” and the marketing campaign that introduced it as an inexpensive, casual, and disposable accessory.

The white-shingled house that Ari Gold lived in for the first four seasons of “Entourage” was, for nearly thirty years, the real-life residence of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

The Emmy Award derives its name from the Immy–a slang term for the image orthicon, a tube that was used in television cameras until the 1960s.

Steve Martin honed his talent for crafting balloon animals, a staple of his early stand-up act, while working at Disneyland’s Main Street Magic Shop in the early 1960s.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

In the twelfth century, modern tennis was born when monks introduced a racquet into the handball game that they played against monastery walls.  The name came later, however, when French nobility latched onto the sport and their servants took to calling “tenez” (which translates to “hold on” or “take heed”) just before the ball was tossed into play.

The man who gave Jack Russell terriers their name was Reverend John “Jack” Russell, an English clergyman who bred dogs as a hobby.  Although he developed the eponymous fox terrier offshoot in the 1800s, the breed wasn’t recognized by the American Kennel Club until 1997.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

It takes approximately ninety minutes to hard-boil an ostrich egg.

In 1923, Frank Epperson was operating a lemonade stand at an amusement park in Oakland, California, when he set out to market a frozen drink-on-a-stick concoction he called the Eppsicle–a combination of his surname and the words “icicle.”  His kids, however, referred to their dad’s novelty treats as “Pop’s icles,” so when Epperson applied for a patent, he did so under the catchier name, Popsicle.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Charles Rushmore was a young attorney sent from New York City to South Dakota in 1885 to check on mining titles in the Black Hills.  When he singled out one of the mountains and inquired about its name, his guide, William Challis, shot back that it did not have one, but suggested they could “just call the damn thing Rushmore.”

Before she found fame as an author and sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer was trained as a sniper in the Israeli army.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

The bottle in which Jeannie lived on “I Dream of Jeannie” was fashioned from a 1964 Christmas-edition Jim Beam decanter.

Costumed characters commonly found at amusement parks are known in the industry as “fuzzies.”  On the average, a fuzzie’s outfit weighs forty pounds, and during the hot summer months, under the blazing sun and surrounded by crowds, interior temperatures can heat up to 150 degrees.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Attendance at the Louvre rose from an average of 6 million visitors in 2000 to 7.5 million in 2005.  Museum officials are mum on the matter, but most in the art world call this “The Da Vinci Code Effect,” attributing the visitor increase (and interest) to the novel by Dan Brown that sold more than 61 million copies in 44 languages.

Vieux Boulogne, a soft cheese from Northern France, is–according to a panel of nineteen human taste tasters and one “electronic nose” (a machine equipped with sensors to detect different chemical aromas)–the smelliest cheese in the world.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

Under NBA regulations, sneakers are the only article of clothing a player can wear that bears a commercial logo.

The phrase John Lennon can be heard saying (twice, on some recordings) at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever”–and the phrase that many Beatles fans took to be “I buried Paul” and that helped launch the “Paul is dead” hysteria–is actually “cranberry sauce.”

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).

This informative post will be posted on Saturday along with my usual writing.  We can all appreciate some of the lesser known facts from around the world.

The famous two-toned French manicure isn’t really French at all.  Hollywood makeup artist Jeff Pink got the idea from Parisian runway models, who simply rubbed a white pencil beneath their unpolished fingernail tips to give them a clean, natural look.

Parcheesi can be traced back to sixteenth-century India, when bored factory workers realized that a piece of cloth with a unique pattern could be turned into a game that would help pass time.

These facts have been discovered in I NEVER KNEW THAT by David Hoffman (2009).