10 things I didn't know until last week

1. According to the US CIA World Factbook, the metric system is the official system of measurement for all nations except for Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States. However, many countries have laws permitting or mandating the use of other systems of measurement in some or all contexts.
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2. Nintendo in Japanese means “Leave luck to heaven.”
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3. The price of every DVD produced includes a small royalty payment to the company that developed the format - Philips.
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4. US patent No. 5,255,452 covering a “system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes” was granted in 1993 to Michael L. Bush, Dennis Tompkins and the king of pop - Michael J. Jackson.
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5. Scooby-Doo was named after a scat-style phrase at the end of Frank Sinatra’s song ‘Strangers in the Night’, which contained the phrase “dooby-doo”.
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6. Schizophrenics rarely have epilepsy and epilectics rarely suffer from schizophrenia.
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7. Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives - a “corollary” to Murphy’s Law - states “anything that can go wrong, will, at the worst possible moment.”
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8. Greenland is the only ‘state’ to secede from the European Union (known then, in 1985, as the European Community.)
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9. The runway at Gibraltar’s airport actually intersects a public road. (If you don’t believe it, see pics by clicking the link below :)
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10. The Beatles actually negotiated with JRR Tolkien for the rights to star in a film version of the Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien nixed it - apparently because he didn’t like the idea of the Beatles doing it.
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