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).

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 speed of a typical golfer’s swing is 101 miles per hour.

In one early published version of “Cinderella,” the wicked stepsister cuts off her own big toe ion order to fit into the glass slipper.

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 fork was invented in Italy as a utensil with which to eat pasta.  However, it was unilaterally dismissed by the Church, which frowned upon using anything not created by God to touch God’s bounty.

Prior to earning his master’s degree in experimental animation, “SpongeBob SquarePants” creator Stephen Hillenburg taught marine biology at the Orange County Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California.

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 1866, Claude Monet, plagued by debt, burned two hundred of his own paintings to prevent them from being seized by creditors.

When Richard Reynolds started manufacturing his eponymous aluminum foil, it wasn’t to package and store food.  He made it for his uncle, cigarette magnate R. J. Reynolds, who was in need of a way to wrap tobacco and keep it fresh.

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 first ten moves of chess can be played roughly 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible ways.

Illinois Avenue has been mathematically proven to be the square on the Monopoly game board that the highest probability of being occupied by a player.  The “Go” square comes in second.

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 first flight attendants were men whose main job function was to handle baggage.  When United Airlines decided to put women on their planes in 1930, all of the stewardesses they hired were nurses, based on the theory that nurses would be most capable of handling passengers’ needs on bumpy flights.

Fred Astaire’s famous dances with Ginger Rogers were some of the most romantic moments in movie history, but Astaire actually developed the numbers with choreographer Hermes Pan, who filled in for Rogers during choreography, then later taught her the steps.

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 only Major League Baseball teams with names that don’t end with the letter “s” are the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox.

The creator of Eudora, the first e-mail software program, was Steve Dorner, a staff member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The University not only gave the software away, but Dorner, who was salaried, received no stock options and no royalties on His 1988 creation.

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 it ranks as the world’s fifth-busiest airport, more people start their trips at Los Angeles International than any other airport in the world.

In a publicity stunt to recognize the one million copies sold of Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in 1942, RCA Records spray-painted a record gold and presented it to Miller during a radio show.  A decade later, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) borrowed the idea and started issuing Gold Records whenever sales hit five hundred thousand.

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