The novelist Jack London was a socialist.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American eats 8.5 pounds of pickles a year.

Alexander Cartwright invented baseball, not Abner Doubleday. In 1953, Congress officially recognized Cartwright as the inventor of modern baseball.

If you see a turtle with a shell that kind of forms a pyramid as opposed to being a circular shape, it’s inbred.

About 22 million lightning bolts hit earth each year. On average, lightning kills 73 Americans annually, and hundreds more suffer debilitating injuries. The odds of being struck in the U.S. in any year are 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck during a lifetime are 1 in 3,000.

This article appears in August 21 • 2009.

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