Contrary to what you learned in school, there are eight planets.

Because its axial tilt is more or less perpendicular to the other planets, each pole of Uranus gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.

Saturn’s moon Titan is larger than the planet Mercury .

Venus rotates “backwards” compared to other planets.

Venus’s day is longer than its year. It takes 243 Earth days to rotate once, and 225 days to circle the sun.

It takes 30,000 years for the sunlight you see to today to make its way from the sun’s core.

Saturn’s density is so low that it would float on water.

Jupiter has 318 times the mass of the Earth, but spins so fast its “day” is only ten hours long.

Left-handed men are 15% richer than right-handed men for those who attended college, and 26% richer if they graduated.

4 of the 5 original designers of the Macintosh computer were left-handed

1 in 4 Apollo astronauts were left-handed – 250% more than the normal level.

According to Scientific American, 15% of people are left-handed.

Men are twice as likely as women to be left-handed.

20% of all MENSA members report being left-handed.

50% of left-handed people report using a computer mouse with their left hands.

68% of left-handed people use their right hand for scissors, and 74% for their dinner knife.

In heraldry, the side of a coat of arms that is to the left of the bearer is called the sinister (opposed to the dexter).

A year is not actually 365 days long. It’s 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds.

The British Parliament had to eliminate 11 days to realign the Julian with the previously used Gregorian calendar.

There are still over forty different calendars in use around the world today.

The ball that is dropped in New York on New Year’s Eve weighs over 1,000 pounds, uses over 9,000 LED’s and is made from Waterford Crystal.

The record for the largest firework display consisted of 66,326 fireworks and was achieved by Macedo’S Pirotecnia Lda. in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, on December 31, 2006.

In the United States alone, over 18 million gallons of alcohol is consumed on New Year’s Eve.

Over 35 million “real” Christmas trees are cut down and sold in the U.S. every year.

The average American household mails out 28 Christmas cards each year.

During the holiday season, more than 1.76 billion candy canes will be produced.

If piled on a football field, the 2.65 billion Christmas cards sold each year in the U.S. would reach ten stories in height.

In the original Anglo-Saxon, “mistletoe” literally meant “dung twig”.

The annual mean temperature at the South Pole is -58°F, at the North Pole, a balmy 0°F.

If Antarctica’s ice sheets melted, the world’s oceans would rise by over 200 feet.

Antarctica contains 90% of all the ice on the planet and between 60 and 70% of all of the world’s fresh water.

The antarctic gave birth to one of the largest icebergs on record. With roughly 183 by 23 miles of it above water, it was comparable in size to Connecticut.

That’s about 127 pennies per SECOND.
That’s enough to give every adult on Earth a penny.
If stacked on top of each other, they’d be 3,948 miles high.
3,948 miles is 17 times higher than the space shuttle’s average orbit.

The really dumb thing about pennies? Well, aside from the fact that they cost 1.2 cents to make, there’s a bunch of them actually:

In 2008, the average American ate 17.6 pounds of turkey.

The heaviest turkey ever raised was 86 pounds, about the size of a large dog.

The male turkey is called a tom. Baby turkeys are called poults.

675 million pounds of turkey are eaten each Thanksgiving in the United States.

Turkeys have been around for almost ten million years.

It takes 75-80 pounds of feed to raise a 30 pound tom turkey.

Turkey breeding has caused turkey breasts to grow so large that the turkeys routinely fall over.

Multiplying numbers that are all elevens always result in an eerie palindromic product:

11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111=12345678987654321

11 + 1.1 = 11 x 1.1 (yawn)

Here’s a good one: “Eleven plus two” and “twelve plus one” are anagrams of each other.

Easy trick for multiplying by 11: with 2-digit numbers add the two digits and place the sum in between!
25 x 11 = 275
31 x 11 = 341
57 x 11 = 627 [of course you still have to carry]

World War 1 ended on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour.

Apparently, we live in eleven dimensions

I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t had my Elevenses yet and it’s already 11:11.

It is estimated that American consumers in 2010 spent $66.28 per person on Halloween.

An estimated 41 million children ages 5 to 14 went trick-or-treating in 2010.

Americans will spend around $310 million to dress up their pets for Halloween in 2011.

Bobbing for apples probably originated with the Roman harvest festival honoring Pomona, the goddess of fruitful abundance.

The rate of meteorites hitting humans is .0055 per year, or once time every 180 years.

Meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds as high as 130,000 miles per hour.

The International Space Station is expected to be hit with an estimated 100,000 meteoroids during its planned 20-year life span.

Estimates of the mass of material meteoric material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons.