Toto got paid more than Judy Garland for their roles in Wizard Of Oz.

The Yo-Yo was originally a weapon used in the Philippines around 1500. A toy similar to the modern-day yo-yo, made of ivory with expensive silk strings, had been used in China as far back as 1000 B.C.

As a Philippine weapon, it was an approximately 4-pound rock attached to a cord about twenty feet long. Tribesmen used it two ways: One, similar to the way a bolo is used, thrown to entangle the legs of game for hunting, and two, to be able to lurk in trees to drop the stone on enemies' heads, then be able to retract it quickly.

In 1945, in an attempt to find a cheap, durable substitute for rubber, scientists at a General Electric plant in New Haven, Connecticut, mixed boric acid with silicone oil, and accidentally created a completely different by-product.

The substance they created proved to be too soft to be used as a rubber substitute, but it bounced like a son-of-a-gun, could be stretched and pulled like taffy, shattered when hit with a hammer, and was able to lift photographs and illustrations from newspaper pages. No one thought it had any commercial potential, so the scientists took samples of it home for their kids to play with.

Later, these same scientists were goofing around with their invention at a c0cktail party when they were noticed by a businessman named Peter Hodgson, who was about to launch a mail-order catalog. He asked GE executives if he could advertise the stuff, and they gave him their blessing. It outsold everything in the catalog except crayons.

Hodgson bought gobs of the stuff from General Electric, called it Silly Putty, packaged it in a plastic egg that kept it from drying out, and enabled kids to stuff it into their pocket and carry it anywhere. It sold 32 million eggs in five years.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all the keyboard rows concentrating them on the left side.

The reason behind these seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so the manufacturers had to slow down typists.

When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed while reducing our typing effort by 95%.

However, QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for 70 plus years.

Now that was interesting!

In 1859, a nation cheered when oil was found in Pennsylvania. However, a 22-year-old Brooklyn chemist named Robert Augustus Chesbrough, who had recently become an expert at extracting kerosene from cannel oil, wept. He now knew petroleum products would be the fuel source of the future.

When Chesebrough went to Pennsylvania to see what he could make using petroleum, he noticed a colorless film the workers called "rod wax" collecting around the pump rods, gumming up the works until it was removed. He also learned that when oil workers cut or burned themselves, they'd slap some of this "rod wax" on the wound instead of a bandage. Not only did it stay on the skin and stop the bleeding, but it seemed to have curative powers.

He took a supply of this stuff back to his Brooklyn laboratory, and spent months creating a perfectly clean form of it, which he called "petroleum jelly". He would cut and/or burn himself to test its healing effects. It worked, and he made more. Because every jar and beaker in his lab was full of the stuff, he threw out flowers his wife kept in vases and filled them with the glop.

Adding the word "vase" to the popular medical term "line", he dubbed the product Vaseline.

In the Middle Ages, dishes, cups, and jugs were made of a thick orange clay known as "pygg". Coins were stored in pygg jars, and long after pygg was no longer used, the name stuck. Finally, somebody in 18th century England simply decided to make a coin-storing jar that looked like a pig!

Texas is the only U.S. state that is allowed to fly its state flag at the same height as the U.S. flag.

Venetian blinds were invented in Japan, not Italy.

The Nike swoosh was invented by Caroline Davidson in 1971. She received $35 for her efforts.

The first toilet tank seen on U.S. television was on Leave It To Beaver.

To "eat like a bird" is a misnomer. Most birds eat twice their weight in a day.

Between the ages of 20 and 70, the typical person spends about 600 hours having sex.

(I'm having a little trouble with this one)

There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.

(Not around MY house, there ain't!)

No, the math doesn't add up for me either. At just one hour a week, that'd be 2,600 hours.

what, what WHAT?

Someone told me that just yesterday.

Judy Garland's real given name was Frances Gumm.

Yes. She bemoaned this fact many times afterwards, whether seriously or in jest. The female black cairn terrier, Terry (real name), was paid $125.00 salary a week, much more than many of the human actors. The midgets who played the Munchkins only made $50.00 a week.

A good way for a man to determine if he will go bald or not (naturally, not deliberately) is to look at his mother's father.