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Future NFL coach Tony Dungy and future NBA coach Flip Saunders roomed together at the University of Minnesota.
When the Vikings controlled Dublin a thousand years ago, the Irish port town featured the largest slave market in the world.
At the beginning of the Permian Period, Earth's land was mostly fused in a supercontinent known as Pangea. The single large ocean that surrounded it is called Panthalassa.
Going into this season, all but seven NCAA Division I-A (now the "Bowl Subdivision") schools had played a non-Division I-A opponent in football since the divisions were established in 1978. The seven were Notre Dame, USC, UCLA, Washington, Michigan State, Michigan and Ohio State. The latter two each played lower division opponents this season.
The rowing crew of the University of Washington competed and won the Olympic Gold Medal in the eight-oared men's rowing event in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. To this day, incoming freshmen on the Husky rowing teams are required to memorize and recite the names and seating positions of each member of that team.
The University of Washington football team once went ten years (1907 to 1917) and 63 consecutive games without a loss.
No player for the Seattle Seahawks is permitted to wear number twelve, which belongs to the fans, the "twelfth man."
During the Klondike gold rush of 1898, Dawson, Alaska swelled to at least 30,000 people, making it the largest American city north of Seattle. Had Dawson ever gotten an NFL franchise, they would probably have called them the 98ers.
The 1919 Stanley Cup Finals ended without a champion being declared. The series between the NHL champion Montreal Canadiens and the PCHA champion Seattle Metropolitans was tied 2-2-1 when players from both teams began getting sick with the Spanish Flu. A few days after officials cancelled the deciding game, Montreal's star player Joe Hall died of the illness.
Isabella of Castile (Queen Isabella I of Spain), the patron of Christopher Columbus and a motivating force behind the Spanish Inquisition, has been under consideration for sainthood since 1974, when Pope Paul VI opened her case for beatification.
Lightning strikes the Earth 3.1 billion times a year.
Pope Urban VII had the shortest reign of any Pope recognized by the Catholic Church.
Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, winning in 1921 for "The Age of Innocence."
Before starring in the pornographic film "Behind the Green Door" (which made $25 million on costs of $60,000), Marilyn Chambers was an Ivory soap model.
An 8 foot 5 inch Ukrainian man named Leonid Stadnik is the tallest known person in the world.
There is no butter in buttermilk.
A drawing room was not meant for drawing. It was short for withdrawing.
Heart cancer is uncommon. The heart does not frequently replicate cells, nor is it exposed to any carcinogens other than those that get into the blood, which are the most common origins of cancer.
In the United Kingdom, everyone who watches television must pay a license fee. To enforce the license, officials drive around in vans equipped with television detectors.
The wardrobe used for the lead character in the 1970s and 1980s TV show Columbo consisted entirely of actor Peter Falk's own clothes.
Alan Alda, Jackie Cooper and Gene Reynolds each won at least one best director Emmy for directing episodes of M*A*S*H.
Sinbad the Sailor was an Iraqi who originally set sail from Basra.
The Jewish population in Afghanistan stands at one.
A two year old octopus is a fairly old fellow.
Aquafina bottled water is owned by PepsiCo. Dasani is a Coca-Cola product.
Basically, i.e. means "in other words" and e.g. means "for example."
Bob Dylan once lived in a place called "Dinkytown."
The landfall of Hurricanes Dean and Felix marked the first time since hurricane records were kept, in which two Category 5 storms made landfall in the same season.
In the long summer days in Northern Alaska, farmers are able to grow cabbages the size of basketballs.
Approximately 10 percent of the US population catches influenza each year.
Before becoming the youngest brigadier general in U.S. Army history, George Custer graduated from West Point, dead last in his graduating class.
Stephen Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death.
Add a book to a trilogy and you get a tetralogy. Add more and you will have a pentalogy, hexalogy, heptalogy or septology.
The Edmonton Oilers are the only remaining WHA team that hasn't folded or moved to another city since the NHL absorbed the WHA in 1979.
Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer and William Rehnquist all graduated from Stanford; so did recently-retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
No country possesses the North Pole. It is situated in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
The legal age for drinking alcohol in the Netherlands is 16.
Bobby Hull was hockey's first million dollar player, accepting that sum to move from the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks to the Winnipeg Jets of the upstart World Hockey Association.
Severe priapism is what they call it when an aroused man remains so indefinitely.
Like a mix between a tidal wave and bathtub sloshing, a seiche in a large lake can bring more water ashore than did the 2004 Indiana Ocean tsunami.
Our love and war man tells us that couples who have at least one son face are less likely to divorce than couples who have only daughters. He doesn't, however, tell us why.
About 80% of all coal mined in the U.S. is burned to generate electricity.
Billionaire Warren Buffet still lives in the same house in Omaha that he bought when he was a young man.
Nebraska is the only state with a single legislative body. The other 49 have bicameral legislatures.
Kansas City's tap water is cleaner than any of the other 50 largest cities in the United States.
The University of Nebraska has sold out 283 consecutive home football games.
They are now known as the Cornhuskers, but prior nicknames for the University of Nebraska's athletic teams included the the Bugeaters, the Hawkeyes (now used by Iowa), the Antelopes (now used by the University of Nebraska at Kearney), the Old Gold Knights, and the Mankilling Mastodons.
In the past three decades, USC and Nebraska are the only schools to have won back-to-back AP football titles.
Kansas City, Missouri was home to AMC, the first multiplex.
From the Montana headwaters of the Jefferson River to the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Jefferson/Missouri/Mississippi River is the longest in North America, and fourth longest in the world.
In addition to being the "Hawkeye State," Iowa also enjoys the nickname "the Tall Corn State."
Before it was used to refer to a free do-over on the golf course, mulligan was an Irish word referring to a fool.
The Equal Rights Amendment was passed by the House 354 to 23, and by the Senate 84 to 8. However, only 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified the ERA.
Dry ice does not melt before it evaporates.
In 1876, when Russia sold its interests in Alaska to the Americans, the purchase price was about two cents per acre.
The Portland Trailblazers have retired the numbers of two players (#15 Larry Steele and #13 Dave Twardzik) who didn't even average ten points per game.
The United States imports $1.7 trillion in goods annually.
American travelers are warned against travel in Afghanistan, Algeria, Chad, Colombia, Congo, East Timor, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
In South America, September 11 ("El 11 de Septiembre" or "El once") is better remembered as the day of the Coup d'État in Chile that led to President Salvador Allende's suicide.
September 11 on the Gregorian calendar is New Year's Day on the Coptic calendar and Ethiopian calendars.
A meteoroid is any interplanetary object bigger than a speck of dust and smaller than an asteroid. Once it hits Earth, a meteoroid becomes a meteorite.
If written today, the Six Degrees of Separation theory would probably be called The 4.6 Degrees of Separation.
In the Gaelic and Arabic languages, each proper sentence begins with the verb.
In the U.S., laptops have been outselling desktops since May 2005.
The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was first used by an economist to describe the capitalist market.
In the last 10,000 years, Earth’s population has doubled ten times. How many more times can it double? Perhaps none. Some demographers forecast that the population will peak just below 10 billion people.
Mark Henry, a fourth grader from Canada, sports an incisor 2.28 centimetres long and 1.2 centimetres wide, the largest human tooth ever measured.
Most plants grow at night, after spending their days photosynthesizing sunlight to use after dark.
Average length of a humpback whale dork is 10 feet long.
Coffee beans are actually seeds, or pits, of a red berry. Not beans. Each berry contains just two seeds.
The "coffin ships" that brought Irish emigrants to North America often lost half their passengers to illness or injury during the great emigration from 1846 to 1856. Why? Arguably, all they needed was a doctor on board. One ship, the Jeanie Johnston, lost no passengers or crew to accident or disease from 1848-1858. It always sailed with a doctor aboard.
No space shuttle has ever carried a crew of more than eight.
"Killer bees" have the same stinger and the same venom as the common honey bee.
Etch-a-Sketch powder is finely ground aluminum.
Sir Francis Drake sailed right past the San Francisco Bay without seeing it, probably due to fog. It was finally discovered about 200 years later by Spanish explorers.
Winnie the Pooh was named after a real life black bear cub, named Winnipeg, at the London Zoo. The "Pooh" part came from the name of a real swan.
The corpse lily's putrid flowers can weigh as much as fifteen pounds, and measure up to three feet wide. Its petals are an inch thick. No other flower is as large.
A single porcupine can have as many as 30,000 quills.
Appalachian State had a total home attendance of slightly more than 135,000 all season in 2006. In their 2007 road opener at Michigan, they played before more than 109,000 fans.
Lamar University, which no longer has has a football team, was the first Division I-AA football team to beat a ranked Division I-A team. On September 5, 1981, they defeated Baylor University 18-17. The Baylor Bears were then ranked #20 in the UPI Coaches Poll. They were not ranked in the AP poll that week, but back then the AP only ranked the top 20, rather than the top 25.
Who says football players are not smart? Corey Lynch, the Appalachian State football player who blocked Michigan's last field goal attempt in their historic upset last week, is a physics major.
The difference between the value of money and the cost of its production is called seigniorage.
Graceland was named for Grace Toof, a wealthy lady whose family owned the property for almost a hundred years before Elvis Presely bought it in 1957.
Yes, a falling cat generally does land on its feet, as long as the fall is from at least one foot high.
To this day, a 19-mile exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant remains uninhabitable.
Martian dust storms can envelope the entire planet.
Roadrunners can sprint about 15 miles per hour. Coyotes can go as fast as 40 miles per hour.
Literally "quid pro quo" means this for that.
Graduates of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University owed more in student loans than any other graduate. The average 2006 graduate left Embry Riddle with $52,276 in student loan debt.
A yeast manufacturer can grow a single gram of yeast into more than a dozen tons of yeast in less than a week.
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