Uninteresting trivial facts, add yours

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Germany gained a very tiny piece of Belgium after WWII (about an acre or less).

The City of London, UK has only about 8,000 residents.

Antarctica is a desert. The average yearly total precipitation is about two inches.

The first stealth airplane, the F117a built by Lockheed, was based on a scientific study published by a Russian researcher.

In 1968, a lightning storm in Lapleau, France, killed all of the black sheep in a flock and left the white sheep unharmed.

Goethe was the one who brought the asian gingko biloba-tree from Italy to Germany (Weimar).

The first blasting caps were made of cork and filled with black powder and were pretty big, bigger than an average stick of dynamite is today.

The first battle of the American Civil War was fought at Philippi, (West) Virginia, on June 3, 1861.

The expression "Chinaman's chance" is not a racial epithet. During the building of the railroads in the US, the Chinese laborers were the ones who most often volunteered to place the dynamite and light the fuses. This very dangerous job also paid more.

Gandy Dancers was the slang term for work crews on American Railroads who tightened the rails together, replaced rottens ties, and tidied up the rail-bed. No one is sure where the name originated from. (My grandfather actually did this for the Penn. Railroad.)

The Wright Brothers never became a major manufacturer of airplanes because they spent so much of their time and money in court battles over patents.

For 4 or 5 days after she disappeared, radio operators in the Pacific claimed to hear distress calls from Amelia Earhart. Some were later discounted as ghoulish hoaxes, but some seemed genuine. If so, this meant she made it to dry land. The type of plane she was flying had to sitting on dry land to run the engine to power the radio.

The Swedish verb "veta"="know" is the same ethymologically as the hindu verb "veda"="know".

"Habadedeima" is ancient Gothic for "had".

Musashi Miyamoto wrote "The book of the five rings". He's the most famous samurai.

Michael Nesmith once parodied one of his own songs, "Joanne", with a short piece called "Rodan". During this performance, he wore the lower half of a Godzilla costume and stomped on a prop village while playing the song.

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