A Shotgun Blast of Trivia

– London, England, is farther north than Amatignak Island, Alaska

King Narmer, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 32nd century BC, is generally thought to be the oldest known historical figure. There are certainly mythological people (like Adam & Eve) who are older than Narmer, and there are fossils of early humanoids (like “Lucy”) who predate him by thousands of years… but Narmer is the first person we can actually date and know a bit about his story.

– If you took a piece of string and wrapped it around a basketball, then took another piece of string and “wrapped” it so that it hovered 1 inch above the first string, the second string would be 6.28″ longer than the first string. If then you took a string and wrapped it around the earth, then took a second string and “hovered it” an inch above the first string… it would also be 6.28″ longer than the first string.

– The largest countries, in terms of geographic size, are (in order): Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, Australia, India and Argentina. The next country on the list? Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is also the world’s largest landlocked country, and is larger than Western Europe.

– The Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints wore black helmets for the 1969 pre-season. The only problem was that the Saints’ front office hadn’t run the new helmets by the NFL to see if they approved. The league objected to being left out of the loop, and thus put tremendous pressure on the team to change back to their original gold ones. When team ownership found that fans hated them, they quickly went back to the gold helmets we’re familiar with today.

1969 Saints helmet

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