Time pass

It’s the first day of the year as I write this. Instead of the usual fluff, I thought I’d share this little list I found in my computer. It was a text file named ‘Useless information’. I have absolutely no idea who sent it to me or why I have it! But the information is so supremely worthless that I felt it was my duty to share it. With comments.

1. Money isn’t made out of paper, it’s made out of cotton (except when it’s made of plastic).

2. The dot over the letter “i” is called a “tittle” (I knew this years ago).

3. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top (only a lunatic would mix raisins with champagne).

4. 315 entries in Webster’s 1996 Dictionary were misspelled (only that edition?).

5. The ‘spot’ on 7UP comes from its inventor, who had red eyes. He was an albino (ummm).

6. On an average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents, daily (when do they find out?).

7. Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister (boring).

8. Orcas kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark’s stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode (I refuse to believe this).

9. Most lipstick contains fish scales (thank goodness I never use any).

10. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants (what a perv!).

11. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time (they can’t possibly know this!).

12. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos (no watches either?).

13. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan ; there was never a recorded Wendy before (amazing)!

14. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and silver (knew that)!

15. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it instantly go mad and sting itself to death (don’t want to know).

16. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can’t sink in quicksand (hope never to find out).

17. The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was the Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola (boring).

18. Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with (no wonder I never eat celery).

19. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying (not true! I tried this)!

20. The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries (must be Guinness Book staff doing the stealing).

21. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages it (what about when they’re back in the spacecraft?).

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column