TRIVIA BITS

 

• The Channel between England and France grows about 300 millimetres each year.
• The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life."
• The characters of Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie were given the same first names as Simpsons creator Matt Groening's real-life father, mother, and two sisters.
• The chemical pectin, found in ripe fruit, causes jam to set when cooling.
• The children's' nursery rhyme 'Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses' actually refers to the Black Death which killed about 30 million people in the fourteenth-century.
• The Chinese ideogram for "trouble" symbolizes "two women living under one roof".
• The Chinese used fingerprints as a method of identification as far back as AD 700.
• The Chinese were using aluminium to make things as early as 300 AD Western civilization didn't rediscover aluminium until 1827.
• The city of Hiroshima left the Industrial Promotion Centre standing as a monument the atomic bombing.
• The city of Istanbul straddles two separate continents, Europe and Asia.