Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Out of This World Facts!


Few would argue with the contention that the world is a big, interesting place. Humans have finally conquered every corner of this globe we like to call Earth, and consequently we have spread our knowledge everywhere. No single resident of the world can be expected to keep track of every single fact—that’s our job!



  • No one alive can translate the Tibetan language of Nepal into English.

  • ONE ON THE CUFF, PLEASE! MAKE IT A DOUBLE! Barcelona's name comes from the Spanish (Castillian) for "drink on loan." If you should ever find yourself there, have a drink on the house!

  • ON A RELATED NOTE: The city of Barcelona was the birthplace of that most American of inventions, the Barcolounger.

  • After China, Africa is the second largest country in the world, per capita.

  • In France, the "lunch hour" is actually an hour and a half.

  • Monaco is the largest country that has never appeared on a map. Luxembourg is the smallest country to always appear on a map.

  • Nestled in the heart of the French Riviera countryside is the world's smallest country, Algiers. Its inhabitants are an indigenous yet violent German-speaking people known as the "Basques."

  • NIPPON, NOT NISSAN: The Japanese alphabet has no equivalent for the letter S.

  • Anthropologists from ‘round the globe flock to study the famed Aboriginees. Hailing from the South Pacific atoll of Aborigin, these “modern stone-age families” are the last cannibals living on Earth besides the Donner party.

  • Sri Lanka is technically the only island country entirely surrounded by water.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Is this post a game where one is supposed to identify which are "very little known facts" and which are "more widely known falsehoods"? Or is it entirely tongue-in-cheek? Is that true for the entire site? Sadly, I didn't get it. Africa a country? Drink on loan? Isle of Aborigin? Basically every alternate one seems to be a hoax, until we get to Sri Lanka which may or may not be true depending on the definition of "technically".

Unknown said...

Actually I take that back, we can't generalize that every alternate one is false. More like most of them near the end are false, while I suspect France's lunch-hour-and-half and Monaco/Luxembourg are both adjacent but true.