For the Titanic 2 survivors were dogs, there were no cats on board. The titanic is about as long as the Empire State Building. Charlie Brown's father was a barber If you would like to make a Siberian happy, give him a horse-meat steak. A black cow is a chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream. The term dates from the Roaring Twenties, although it also came to be used to describe a root beer float. Another term for a black cow was a mud fizz. The cashew is part of a fruit that grows in tropical regions called 'a cashew apple'. After harvesting, the cashew apple keeps for only 24 hours before the soft fruit deteriorates. The cashew apple is not commercially important since it spoils quickly, but local people love the fruit. To harvest the nut, the ripe apple is allowed to fall to the ground where natives easily gather it. The apple and nut are separated. South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, better known as "The Cornbread Capitol of the World," has an old ordinance pertaining to the cooking of this southern staple. The law declares: "Cornbread isn't cornbread unless it be made correctly. Therefore, all cornbread must be hereby made in nothing other then a cast iron skillet." Those found in violation of this ordinance are to be fined one dollar. The Ritz cracker was introduced to markets in 1934, but gourmets had to wait until 1953 for the invention of cheese in a can. The fortune cookie was invented in 1916 by George Jung, a Los Angeles noodlemaker. A man named Ed Peterson is the inventor of the Egg McMuffin. Although the combination of chili peppers and oregano for seasoning has been traced to the ancient Aztecs, the present blend is said to be the invention of early Texans. Chili powder today is typically a blend of dried chilies, garlic powder, red peppers, oregano, and cumin. Americans eat an average of 18 pounds of fresh apples each year. The most popular variety in the United States is the Red Delicious. An apple, onion, and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavor are caused by their smell. To prove this - pinch your nose and take a bite from each. They will all taste sweet.
Mr. Peanut was invented in 1916 by a Suffolk, Virginia schoolchild who won $5 in a design contest sponsored by Planters Peanuts. John Kellogg invented corn flakes, for a patient with bad teeth. Charles Post invented Grape Nuts. Dr. Kellogg was the manager of a Michigan health spa and Post was a patient. The spa was founded by Sylvester Graham...inventor of the Graham cracker and pioneer of the early 1800s movement to eat more bran. The secret recipe for Coca Cola, code-named "Merchandise 7X" is kept under lock and key in a vault in the SunTrust Bank Building in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Coke inventor Dr. John S. Pemberton and current world headquarters of Coca Cola International. In South Africa, termites are often roasted and eaten by the handful, like pretzels or popcorn. Table salt is the only commodity that hasn’t risen dramatically in price in the last 150 years. Burger KingŽ uses approximately 1/2 million pounds of bacon every month in its restaurants. There are more than 200 kinds of chili peppers, none of which belong to the pepper family. Ice cream was originally made without sugar and eggs. The Chinese used to open shrimp by flaying the shells with bamboo poles. Until a few years ago, in factories where dried shrimp were being prepared, "shrimp dancers" were hired to tramp on the shells with special shoes. Native Americans never actually ate turkey; killing such a timid bird was thought to indicate laziness. For decades, there's been a hard-fought and usually close battle between Coke and Pepsi in the United States...with each claiming some regional pockets of leadership. But globally it's no contest - Coca-Cola sales far outstrip sales of Pepsi-Cola internationally. The famous Chef Wolfgang Puck chose the Italian word "Spago" as the name for his popular chain of restaurants. In Italian - spago = "String" or "Twine" - slang for spaghetti.
Grand Rapids, Michigan is the "SpaghettiOs Capital of the World" because percapita consumption is highest in that city, per the Franco-American Company. Reportedly, there are more than 1,750 "O's" in a 15-ounce can of SpaghettiOs. Pigturducken is a pig, stuffed with a turkey, which is stuffed with a chicken, deep fried in oil, which is usually put into something similar to a horse trough over propane burners. Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans eat more than 22 pounds of tomatoes every year. More than half this amount is eaten in the form of ketchup and tomato sauce. In Bavaria, beer isn't considered an alcoholic drink but rather a staple food. Beer is made by fermentation cause by bacteria feeding on yeast cells and then defecating. In other words, it's a nice tall glass of bacteria doo-doo. Americans eat an average of 18 pounds of fresh apples each year. The most popular variety in the United States is the Red Delicious. Spam stands for Shoulder Pork and hAM. Ostriches are often not taken seriously. They can run faster than horses, and the males can roar like lions. Seals used for their fur get extremely sick when taken aboard ships. Sloths take two weeks to digest their food. Guinea pigs and rabbits can't sweat. The pet food company Ralston Purina recently introduced, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to help roosters build muscles for cockfighting, which is popular in many areas of the world. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cockfighting market is huge: The Philippines has five million roosters used for exactly that. Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that don't get cancer. Scientists believe this has something to do with the fact that they don't have bones, but cartilage.
The porpoise is second to man as the most intelligent animal on the planet. Young beavers stay with their parents for the first two years of their lives before going out on their own. Skunks can accurately spray their smelly fluid as far as ten feet. Deer can't eat hay. Gopher snakes in Arizona are not poisonous, but when frightened they may hiss and shake their tails like rattlesnakes. On average, dogs have better eyesight than humans, although not as colorful. The duckbill platypus can store as many as six hundred worms in the pouches of its cheeks. The lifespan of a squirrel is about nine years. North American oysters do not make pearls of any value. Human birth control pills work on gorillas. Many sharks lay eggs, but hammerheads give birth to live babies that look like very small duplicates of their parents. Young hammerheads are usually born headfirst, with the tip of their hammer-shaped head folded backward to make them more streamlined for birth. Gorillas sleep as much as fourteen hours per day. A biological reserve has been made for golden toads because they are so rare. There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos. Jellyfish like salt water. A rainy season often reduces the jellyfish population by putting more fresh water into normally salty waters where they live. The female lion does ninety percent of the hunting. The odds of seeing three albino deer at once are one in seventy-nine billion, yet one man in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, took a picture of three albino deer in the woods. A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.
Cats often rub up against people and furniture to lay their scent and mark their territory. They do it this way, as opposed to the way dogs do it, because they have scent glands in their faces. Cats sleep up to eighteen hours a day, but never quite as deep as humans. Instead, they fall asleep quickly and wake up intermittently to check to see if their environment is still safe. Catnip, or Nepeta cataria, is an herb with nepetalactone in it. Many think that when cats inhale nepetalactone, it affects hormones that arouse sexual feelings, or at least alter their brain functioning to make them feel "high." Catnip was originally made, using nepetalactone as a natural bug repellant, but roaming cats would rip up the plants before they could be put to their intended task. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans ages the equivalent of five human years for every day they live, so they usually die after about fourteen days. When stressed, though, the worm goes into a comatose state that can last for two or more months. The human equivalent would be to sleep for about two hundred years. You can tell the sex of a horse by its teeth. Most males have 40, females have 36. Medical researchers contend that no disease ever identified has been completely eradicated. The attachment of the human skin to muscles is what causes dimples. No one seems to know why people blush. In 1972, a group of scientists reported that you could cure the common cold by freezing the big toe. The number one cause of blindness in the United States is diabetes. The adult human heart weighs about ten ounces. People who laugh a lot are much healthier than those who don't. Dr. Lee Berk at the Loma Linda School of Public Health in California found that laughing lowers levels of stress hormones, and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds have it best - they laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day. People who have a tough time handling the stress of money woes are twice as likely to develop severe gum disease, a new study finds.
Between 25% to 33% of the population sneeze when they are exposed to light. Of the 206 bones in the average human adult's body, 106 are in the hands and feet. (54 in the hands and 52 in the feet) In 1815 French chemist Michael Eugene Chevreul realized the first link between diabetes and sugar metabolism when he discovered that the urine of a diabetic was identical to grape sugar. Approximately 16 Canadians have their appendices removed, when not required, every day. Sumerians (from 5000 BC) thought that the liver made blood and the heart was the center of thought. Men have more blood than women. Men have 1.5 gallons for men versus 0.875 gallons for women. The first Band-Aid Brand Adhesive Bandages were three inches wide and eighteen inches long. You made your own bandage by cutting off as much as you needed. The human brain stops growing at the age of 18. In 1977, a 13 year old child found a tooth growing out of his left foot. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 18 million courses of antibiotics are prescribed for the common cold in the United States per year. Research shows that colds are caused by viruses. 50 million unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed for viral respiratory infections. It takes an interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech. The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English garden. In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of dried leaves of the common plant, digitalis purpurea, on heart action. Still used in heart medications, digitalis slows the pulse and increases the force of heart contractions and the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat. Blood is red only in the arteries after it has left the heart and is full of oxygen. Blood is a purplish, blue color in the veins as it returns to the heart, thanks to having picked up carbon dioxide and other wastes from the body's cells. In fact, your blood is red throughout only half your body. When cut, of course, the blood always appears red because it is instantly exposed to oxygen outside the body.
Contrary to popular belief, hemophiliacs do NOT bleed to death from minor cuts. This rare disease, which affects only males (it is carried by females, but they don't exhibit symptoms), involves an impairment in blood clotting窶馬ot an absolute inability to clot. Hemophiliacs today may take clotting serums and often lead fairly normal lives. During his or her lifetime, the average human will grow 590 miles of hair. The average Human bladder can hold 13 ounces of liquid. You lose enough dead skin cells in your lifetime to fill eight five-pound flour bags. Your thumb is the same length as your nose. The storage capacity of human brain exceeds 4 Terrabytes. The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland was a symbolic character for the hat makers in towns of the late 1800's. The large felt hats of the day had supports made out of lead. The lead caused an organic form of psychosis (brain damage) to develop in the hat makers causing them to be declared crazy. Although your system cannot digest gum like other foods, it won't be stuck inside of you forever. It comes out with other waste your body can't use. The substance that human blood resembles most closely in terms of chemical composition is sea water. Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, was home to Rocky and Bullwinkle. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first film featuring the character Indiana Jones, was crawling with four-, eight-, and no-legged creatures: - Number of boas, cobras and pythons used in the film: 7,500 - Number of tarantulas: 50 - Source of the name "Indiana Jones": it was the name of producer George Lucas' pet Malamute. The first ever televised murder case appeared on TV in 1955, Dec. 5-9. The accused was Harry Washburn. Twentieth Century-Fox studio cut all scenes showing physical contact between America's curly-haired darling Shirley Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in
"The Little Colonel" in 1934 to avoid social offense and to assure wide U.S. distribution. Pre-release showings of the film, particularly in the southern U.S., shocked audiences when the two actors touched fingers during their famous staircase dance sequence. Beaver Cleaver graduated in 1953. On Beaver Cleaver's US tour, he visited Albuquerque on a Tuesday. Muppets creator Jim Henson first created Kermit in 1955 - as a lizard. He was made from Henson's mother's coat and two halves of a Ping-Pong ball (no flipper feet or eleven-point collar). The person who performs the Muppets - Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Animal, and Grover is Frank Oz. Oz is also the voice of Star Wars Yoda. By the way, his real name is Frank Oznowicz. The 1997 Jack Nicholson film - "As Good As It Gets", is known in China as "Mr. Cat Poop". Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp.) The writers of The Simpsons have never revealed what state Springfield is in. A theater manager in Seoul, Korea felt that The Sound of Music was too long, so he shortened it by cutting out all the songs. Bruce was the nickname of the mechanical shark used in the "Jaws" movies. The original title of the musical "Hello Dolly!" was "Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman." Why did they change it? The original had such music, poetry, and pizzazz. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants. A two hour motion picture uses 10,800 feet of film. Not including the previews and commercials. For many years, the globe on the NBC Nightly News spun in the wrong direction. On January 2, 1984, NBC finally set the world spinning back in the proper direction. In the Mario Brothers movie, the Princess' first name is Daisy, but in Mario 64, the game, her first name is Peach. Before that, it's Princess Toadstool.
"60 Minutes" is the only show on CBS that doesn’t have a theme song. Dooley Wilson appeared as Sam in the movie Casablanca. Dooley was a drummer - not a pianist in real life. The man who really played the piano in Casablanca was a Warner Brothers staff musician who was at a piano off camera during the filming. The TV sitcom Seinfeld was originally named "The Seinfeld Chronicles". The pilot which was broadcast in 1989 also featured a kooky neighbor named Kessler. This character later became known as Kramer. In the movie 'Now and Then', when the girls are talking to the hippie (Brenden Fraser), and they get up to leave, Teeny (Thora Birch) puts out her cigarette twice. In Hitchcock’s movie, "Rear Window", Jimmy Stewart plays a character wearing a leg cast from the waist down. In one scene, the cast switches legs, and in another, the signature on the cast is missing. In the movie "Two Jakes," which is set in the 1940's, Jack Nicholson walks right by a BankOne automatic teller machine. Didn't know there were too many of those around in the 1940's. In the movie "Bustin' Loose" where Richard Pryor and Cicely Tyson take a group of underprivileged kids to the west coast, the car in which Cicely Tyson's boyfriend is pursuing them changes interior color from red to white and then back to red several times. In the movie Ghost (Patrick and Demi) when Demi is making something on the pottery wheel her hands are covered in clay. But when her husband comes up behind her to give her a kiss she turns around and they are completely clean. In Forrest Gump, when Forrest goes to see Jenny toward the end, in one scene, in Jenny's apartment, the iron is up, later, the iron is faced down steaming. The first man to distill bourbon whiskey in the United States was a Baptist preacher, in 1789. The Aztec Indians of Mexico believed turquoise would protect them from physical harm, and so warriors used these green and blue stones to decorate their battle shields. More than 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered how to make silk from silkworm cocoons. For about 3,000 years, the Chinese kept this discovery a secret. Because poor people could not afford real silk, they tried to make other
cloth look silky. Women would beat on cotton with sticks to soften the fibers. Then they rubbed it against a big stone to make it shiny. The shiny cotton was called "chintz." Because chintz was a cheaper copy of silk, calling something "chintzy" means it is cheap and not of good quality. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt wore garments made with thin threads of beaten gold. Some fabrics had up to 500 gold threads per one inch of cloth. The ancient Egyptians recommended mixing half an onion with beer foam as a way of warding off death. The Chinese, in olden days, used marijuana only as a remedy for dysentery. "Scientific America" carried the first magazine automobile ad in 1898. The Winton Motor Car Company of Cleveland, OH, invited readers to "dispense with a horse". In France - Captain Sarret made the first parachute jump from an airplane in 1918. The first paperback book was printed - by Penguin Publishing in 1935. In 1956 the phrase, "In God We Trust", was adopted as the U.S. national motto. Henry Ford flatly stated that history is "bunk." The first Eskimo Bible was printed in Copenhagen in 1744. The last words spoken from the moon were from Eugene Cernan, Commander of the Apollo 17 Mission on 11 December 1972. "As we leave the Moon at TaurusLittrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." Virginia O'Hanlon Douglas was the eight-year-old girl who, in 1897, asked the staff of The New York Sun whether Santa Claus existed. In the now-famous editorial, Francis Church assured Virginia that yes, indeed, "there is a Santa Claus." The first dictionary of American English was published on April 14th, 1828, by who else? - Noah Webster. No automobile made after 1924 should be designated as antique. John Hancock was the only one of fifty signers of the Declaration of Independence who actually signed it on July 4.
The first United States coast to coast airplane flight occurred in 1911 and took 49 days. Escape maps, compasses, and files were inserted into Monopoly game boards and smuggled into POW camps inside Germany during W.W.II; real money for escapees was slipped into the packs of Monopoly money. Values on the Monopoly gameboard are the same today as they were in 1935. Incan soldiers invented the process of freeze-drying food. The process was primitive but effective — potatoes would be left outside to freeze overnight, then thawed and stomped on to remove excess water. The first wooden shoe comes from the Netherlands. The Netherlands have many seas so people wanted a shoe that kept their feet dry while working outside. The shoes were called klompen and they had been cut of one single piece of wood. Today the klompen are the favorite souvenir for people who visit the Netherlands. When airplanes were still a novel invention, seat belts for pilots were installed only after the consequence of their absence was observed to be fatal - several pilots fell to their deaths while flying upside down. Limelight was how we lit the stage before electricity was invented. Basically, illumination was produced by heating blocks of lime until they glowed. False eyelashes were invented by the American film director D.W. Griffith while he was making his 1916 epic, "Intolerance". Griffith wanted actress Seena Owen to have lashes that brushed her cheeks, to make her eyes shine larger than life. A wigmaker wove human hair through fine gauze, which was then gummed to Owen's eyelids. "Intolerance" was critically acclaimed but flopped financially, leaving Griffith with huge debts that he might have been able to settle easily had he only thought to patent the eyelashes. On November 29, 1941, the program for the annual Army-Navy football game carried a picture of the Battleship Arizona, captioned: "It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs." Today you can visit the site—now a shrine—where Japanese dive bombers sunk the Arizona at Pearl Harbor only nine days later. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time. During the California Gold Rush of 1849 miners sent their laundry to Honolulu for washing and pressing. Due to the extremely high costs in California during these
boom years it was deemed more feasible to send the shirts to Hawaii for servicing. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian men never became bald. The reason for this, Herodotus claimed, was that as children Egyptian males had their heads shaved, and their scalps were continually exposed to the healthgiving rays of the sun. In 1893, Chicago hired its first police woman. Her name was Marie Owens. While the city was progressive in its hiring practices, Chicago's female police officers were not allowed to wear uniforms until 1956. What is billed as the world's largest weather vane sits on the shores of White Lake in Montague, Michigan. It's 48 feet tall with a 26-foot wind arrow and adorned with a 14-foot replica of a 19th-century Great Lakes schooner. The world's largest coffee pot is located in Davidson, Saskatchewan. It measures 24 Feet(7.3 Meters) tall, is made of sheet metal and could hold 150,000 8 ounce cups of coffee. The Tokyo World Lanes Bowling Center is the largest bowling establishment in the world. It has 252 lanes and one very tired pinsetter. The World's Largest Catsup Bottle stands proudly next to Route 159, just south of downtown Collinsville, Illinois. This unique 170 ft. tall water tower was built in 1949 by W.E. Caldwell Company for the G.S. Suppiger catsup bottling plant. In 1995, due to the efforts of the Catsup Bottle Preservation Group, this piece of local history was saved from demolition and beautifully restored to its original appearance. The longest Monopoly game ever played was 1,680 hours long, that's 70 straight days! The longest Monopoly game in a bathtub was 99 hours long. The highest wind velocity ever recorded in the United States was 231 miles per hour, on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, in 1934. Howard Kinsey and Mrs. R. Roark, during a game of tennis, batted the ball back and forth 2001 consecutive times. The World's Largest yo-yo resides in the National Yo-Yo Museum in Chico, California. Named "Big Yo," the 256-pound yo-yo is an exact scale replica of a Tom Kuhn "No Jive 3 in 1 Yo-Yo." Fifty inches tall and 31.5 inches wide, the yo-
yo is made of California sugar pine, Baltic birch from the former USSR, and hardrock maple. It was first launched in San Francisco on October 13, 1979. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language—823 words without a period. The largest web-footed bird is the albatross. On July 31, 1994, Simon Sang Sung of Singapore turned a single piece of dough into 8,192 noodles in 59.29 seconds! At 12 years old, an African named Ernest Loftus made his first entry in his diary and continued everyday for 91 years. Toronto, Ontario was home to the biggest swimming pool in the world in 1925. It held 2000 swimmers, and was 300ft x 75ft. It is still in operation. In 1968, Steve McPeak traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles on a unicycle. The trip took him six weeks, but he planned for the long bike journey. He brought an extra tire and a spare heinie. The biggest bell is the "Tsar Kolokol" cast in the Kremlin in 1733. It weighs 216 tons, but alas, is cracked and has never been rung. The bell was being stored in a Moscow shed which caught fire. To "save" it, caretakers decided to throw water on the bell. This did not succeed, as the water hit the superheated metal and a giant piece immediately cracked off, destroying the bell forever. Shakespeare's most talkative character is Hamlet. None of his other characters have as many lines in a single play. (Falstaff, who appears in several plays, has more lines total). The largest school in the world is a k-12 school in the Philippines, with an enrollment of about 25,000. France had the first supermarket in the world. It was started by relatives of the people who started the Texas Big Bear supermarket chain. If you walked the entire length of the China's Great Wall, you would be walking farther than the distance between New York City and Miami, Florida. The wall stretches for over 1,500 miles. The driving distance between New York and Miami is just over 1,250 miles. Provided you don't get lost. In Muddy, Illinois, the post office measures only 7½ by 10½ feet, about the size of a garden shed. If it wasn't for a sign hanging above the door stating, "U.S.
Post Office, Muddy, IL., 62965," finding the tiny, wooden building could be difficult. It is believed to be one of the smallest post offices in the United States. Zaire is the world leader in cobalt mining, producing two-thirds of the world's cobalt supply. The world's tallest mountains, the Himalayas, are also the fastest growing. Their growth - about half an inch a year — is caused by the pressure exerted by two of the earth's continental plates (the Eurasian plate and the Indo-Australian plate) pushing against one another. The biggest hog ever recorded was a creature named Big Boy who weighed in at 1, 904 pounds. Belgian driver Jenatzy was the first to reach a speed of over 100km/h in his electrically powered car 'La Jamais Contente' in 1899. Never mind what you saw in the film "The Poseidon Adventure." The biggest wave on record, reported by a reliable source, was estimated to have attained a height of 112 feet. It was measured, at some distance, I hope, by a tanker traveling between Manila and San Diego in 1933. The wind was blowing at 70 mph at the time. On December 15, 1998, the Mayer Kaplan Jewish Community Center in Skokie, Illinois attempted to set the inaugural world's record for largest number of dreidels to be spun at one time. At least 200 people were needed to set the record. The shopping mall in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada has the largest water clock in North America. Linn's Stamp News is the world's largest weekly newspaper for stamp collectors. The Bible is the number one shoplifted book in America. Theaters in Glendale, California can show horror films only on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. You can't plow a cotton field with an elephant in North Carolina. In Lehigh, Nebraska it's against the law to sell donut holes. Under the law of Mississippi, there’s no such thing as a female Peeping Tom.
Anti-modem laws restrict Internet access in the country of Burma. Illegal possession of a modem can lead to a prison term. Lawn darts are illegal in Canada. In Idaho a citizen is forbidden by law to give another citizen a box of candy that weighs more than 50 pounds. Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath at least once a year. It is against the law to whale hunt in Oklahoma. (Think about it...) A Venetian law decrees that all gondolas must be painted black. The only exceptions are gondolas belonging to high public officials. In the state of Queensland, Australia, it is still constitutional law that all pubs (hotel/bar) must have a railing outside for patrons to tie up their horse. According to law, no store is allowed to sell a toothbrush on the Sabbath in Providence, Rhode Island. Yet these same stores are allowed to sell toothpaste and mouthwash on Sundays. Before the enactment of the 1978 law that made it mandatory for dog owners in New York City to clean up after their pets, approximately 40 million pounds of dog excrement were deposited on the streets every year. Chewing gum is outlawed in Singapore because it is a means of "tainting an environment free of dirt." The handkerchief had been used by the Romans, who ordinarily wore two handkerchiefs: one on the left wrist and one tucked in at the waist or around the neck. In the fifteenth century, the handkerchief was for a time allowed only to the nobility; special laws were made to enforce this. The classical heritage was rediscovered during the Renaissance. For hundreds of years, the Chinese zealously guarded the secret of sericulture; imperial law decreed death by torture to those who disclosed how to make silk. An old law in Bellingham, Washington, made it illegal for a woman to take more than 3 steps backwards while dancing. By law, information collected in a U.S. census must remain confidential for 72 years.
Candy made from pieces of barrel cactus was outlawed in the U.S. in 1952 to protect the species. A slander case in Thailand was once settled by a witness who said nothing at all. According to the memoirs of Justice Gerald Sparrow, a 20th century British barrister who served as a judge in Bangkok, the case involved two rival Chinese merchants. Pu Lin and Swee Ho. Pu Lin had stated sneeringly at a party that Swee Ho's new wife, Li Bua, was merely a decoration to show how rich her husband was. Swee Ho, he said, could no longer "please the ladies." Swee Ho sued for slander, claiming Li Bua was his wife in every sense - and he won his case, along with substantial damages, without a word of evidence being taken. Swee Ho's lawyer simply put the blushing bride in the witness box. She had decorative, gold-painted fingernails, to be sure, but she was also quite obviously pregnant. In Breton, Alabama, there is a law on the town's books against riding down the street in a motorboat. Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified the 18th Amendment: Prohibition. A few years back, a Chinese soap hit it big with consumers in Asia. It was claimed in ads that users would lose weight with Seaweed Defat Scented Soap simply by washing with it. The soap was sold in violation to the Japanese Pharmaceutical Affairs Law and was banned. Reportedly, the craze for the soap was so great that Japanese tourists from China and Hong Kong brought back large quantities. The product was also in violation of customs regulations. In June and July 1999 alone, over 10,000 bars were seized. In most American states, a wedding ring is exempt by law from inclusion among the assets in a bankruptcy estate. This means that a wedding ring cannot be seized by creditors, no matter how much the bankrupt person owes. In New York State, it is still illegal to shoot a rabbit from a moving trolley car. Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine are the four states in the U.S. that do not allow billboards. Wetaskiwin, Alberta from 1917: "It's against the law to tie a male horse next to a female horse on Main Street." Women were banned by royal decree from using hotel swimming pools in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, in 1979. In Riverside, California, there is an old law on the city's books which makes it illegal to kiss unless both people wipe their lips with rose water.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman reportedly may divorce her husband if he does not keep her supplied with coffee.