After a trillion comes a quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, duodecillion, tredecillion, quattuordecillion, and quindecillion.
Duke Snider's first name was Edwin.
An 1875 swarm of Rocky Mountain Locusts measured 100 miles across and 1,800 miles long crossed the American Midwest. It was estimated to include 3.5 trillion insects. By 1902, the species was extinct.
Mariners used to call sharks sea dogs.
There are only about 700 Samaritans. No one knows how many are good.
St. Olav's Church, in Tallinn, Estonia, was the world's tallest building from 1549 to 1625, when it was surpassed by the Strasbourg Cathedral. It currently houses a Baptist church.
"The Haystack" was the name of the brewery that Gerard Heineken bought in 1864.
Max Factor, Sr. got his start as a makeup man for the Royal Ballet in Czarist Russia.
Brett Favre passed for more than 35 miles in his NFL career. Only he and Dan Marino threw for more than 30.
Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface at 1:40 p.m. on July 20, 1969, but Neil Armstrong did not actually set foot on the moon until 7:56 p.m.
A $100 billion note in Zimbabwe is worth about $1.00 U.S. That makes anyone with an American penny a billionaire.
If it was an independent nation, California would be the #2 largest consumer of gasoline in the world, trailing only the rest of the U.S.
In Iran, the old "thumbs up," known there as the bilakh, has a similar meaning to the middle finger in America.
Discount retailer TJ Maxx is called TK Maxx in the U.K.
Southern Mississippi was the only only Division I college to recruit Brett Favre. They recruited him as a defensive back.
Cloudy apple juice is healthier than clear juice.
There are 30,000 wild parakeets in London.
It was a dye made from madder root that made the British redcoats so red.
Some roaches can fly.
When the British talk about Tories, they are talking about the Conservative and Unionist Party. Thus, in the U.K., the Unionist Party is the opponent of the Labour Party.
Lionel was the middle name of the model train company's founder, Joshua Cowen.
Orville was the Wright brother who piloted the first motorized manned flight.
Neil Armstrong's moon landing took place while the one-hit wonder band's Thunderclap Newman held the #1 spot on the U.K. pop charts with a song called "Something in the Air." The week after the landing, it fell from the top spot.
A piece of eight was legal tender until 1857.
The world's largest airport is in the Arabian Desert. Riyadh Airport covers 87 square miles in Saudi Arabia.
You are far more likely to die in a car accident during the afternoon rush hour, than during the morning rush hour.
The moon was about three meters closer to the Earth when John McCain was born.
The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League All-Star Game.
Byzantine Emperor Justinian I was a victim and survivor of the bubonic plague that killed half of his people in the 540s Plague of Justinian.
Two of the National League's eight charter members — the Chicago Cubs fka the Chicago White Stockings and the Atlanta Braves fka the Boston Red Stockings the Chicago White Stockings, now known as the Chicago Cubs, and the Boston Red Stockings — are still in play.
The area now comprising Britain formed part of the last land bridge between Europe and North America more than 65 million years ago.
Q: Who was major league baseball's career home run leader before Babe Ruth?
A: Roger Connor, whose 138 career home runs lasted until Ruth hit his 139th on July 18, 1921.
Pitcher Josh Beckett pitched three shutouts in his first six major league baseball playoff games. That's one more than he has in his 183 regular season starts.
The Spotted Hand Fish, found in Tasmania, can walk on its fins, which are shaped like a human hand.
Less than 66 full years elapsed between Orville Wright's first motorized flight and the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The National League once included the Indianapolis Blues, the Milwaukee Grays, the Providence Grays, the Buffalo Bisons, the Cleveland Blues, the Syracuse Stars, the Troy Trojans, the Worcester Worcesters, the Detroit Wolverines, the St. Louis Maroons, the Kansas City Cowboys, the original Washington Nationals, the Indianapolis Hoosiers and the Cleveland Spiders.
Hasbro was founded by and named for the Hassenfeld brothers, Henry and Helal.
The last time someone in the U.S. was executed for something other than murder was in 1964, when a man went to the electric chair in Alabama for robbery.
For each mile you travel beneath the Earth's surface, temperatures increase by about 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
The 1492 voyage of Columbus lasted more than six months — for the Niña and Pinta, that is. The Santa Maria never made it back.
Racism is a crime in Brazil.
The national debt incurred to fight the Civil War had not been paid off when World War I began.
Among all diseases known in human history, smallpox is considered the single greatest killer.
A prairie oyster is not an oyster; it's a calf's testicle.
The Earth's rotation is steadily slowing. In five billion years, a day might last 23,000 hours.
A person with a superior autobiographical memory can be said to be "afflicted" with hyperthymesia.
The Irish monks who discovered how to distill water and barley onto whiskey called it "uisce beatha," which means "water of life."
The observable universe contains approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
Al Downing surrendered the home run that Hank Aaron hit to surpass Babe Ruth's record of 714; Dick Drago gave up Aaron's 755th.
Einstein considered there to be at least four dimensions: the three dimensions of space, plus one dimension of time. String theory physicists currently believe that there may be eleven dimensions.
Grubs and grasshoppers are eaten in Africa.
That old orca can be as old as 90 years.
Around the world in 57 days, that's where the world's fastest solo sailor can go.
You need to win a minimum of 500 games to crack the top ten coaching ranks in NHL.
Hitler served hard time in Bavaria at Landsberg Prison.
The first computer to use magnetic disks to store data was IBM's 1956 model RAMAC. At the time, it took about a hundred 24-inch disks to store ten megabytes.
About 780,000 years ago, your compass would have pointed south.
The U.S. Congress made July 4 an unpaid holiday for federal employees in 1870. Congress didn't declare it a legal federal holiday until 1941.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 each to achieve what he called a "gradual emancipation."
The Earth never gets any farther from the Sun than it is on and around July 4 each year.
The bullet ant has the most excruciating sting of all insects.
Fred Haise Jr. was the member of the Apollo 13 crew who did not tell Houston that they'd had a problem.
In July 2007, a recycling plant worker in Japan found four gold bars worth about 6.7 million yen.
One megabyte is slightly more than 1,000,000 bytes; it is exactly 1,048,576 bytes, or 2 to the 20th power.
The Dublin exporters of the liqueur called Irish Mist know to expect fewer sales in Germany. The word "mist" in German means "manure".
American Hindus marry within their faith 90% of the time.
Nobody said "Houston, have a problem," until after Apollo 13 landed. "Houston, we've had a problem," is what John Swigert and James Lovell both told Mission Control.
Eating just two poppy seed bagels may produce a positive result for opiates on a drug screen.
"CQD" was the international distress call until "SOS" replaced it on July 1, 1908.
The energy from the asteroid or comet that exploded over Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was more than 1,000 times greater than the energy released in the Hiroshima nuclear blast.
Our cliché expert reminds us that "One man's trash is another's treasure." Exhibit "A": The painting "Tres Personajes" by Rufino Tamayo, worth a million dollars on the open market, was found in a trash can along the street.
Mut was the name of the Egyptian mother goddess.
Q: What kind of wood doesn't float?
A: The Black Ironwood tree, Olea laurifolia. Its wood is so dense that it sinks.
A neutron star the size of a marble would weigh about 100 million tons on earth.
Nathan E. Cook, the last known U.S. veteran of the Spanish-American War, lived to the ripe old age of 106.
Since "Rock Around the Clock" was the first in 1955, there have been 1,000 songs topping the Billboard charts.
Today, when E.F. Hutton talks, people are listening to Citi, which currently owns what is left of the once influential financial firm.
Standard Oil, broken apart in 1911 under antitrust laws, now exists in the form of Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips.
William Jonathan Drayton Jr. is Flavor Flav's real name.
An octopus has three hearts.
By some estimates, 10% of all the humans who have ever lived are alive in the world right now.
Hoover Dam holds back 8 trillion gallons of water.
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax," wrote Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society in 1883, after he saw the early x-ray images produced by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen that looked like fake ectoplasm pictures.
The word hammock comes from the native Caribbeans' word hamacas.
The 1893 Columbian World Expo was intended to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first trip to the New World. They were a year late.
During the four-month Spanish-American War, the U.S. suffered just four casualties in capturing Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
The last tsunami to hit the eastern Mediterranean was a nine-meter high wall of water that came ashore on August 8, 1303 following an earthquake near Crete.
Adolf Hitler's father was a bastard who took his stepfather's surname when he was 39 years old. Had he not, it would have been "Adolf Schicklgruber" at the head of the Nazi party.
Though it still stands today, Ford's Theater never opened for business again after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Cannibals, among others, were declared available to take as slaves by a 1503 decree by Queen Isabella of Spain providing that people who "were better off under slavery" could legally be taken as slaves.
Steve Fisher won his first NCAA basketball title as Michigan's interim coach. He never won one as regular coach.
Western hemisphere vultures are more closely related to storks than to Eastern Hemisphere vultures, which are genetically more like hawks.
Battery acid is sulfuric acid.
On the day Judy Garland died, several tornadoes struck the midwest; and on the following day, an F4 tornado struck Kansas.
The last shot of the Civil War was fired by Captain James Waddell's Shenandoah at Yankee whaling ships off the coast of Alaska, near St. Lawrence Island, on June 22, 1865, more than two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered.
The player who replaced Hank Aaron as the DH for the Milwaukee Brewers (for whom Aaron hit his final 22 home runs) was Jamie Quirk.
Many brands of Caribbean rum are aged in used oak bourbon barrels from Kentucky.
Chimpanzee sex usually lasts no more than 15 seconds.
The first Nordstrom was opened in 1901 as a shoe store.
Today, it is along the Tropic of Cancer (23° 26′ 22″ N), not the equator, where the sun appears to be directly overhead.
On average, a language replaces twenty percent of its vocabulary every 1,000 years.
Neanderthal's brains were ten percent larger than a modern human's.
It wasn't until June of 1865 that the good people of Galveston, Texas were told of the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
The oldest archeological evidence of wheeled vehicles dates to about 3300 B.C.
The Godfather was the first movie to have a million dollar day at the box office.
The U.S. no longer produces currency worth more than $500.
Bubonic plague is nearly always fatal if not treated within 24 hours after the onset of symptoms.
Friends of Baskin-Robbins called them Burt and Irv, respectively.
"Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings" was the name of Levi Strauss's first patent for blue jean manufacturing.
The number 36 is the only triangular number whose square root is also a triangular number.
The celebration of birthdays is thought to have been first popularized by followers of the cult of Mithras.
Sherlock Holmes had an older brother named Mycroft.
Almost two-fifths of all baby gorilla deaths are the result of murder by adult gorillas.
Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lead plaintiffs in the 2004 Massachusettss case that paved the way for same-sex marriage in that state, split up two years later.
Shea stadium was named after William Shea, an influential New York attorney.
Ants are on the menu in several places in South America.
The geoduck is the largest burrowing clam in the world. The largest specimens can weigh more than 15 pounds.
The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok , Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.
The first Barnes & Noble store was established in 1873 at the home of Charles M. Barnes.
In a report from the General Accounting Office to Congress in 2005 it was estimated that $7 billion in fraudulent earned income credits are paid by the IRS each year.
The Boston Marathon was the first to include a wheelchair division.
Pastor comes from the Greek and Latin words for shepherd.
Charles E. Merrill and Edmund C. Lynch met at the YMCA.
The precise value of a kilogram was intended to be eternally precise through the creation and preservation of several identically-massed platinum-iridium cylinders. However, in the 120 since they were created, their masses have been changing, by an average of 50 micrograms.
Grover Cleveland was the president on the $1,000 bill.
Q: Which burger chain started business by selling a burger called "The Whopper?"
A: None. Burger King was founded in 1954, and it introduced the Whopper three years later.
Since the U.S. resumed capital punishment, only Texas has executed more prisoners than Virginia.
Universal Studios Japan is the world's ninth most-visited theme park, but it is the first among parks not un by Disney.
A shiver was a wood splinter. "Shiver me timbers" referred to splintering the big planks of wood on a ship.
Q: What major basketball record did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar break at UNLV?
A: The NBA career scoring record.
Two former Celtics were the head coach and assistant coach of the Lakers when the team won its first NBA title in Los Angeles.
Jungle Jim Loscutoff was the center Bill Russell replaced in the Celtics' lineup in 1956.
"Men of few words are the best men," wrote William Shakespeare, one of history's most prolific writers.
Henry was Royce's name. Mr. Rolls was named Charles.
Osama bin Laden has been indicted by the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, but has not been indicted in connection with 9/11.
The Lakers and Celtics are facing each other in the NBA championship finals for the 11th time. Among major U.S. league sports, only the Dodgers and Yankees have played for the title as many times, also eleven.
Jerry West is the only player to win an NCAA Most Outstanding Player award (1959 West Virginia) and an NBA Finals MVP award (Lakers, 1969), without playing for the team that won the championship.
The Boston Celtics won their first eight championship series against the Lakers, including six in eight years from 1962 to 1969, but the Lakers have won the last two.
The current 30 year gap between Triple Crown winners is the longest ever. Since the last winner in 1978, ten horses have entered the Belmont Stakes with the chance to win the Triple Crown, starting with Spectacular Bid in 1979.
Secretariat's Belmont Stakes time of 2:24 flat not only stands as the fastest Belmont Stakes time ever, it is the fastest 1½ miles ever run on a dirt track. No other horse has broken 2:25 for 1½ miles on any dirt track.
Granville, the son of one Triple Crown winner and the half-brother of another, won the 1936 Belmont Stakes after finishing dead last in the Kentucky Derby. His win spoiled Bold Venture's Triple Crown bid.
Nine of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers were Irishmen, including three born in Ireland.
Peggy Sue Gerron was the girl who Buddy Holly crooned in his 1957 hit "Peggy Sue." A high school classmate of Holly's, she eventually married his drummer.
A firefly is not a fly; it's a beetle.
The Charlotte Hornets were the team that drafted Kobe Bryant. He was picked 13th overall in the 1996 NBA draft.
By the time this season's NBA champion is crowned, the Lakers and Celtics will collectively own exactly half (31) of the championships earned in the 62 years of the National Basketball Association. The current tally: Celtics 16, Lakers 14.
Laker general manager Mitch Kupchak's career-ending injury came on a play in which he stopped suddenly to avoid committing a charging foul. The defender on the play was Joe Bryant, the father of current Laker star Kobe Bryant.
The last Miss Canada, Nicole Dunsdon, completed her reign in October 1992; the last Canadian Miss Universe was Natalie Glebova (2005).
The Afghan Hound is generally the least intelligent breed of dog.
In 1916, Mary Pickford earned $10,000 a week as an actress. That doesn't include her $300,000 bonus.
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