Snippets & Facts *** You Know You're Getting Old When … your arms are getting too short to read the paper "getting any?" means sleep you can cough, sneeze, fart and pee at the same time it takes longer to rest than it did to get tired getting lucky means you found your car in the parking lot you hear your favorite song in an elevator the birthday candles cost more than the cake you’ve been there and done that, but don’t remember what “it” was you eat supper at 5 p.m. and are in bed by 8 p.m. you hear snap, crackle and pop at the breakfast table, but you're not eating cereal it takes two tries to get up from the couch everything either hurts or doesn't work *** A promise is a debt. A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package. No talent, no character, and no brains are required in the grumbling business.  Someday I will learn to stop procrastinating, but today is not that day. Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ. It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful. Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease. Experience is the father of wisdom. The crown of a good disposition is humility. Asking costs little.   The wise man has long ears, big eyes and a short tongue.   Conscience gets a lot of credit that belongs to cold feet. Do not choose for anyone what you do not choose for yourself. What can the enemy do when the friend is cordial? Joy and sorrow are next door neighbors. Fool me once, shame on you;  fool me twice, shame on me. The pebble in the brook secretly thinks itself a precious stone. Good example is half a sermon. A man with a sour face should not open a shop. What is bitter to endure may be sweet to remember. For every evil under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none.  If there be one, try and find it; if there be none,    never mind it.   A narrow mind has a broad tongue. An idle brain is the devil's workshop. We have two ears and one mouth that we may listen the more and talk the less. If you wish another to keep your secret, first keep it yourself. A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds. Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp's nest. A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough. To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. * Some little known facts The Vatican City is the country that drinks the most wine per capita at 74 liters per citizen per year. Approximately 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year. If a female ferret does not have sex for a year, she will die. Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as medicine. “Almost” is the longest word in English with all the letters in alphabetical order. A family of people with blue skin lived in Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates of Troublesome Creek are thought to have gained their blue skin through combination of inbreeding and a rare genetic condition known as methemoglobinemia. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. No piece of square paper can be folded more than 7 times in half. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody can figure out why. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots. The maggots can jump up to five inches out of cheese while you're eating it, so it's a good idea to shield it with your hand to stop them jumping into your eyes. At any one time about 0.7% of the world’s population is drunk. Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue * Weird & Wonderful Facts The Olympic flag's colors are always red, black, blue, green, and yellow rings on a field of white. This is because at least one of those colors appears on the flag of every nation on the planet. At any given time, there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress over the earth's atmosphere. Dueling is legal is Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors. In 18th century England, gambling dens employed someone whose job was to swallow the dice if there was a police raid. There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball In Calama, a town in the Atacama Desert of Chile, it has never rained. In space, astronauts cannot cry because there is no gravity and tears can't flow. Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors. Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to operate a television for three hours. Antarctica is the only continent without reptiles or snakes. The cruise liner Queen Elizabeth 2 moves only six inches for each gallon of fuel it burns. Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously. According to Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg. * 21 Odd Facts About the Body 1.    Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different. 2.    Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day. 3.    It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest. 4.    A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h. 5.    Women blink nearly twice as often as men. 6.    Most of the dust particles in your house are dead skin. 7.    There is a company in the USA that will (for $14,000) take your ashes and compress them into a synthetic diamond to be set in jewelry for a loved one. 8.    There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth. 9.    The longest bout of hiccups lasted nearly 69 years. 10.  Babies are born without kneecaps. They appear between the ages of 2 and 6. 11.  Men can read smaller print than women. Women can hear better. 12.  Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. 13.  If you sneeze too hard you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. If you keep your eyes open by force they can pop out. 14.  A kiss stimulates 29 muscles and chemicals that cause relaxation. Women seem to like light and frequent kisses while men like them more strenuous. 15.  Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie. 16.  Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. 17.  The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. 18.  Almost everyone who reads this will try to lick their elbow. 19.  According to Chinese acupuncture, there is a point on the head that you can press to control your appetite. It is located in the hollow just in front of the flap of the ear. 20.  In a recent survey, Americans revealed that banana was their favorite smell. * Some interesting Facts about the United Kingdom For the British, the position of monarch probably ranks as one of history’s least safe occupations. English kings have been killed in battle (Harold), beheaded (Charles I), assassinated (William II), murdered by a wicked uncle (Edward V), and knocked off by the queen and her lover (Edward II). London is one of only two cities above the 50th parallel with a population of more than five million. Moscow is the other. The first fish and chips restaurant was opened in 1860 in London by a Jewish immigrant named Joseph Malin. It is illegal to import haggis from the UK into the U.S., as the American government has declared that sheep lungs are unfit for human consumption. The Ghost Research Foundation has determined that with 500 recorded cases of ghostly encounters, York is the most haunted city in England and one of the most haunted in the world. More languages (300) are spoken in London than in any other country in the world. A new breed of mosquito was found in the Tube tunnels in 1998. Scientists believed it mutated from the bird-biting form that colonized the London Underground when it was built in last century and, as it would not mate with its aboveground cousin, it has evolved into a separate species. In medieval times, Magpie Lane was Oxford, England’s red light district, where the “nymphs of the pavement” would tout for business. The street was previously called Gropecunt Lane. The sport of football, or soccer, supposedly got its start in England when Anglo-Saxon farmworkers plowing a field unearthed the skull of a Danish warrior killed in battle a few years earlier. To show their still bitter feelings towards the Danes and to amuse themselves, they began kicking the skull among them. This early form of football was called “kicking the Dane’s head. Golf is Scotland’s national game. It was invented on the grounds of St. Andrews, and the earliest record of the game dates from 1457, when James II banned it because it interrupted his subjects’ archery practice. Mary, Queen of Scots, enjoyed golf and was berated in 1568 for playing so soon after the murder of her husband Lord Darnley. * Did you know  Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different. A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h. The longest bout of hiccups lasted nearly 69 years. Babies are born without kneecaps. They appear between the ages of 2 and 6. Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. * Historical Facts Louis XIV of France really was as unpleasant a fellow as he's been depicted. In 1674, when he was visiting a school at Clermont, he heard from the school's authorities that one of the children, a nine- year-old Irish lad named Francis Seldon, had made a pun about the king's bald head.  Louis was furious. He had a secret warrant drawn up for the child's arrest, and young Seldon was thrown into solitary confinement in the Bastille. His parents, members of one of Europe's richest merchant families, were told simply that the child had disappeared. Days turned to months, months to years, and Louis himself passed away. But Francis spent sixty-nine years "in the hole" for making fun of the king's baldness. In the 16th and 17th centuries in the country of Turkey, anyone caught drinking coffee was put to death. Abraham Lincoln's dog, Fido, was also assassinated. About 3,000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30. The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. The youngest pope was 11 years old. Richard Versalle, a tenor performing at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, suffered a heart attack and fell 10 feet from a ladder to the stage just after singing the line, "You can only live so long." David Bowie used to think he was being stalked by someone who is dressed like a giant pink rabbit. Bowie noticed the fan at several recent concerts, but became alarmed when he got on a plane and the bunny was also on board. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and whose shame created the expression for ignominy: "His name is Mudd." In Ancient Egypt , priests plucked every hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes. More than 8,100 US troops are still listed as missing in action from the Korean War. In the great fire of 1666, half of London was burnt down but only six people were injured. The electric chair was invented by a dentist. In Egypt around 1500 B.C., a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths. George Lumley, aged 104, married Mary Dunning, aged 10, in Nortallerton, England on August 25, 1783. She was the great-great granddaughter of the woman who'd broken her engagement to Lumley, eighty years before. In Elizabethan England, the spoon was so novel and prized that people carried their own folding spoons to banquets. Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone. Millie the White House dog earned more than four times as President Bush in 1991. A law passed in Nebraska in 1912 set hard rules of the road. Drivers in the country at night were required to stop every 150 yards, send up a skyrocket, then wait eight minutes for the road to clear before proceeding cautiously, all the while blowing their horn and shooting off flares. Courtesy of Fact Retriever LLC