Facts You Probably don’t Need

• E      So many people died by ringing church bells in storms, due to the belief that it would disperse thunder, that the practice was banned by the Parliament of Paris.

• Dr. Seuss wrote “The Cat in the Hat” to help combat illiteracy. 348 words were identified as being important to first graders, which he was asked to narrow down to 250. Nine months later, Seuss used 236 of them to complete “The Cat in the Hat.”

• Tilly Smith at age 10, helped save her family and hundreds of other tourists in Thailand from the 2004 tsunami by recognizing warning signs of a tsunami that she had learned in her geography class two weeks earlier.

• Capsaicin, the spicy compound in hot peppers, does NOT kill tastebuds or harm your stomach. In fact, it was found to be beneficial to your digestive system, even helping it prevent and heal stomach ulcers.

• One of the SNL Jeopardy sketches was created by Norm Macdonald purely so that he could show off his Burt Reynolds impression.

• Electricity was introduced to Ethiopia in 1896 after Emperor Menelik II ordered two newly invented electric chairs as a form of humane capital punishment and realized they were useless in his country without electricity.

Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.