Today is Trivia Day! One of my favorite pastimes, trivia! Here are some wonderful little bits I have read through the years (most from Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts).
- Tissue paper gets its name from its original use: it was designed for placing between the folds of extremely fine gold-woven fabric, or “gold tissue.”
- Martha Washington’s silver service was the source of the silver that went into the first U.S. coins.
- The Egyptians trained baboons to wait on tables.
- The Europeans once called the giraffe a camelopard, because they thought it was the product of a camel breeding with a leopard.
- Henri Matisse’s Le Bateau hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 47 days in 1961 before someone noticed it was upside down. About 116,000 people has passed in front of it before it was noticed.
- All of Reykjavik the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs.
- New York City’s administrative code still requires that hitching posts be located in front of city hall so that reporters can tie their horses.
- Chocolate was once considered a temptation of the devil. In Central American mountain villages, no one under the age of 60 was allowed to drink it, and if churchgoers broke this rule, they could be ex-communicated.
- The only thing that Isaac Newton said when he was a member of Parliament was to ask someone to open the window.
- The average married woman in seventeenth-century America gave birth to 13 children. (PTL I am neither married, nor live in seventeenth century America.)
Happy Trivia Day!
Reading, Writing & Other Addictions 
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