Michael’s Blog

5 Different sites linked to me for my last post within 3 hours… So I’m doing another one!

Aussie Facts

• Australia was once called New Holland.
• In Australia light bulbs are called globes.
• Ayers Rock means meeting place in the Aboriginal language.
• Lonely Planet is based in Melbourne Australia.
• Australians have about 380,000 sq m of land/per person. Yet 91% live in urban areas.
• Australia has more than 1500 species of spiders.
• Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth.
• 95 percent of the world’s opals are mined in Australia.
• Australia has the biggest number of wild one humped camels in the world.
• The biggest pure-gold nugget was found in Australia in 1869 and weighed 156 pounds.
• Australia use to have stamps that actually look like gems.
• The first time South Africa beat Australia in a cricket game was in Adelaide in 1910-1911.
• The only continent occupied by only one nation is Australia.
• Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth.
• Australia has more than 1500 species of spiders.
• There are 6000 species of flies in Australia.
• The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest organic construction on earth.
• A billabong is a stagnant body of backwater attached to a river or a stream.
• QANTAS stands for Queensland and Northern Territories Airline Service.
• Australia is the world’s driest continent.
• In Australia a banana bender means that a person comes from Queensland.
• It was an Australian meteorologist who first began to give tropical storms women’s names at the end of the 19th century.
• Melbourne in Australia has, after Athens, the largest Greek population in the world?.
• Bob Hawke’s name was listed in the Guinness Book of world Record  in the year 1954, for having 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds time. Later Bob Hawke  was also the Prime minister  of Australia.
• Each and every part of Australia is within a distance of 1000km from ocean or a beach.
• 30,028 square km of land is under cattle ranch. This area size is almost the same as that of the whole Belgium.
• Apparently the first European settlers in Australia drank more alcohol per person than any other community in the history of mankind.
• Australian mines (one of our most important industries, which accounts for 15% of Australia’s GDP) cover 0.02% of Australia’s land mass. More land is occupied by pubs. (Can’t find any statistics on the GDP here. My guess is: substantial)
• If you read about our spiders you might not like this: the average person swallows three spiders a year.
• We have over 6000 species of flies, about 4000 species of ants, and there are about 350 species of termites in Australia.
• The combined mass of all termites in the world is more than ten times the mass of all people.
• Termites are also called white ants, but they’re not ants, in fact not even closely related to ants.
• Australia has the world’s largest population of wild camels with one hump.
• The Tasmanian Devil does exist, and it has the jaw strength of a crocodile.
• Sharks are immune to all known diseases.
• There are more than 150 million sheep in Australia, and only some 20 million people.
• Tasmania has the cleanest air in the world.
• The Australian Alps, or Snowy Mountains as they are also known, receive more snow than Switzerland.
• Imagine the fully welded rails of the Ghan train track weren’t restrained properly: on a hot Outback desert day they would expand at 200km/hour and at the Darwin end they’d stick out 1.1 km into the ocean.
• Star gazing: under ideal viewing conditions, like in the Australian Outback, the naked eye can detect about 5,780 stars.
• The Sydney Opera House roof weighs more than 161,000 tons.
• The Great Barrier Reef is the largest organic construction on earth.
• Termite mounds are the tallest non-human constructions on earth.
• Yulara, the Aboriginal name of the Ayers Rock Resort, means “crying”, “weeping”. Nasty tongues say because that’s what visitors do when they see their bill…
• For each person in Australia there are two sheep and over 16 rabbits.
• Per Capita, Australians spend more money on gambling than any other nation. considering that we have less than 1 percent of the world’s population, we also have more than 20% of the world’s poker machines.
• It may surprise you to know that Australia’s first police force was comprised of 12 of the most well behaved Convicts.
• The Australian Lyre Bird is the world’s best imitator; able to mimic the calls of 15 different species of birds in their locality and string the calls into a melody. It has also been known to mimic the sound of mobile phones.
• A baby kangaroo at the time of its birth measures 2 centimetres. Yeh they are cute..
• Australia is home to the world’s only 2 monotremes, the platypus and the echidna. A monotreme is a animal that both lays eggs and suckles its young.
• Thousands of Australians during a national census have been known in the past to put down their religion as being ‘Jedi’
• Now it seems the first ‘Jedi Church’ is in the makings thanks to brothers Barney and Daniel Jones of Anglesey, Wales
• They claim to have up to 400,000 members worldwide, with 80 of those physically in Anglesey, and base their religion on the teachings of Yoda to promote inner peace.
• Taking their religion seriously, they have also offered to start up lightsabre fighting classes when construction in completed.

Random facts

• Life is sexually transmitted.
• The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
• Never take life seriously Nobody gets out alive anyway.
• There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.
• Life is sexually transmitted.
• An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
• Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
• The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
• Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks.
• Some people are like Slinkies . . . not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.
• Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
• Have you noticed since everyone has a cam recorder these days no one talks
  about seeing UFOs like they used to?
• Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
• All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
• Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?
• In the 60’s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
• Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
• How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
• The tongue of a mature Blue Whale has approximately the same mass as that of an entire adult elephant.
• You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown and you use an average of 17 muscles for a smile, and they say every two thousand frowns creates one wrinkle.
• You will have to walk 80 kilometers for your legs to equal the amount of exercise your eyes get daily.
• Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the extreme fear of Friday the 13th.
• Thomas Edison got patents for a method of making concrete furniture and a cigar which was supposed to burn forever.
• Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain.
• The water pressure inside every onion cell would be sufficient to explode a steam engine.
• If you take any number, double it, add 10, divide by 2, and subtract your original number, the answer will always be 5.
• Over a 12 day period your body generates a whole new set of taste buds. (This process continues until you are in your 70’s.)
• Turtles can breath through their bottoms.
• The average single man is one inch shorter than the average married man.
• Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
• A house fly hums in the middle octave key of F.
• Adolf Hitler’s mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
• The sound you hear when macho people crack their knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.
• The only food cockroaches won’t eat are cucumbers.
• The words silent and listen have the same letters. Santa and Satan do too.
• Captain Kirk never actually said “Beam me up, Scotty,” but he did say, “Beam me up, Mr. Scott”

Really Wierd Facts

• In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, “They’ll put a man on
  the moon before I hit a home run.” On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run.
• The term, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, “No eye gouging,” eveything else was allowed.
• The Sanskrit word for ‘war’ means - “desire for more cows”.
• Pain travels faster than 3000 feet per second.
• The dot that appears over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
• You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.
• Sugar was first added to chewing gum in 1869 by a dentist (William Semple)
• 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts.
• Clans many many years ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them, burnt their houses down - hence the expression “to get fired”.
• Charlie Chaplin once entered a competition and came away the winner of 3rd prize. But what was the competition? A Charlie Chaplin Look-a-like Contest!
• A tourist in some cave tourest attraction asked “Can I take my helmet off, I keep bumping my head?”
• In Zion, Illinois there is a law that prohibits owners from giving a lit cigar to any of their domesticated animals.
• 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused.
• More than 20% of the votes in the 2001 elections in Argentina were invalid.
• 0.7% of Americans are currently in prison.