Friends sometime share the craziest things with me. This week is an example of that. We have some interesting facts or should we say some of them are useless facts. You be the judge. You never know when you might need some of this stuff.
To begin, here is a way to burn some calories or maybe not. The statement is: Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour. Now first of all, 150 calories isn’t very many when you’re trying to burn up maybe 1,000 a day. If you did this, you would have to bang your head for six or seven hours. I can’t imagine doing it for six seconds. Who could or would bang their head against a wall for an hour? I’m throwing this out as possibly a useless piece of information, but do with it as you please!
Next we have this fact – the flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field. No wonder fleas causes so much trouble with our pets. Some of my family members have little poodles and they suffered all last summer and even into November with fleas, even though they were being treated for them. Fleas are examples of something we can never really get rid of. Fleas, cockroaches and those ugly crickets are all really icky. That’s a scientific term, isn’t it?
How about this one: The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. What could be so tasty at the bottom of the pond? Don’t they just eat green stuff growing there, like algae? Maybe those taste buds help them be discriminating on good algae and bad algae. A better question is, who does this kind of study?
Can you believe this one – some lions mate over 50 times a day. Maybe the least said about this fact, the better. They must have a season for this so it doesn’t happen all year. Well I hope not, anyway.
Here’s one – butterflies taste with their feet. Sometimes their feet might be on the ground, but maybe mostly their feet are just going from plant to plant. So they’re probably not getting dirty. But how does this really work anyway? I suppose they have some sort of nerve center, not really a brain, and tastes are sent from their feet to that center. Oh that’s really a strange arrangement. But they may not have as many taste buds as those catfish. I doubt they could get 27,000 on those tiny little feet.
Now we have one I know something about – the strongest muscle in the body is the tongue. I have encountered many tongues along the way while I was working as a dental hygienist for more than 25 years. Some people can control the tongue when you’re in their mouth and others just want to follow you around as you’re doing your job. That tongue is strong when you try to move it out of the way, and it goes right back where it was on some people. Also another way to look at this fact is that the tongue can be strong and produce words that will hurt others. Be careful with that muscle. Some things you can’t ever take back.
I am one of these people – right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people. I recently had an experience which injured my right hand and for seven weeks now I have been using mostly my left hand to get through life. It has been a tough experience but I’m glad to know that as I try to return to right-handedness, things may be in my favor. (If you’re ambidextrous, do you split the difference?)
This fact is probably something we could have all ready figured out for ourselves – elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. Imagine a several thousand pound animal like that going up and down on the ground. Think of the how the Earth would move and how that big animal would ever get off the ground. Yes I can see how this can be true.
Then there’s this one: A cat’s urine glows under a black light. We had cats for many years when I was growing up and believe me we never checked this out. (I wonder how much the government paid to discover this!)
The next two I have lumped together because they have commonness about them – An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain and starfish have no brains. I believe I may have encountered people who would fall into both of these categories. Enough said.
And finally we have this one – the male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off. My gosh, I don’t know where to go with this. I may have heard this before but I can’t even begin to visualize it. That can’t be any fun for either one of them.
(Melanie Behrens – melb@maryvillejt.com)