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A person who was born on February 29 may be called a "leapling".
A leap day is more likely to fall on a Friday than a Sunday, but even more likely to come on a Monday.
Sweden and the Soviet Union, among others, have briefly utilized calendars that extended February to 30 days.
Pound for pound, the most ferocious animal ever discovered is the Ratel or African Honey Badger.
A British law prohibits people from dying while in the Houses of Parliament. The punishment is largely irrelevant.
Santa Cruz is home to the last of the beachside California amusement parks.
To peruse is to review quite thoroughly, not to skim through it.
The Appalachian Trail is a journey of approximately 5 million steps.
The sign that inspired train passenger Jack Norworth to pen the lyrics to "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" was promoting a ballgame at the Polo Grounds, home of the NY Giants.
California is the nation's leading grower of turkeys.
The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles sees 500,000 new cases each year; very few of those are personal injury cases.
Seventy percent of adult Americans believe in heaven and angels, but just over sixty percent believe in hell and the devil.
At 612 feet, the Singer Building in New York City was the tallest building in the world from its completion in 1908 until the completion in 1909 of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower in Manhattan.
In Bracken Cave, Texas, about 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats eat about 200 tons of insects every night.
Rural folks in Ghana once harbored a widespread belief that grassland witches could turn themselves into hyenas at will.
The first Oscars were handed out in a ceremony that lasted just 15 minutes.
An Oscar weighs eight pounds.
Popularity and box office success mean nothing to the voting members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From Cary Grant to Harrison Ford, the prized Oscar has been denied throughout the careers of some of Hollywood's most beloved and best-selling leading men.
Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Their grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, started the Wedgwood pottery company.
Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Midianites, Amalekites, Philistines, Hasmonaeans, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamlukes, Mongols, French, Ottomans, British, Australians, Germans, Arabs and Israelis have all already fought and died at the place the Bible calls Armageddon.
Michael Flatley, of River Dance fame, was a boxer who won a Golden Gloves championship in 1975.
The A&W of root beer fame stands for Allen and Wright.
The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is the full name of the smallest U.S. state.
Actress Teri Hatcher was once a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers.
Fifty people per year die from consuming fugu. The deadliest is the torafugu, or tiger blowfish.
The Welsh consider faggots a delicacy. In Wales, a faggot is a meatball made out of pig hearts, liver and fatty belly meat.
No rivers flow out of Utah's Great Salt Lake.
The Snickers bar was named after the Mars family's favorite horse.
Children's television show "Sesame Street" has won more than 100 Emmy Awards.
The late Tom Lantos of California was the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress.
The oriental rat flea is the primary transmitter of plague in Asia, Africa and South America.
The People's Court Judge Joseph Wapner dated Lana Turner while the two were classmates.
The middle name of Elvis Presley's mother was "Love."
There were no photographs taken of George Washington.
Andrew Jackson was the first American president from the working class.
George Washington swept the Electoral College twice. That's two times more than any other presidential candidate.
Golf was invented in Scotland. A popular but false myth says the name was an acronym for "Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden," but its name is actually derived from the Scots word goulf, meaning "to strike".
In 1984, the average worker had to work 460 hours to earn enough to buy an average cellular phone. Today, the average phone can be purchased with the three hours worth of wages for an average worker.
Exhibit CE-399 is the name investigators gave to the "magic bullet" that struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally in 1963.
Cereology isn't the study of breakfast foods; it's the study of crop circles.
Atlantic Southeast Airlines mishandles the luggage of 1.7% of its passengers. That's the worst among all major American air carriers.
There's no such fish as a sardine. Sardine is a generic term used for herring, pilchard, and the other small fish they pack in those little oblong cans.
French Guiana is the only French-speaking nation in South America.
The swastika was used by American Indians, Hindus, Buddhists, Vikings, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Mayans, Aztecs, Persians, Christians, and neolithic tribes. There are even Jewish swastikas found in ancient synagogues side-by-side with the star of David.
Donny Most was originally cast to play Potsie Weber on Happy Days. The Ralph Malph character was added to the show after producers decided to cast Anson Williams as Potsie instead.
Locust swarms can exceed a trillion individual insects.
The iceberg that sunk Titanic hit her on the starboard side.
The ill-fated zeppelin Hindenburg was named after Hitler's predecessor, president Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg aka Paul von Hindenburg.
Bats have only one pup a year.
John V. Atanasoff, a theoretical physicist, and his assistant Clifford Berry built the first computer that successfully employed vacuum tubes to perform mathematical calculations in 1942. The computer was called the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC.
Cows evolved as wild grazing herd animals called aurochs. Pictures of them have been found on prehistoric cave paintings. A poacher in Poland is believed to have killed the last one in 1627.
Lincoln is most closely identified with the State of Illinois, but he was born in Kentucky.
An enormity isn't just any sort of immenseness. It is something wicked or outrageous on a grand scale. The Holocaust was an enormity. The Mall of America is not.
Had Lincoln been shot a few months earlier, Hannibal Hamlin would have been the 17th president.
Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds has won more Grammy Awards than the Beatles ever did.
Christopher Cross is the only artist to receive the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist in a single ceremony.
If Grammy Awards are the measure of an artist's success, then Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Carter were all more successful as recording artists than Diana Ross. As a solo artist and as a member of the Supremes, Ross topped the Billboard charts eighteen times, but she never won a Grammy Award.
Venus is hotter than Mercury.
An individual locust weighs just about half an ounce, but can eat its weight in food every day.
When Dante's wife Elizabeth died in 1862, he buried with her the only manuscript of a book of poems he had been working on. Years later, he decided to have her disinterred to retrieve the manuscript.
The Eiffel Tower was the world's tallest structure from 1889 to 1930, when New York City's Chrysler Building (1,047 ft.) was completed.
Chiasmus is the figure of speech where the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second, e.g., "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."
Cockroaches are nocturnal; if you seen one by day, it is probably out because of overcrowding.
Spanish settlers named California after a utopian society described in a popular 16th-century novel called Serged de Esplandian.
Only the French are properly able to call their sparkling wines champagne. Italian champagne is called spumante. German is called sekt. California sparkling wine is sometimes called champagne because the U.S. has no treaty with France regarding wine names.
The Pony Express ran from St. Joseph, Missouri and San Francisco, California. The riders were changed every 75 to 100 miles. Fresh horses were given to riders every 10 to 15 miles.
The three colleges with the most sports championships are all Pac-10 schools: UCLA, Stanford and USC.
The first, second, third and sixth largest (by wood volume) trees on the planet all grow within less than one mile of each other.
The maximum recorded lifespan of a Condor (California) is 45 years.
The sun bear is the world's smallest bear.
Navigator Fred Noonan disappeared along with Amelia Earhart.
A poem by Chretian de Troyes in 1190 contains the earliest known reference to a Holy Grail.
Q: FDR won the popular vote for U.S. president four times in a row. Who won the next-most number of popular votes?
A: Two-time president Grover Cleveland (#22 and #24), who won the popular vote three times in a row, but lost the the electoral vote in the second election to Benjamin Harrison.
The last time a U.S. presidential election did not include a candidate currently serving as either president or vice-president was in 1928.
Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they don't pay federal taxes, and they don't vote in presidential elections.
Switzerland hosts two enclaves: Büsingen (Germany) and Campione d'Italia (Italy).
The word "nincompoop" is believed to be derived from the Latin phrase "non compos mentis," meaning not of sound mind.
Shark leather is up to 11 times more durable than cowhide.
Point Roberts in Washington is cut off from the rest of the state by British Columbia, Canada. To travel from Point Roberts to any other part of the U.S., you must either cross a bay or pass through Canada. Other such American exclaves include Northwest Angle, Minnesota and Elm Point, Minnesota.
The peacock is the national bird of India.
Among things faster than a speeding bullet: The Earth as it orbits the Sun. Earth's average speed of revolution about the Sun is 29,800 meters per second. A speeding bullet travels between 180 and 1500 meters per second.
Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow approximately 90 percent of the time. His weather predictions are only right 39 percent of the time.
Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in South America.
Among the cast of Happy Days, only Marion Ross and Anson Williams stayed in the cast from its pilot, an episode of "Love, American Style," to its conclusion. Henry Winkler and Tom Bosley appeared in every episode of the series other than the pilot.
Birds often eat one-fourth to one-half of their own body weight each day. "Eating like a bird" is actually eating a lot.
Dutch is one of three official languages in Belgium. French and German are the others.
Sonny and Cher called themselves Caesar and Cleo earlier in their career.
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