• Three out of five Frenchmen believe the sun revolves around the earth.
• John Kerry's favorite food is croutons.
• For every student that graduates from Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College, three drop out before completing their training and two are failed by their instructors.
• Polarized sunglasses counteract the effects of one-way mirrors.
• Microsoft Word crashes cause 49 million hours of lost productivity ever year.
• There are approximately 800 people killed per year in pedestrian-on-pedestrian accidents in the US.
• Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building is struck by lightning nearly twice as often.
• The first draft of the Declaration of Independence read "life, liberty, and happiness" until John Adams successfully argued that happiness is not a right and cannot be guaranteed, so they compromised with the "pursuit of happiness".
• Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of some of the world's tallest skyscrapers, was afraid of heights.
• Comparing injuries per mile, travel by horseback is over 70 times more dangerous than by car.
• 91 percent of rocket mission failures occur within five minutes of takeoff or landing.
• A recent study by Proctor & Gamble found that 62 percent of people use more shampoo than necessary to clean their hair. 18 percent use twice what they actually need.
• Eight out of nine Americans have made at least one purchase at a Wal*Mart retail store.
• For nearly a decade, acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick greeted people with the question "how you doodle doing?" Friends would often respond "yankee doodle dandy."
• On average, tomatoes picked in the dark will stay ripe for two days longer than those picked during daylight hours.
pursuit of happiness
