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).

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).