601. In 1815 French chemist Michael Eugene Chevreul realized the first link between diabetes and sugar metabolism when he discovered that the urine of a diabetic was identical to grape sugar.
602. Noah Webster was the first epidemiologist in the United States.
603. Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo, nonstop across the Atlantic, was only the 67th person overall to do it.
604. Charles Lindbergh did not sleep for 24 hours preceding his 33 1/2 hour flight, and kept awake by holding his eyes open with his fingers, slapping himself, and opening the cockpit window.
605. Charles Lindbergh only flew at a top speed of only about 110 mph.
606. Charles Lindbergh carried with him five sandwiches he bought at a drugstore at the last minute (he is reported to have said that he wouldn't need more than five if he made it across the Atlantic, and he wouldn't need more than five if he didn't)
607. Charles Lindbergh still holds the record for "ticker tape," 1,750 tons, tossed on him in his parade up New York City's "Canyon of Heroes."
608. M&M's come from Forrest Mars Sr., son of the company's founder, who came up with the idea for M&M's during World War II. Unfortunately, sugar was rationed in the US during the war, and most chocolate was reserved for GIs overseas. The difficulty Mars faced in obtaining enough of each to launch the new product suggested the need for a strategic alliance. Mars made that alliance with William Murrie, president of Hershey, and the two named the new product with the first letters of their last names.
609. The first United States coast to coast airplane flight occurred in 1911 and took 49 days.
610. The female lion does 90% of the hunting.
611. At one time chocolate was considered a temptation of the devil.
612. Original name of character Luke Skywalker was Luke Skykiller.
613. Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, and Burt Reynolds were considered for the role of Han Solo, before it went to Harrison Ford.
614. Producer's second choice to play Princes Leia was Jodie Foster.
615. 7-foot 2-inch tall Peter Mayhew wears elevated boots under his Chewbacca costume.
616. Raisins don't settle to the bottom of cereal boxes because half the box is filled with cereal before the first raisin makes an appearance. Then, in the upper half of the box, raisins and cereal are mixed. The raisins eventually do settle, but this clever packing method insures that they do not end up clumped together on the bottom.
617. The first US President to be a target of an attempted assassination was also the only president to kill a man outside of wartime. On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson was attending a Congressman's funeral in the Capitol rotunda when a deranged man fired at him from six feet away with two pistols. Only the man's misfire saved the 7th President.
618. Pre-president Andrew Jackson, who may have fought as many as 100 duels before entering the White House, did not miss on May 30, 1806, when at 24 paces he killed a man who had insulted his wife.
619. Crickets don't chirp by rubbing their legs together, they make the noise by rubbing their wings together.
620. Birds don't sing because they are happy, they sing because they are territorial.
621. The early phone companies thought that seven-digit phone numbers would be too hard to remember. So as a mnemonic device they assigned the first two letters of a word to the first two digits of each phone number. For example, 555-1234 became KL5-1234, the "KL" standing for "Klondike."
622. A phone number couldn't begin with a letter on the zero position because dialing that would call the Operator. And letters couldn't go on the "one" because it was used for phone company internal codes. That left eight numbers and twenty-six letters, but twenty-four letters made an even fit. "Q" and "Z" were least likely to be needed for the mnemonic words, so they were banished forever.
623. Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII underwent rigorous training that prepared them for their suicide mission. If they refused to stay in the corps, they were shot as traitors.
624. Teddy Roosevelt's famous attack in Cuba during the Spanish-American Was is referred to as the charge of the "Rough Riders," even though the troops were not on horses.
625. You may know it as the "pound key" or as the "number sign." It's the "#" symbol on the telephone dial, also known as the octothorp (sometimes spelled octothorpe). Apparently, the word was coined in the 1960s by a telephone company employee who wanted a single word for the symbol. All of our sources agree that octo- refers to the eight points on the symbol, but there are many stories about the origin of -thorp. According to one story, the person who invented the word was involved in an effort to have the gold medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he added -thorpe to the word. Another possibility is that -thorp is related to Old Norse thorpe (village, farm, hamlet), maybe because the symbol looks something like eight fields around a village.
626. Richard Nixon was the only President to have his name inscribed on a plaque that was left on the moon.
627. If you look closely at a black panther, you can see the spots in its coat. They're really leopards.
628. Napoleon suffered from a fear of cats.
629. The largest hailstone to fall in the U.S. weighed 1.67 pounds and was 17 1/2 inches in circumference, which is technically an ice sculpture, not a hailstone.
630. Commercial airlines prohibit the carry-on of mercury thermometers because of the way mercury reacts with aluminum. If such a thermometer were to break and spill on a plane, even a tiny amount of mercury could badly damage the plane's aluminum frame.
631. Margaret Higgins Sanger, a pioneer of birth control, was one of 11 children.
632. We'll never know Albert Einstein's last words. He spoke them in German and his attending nurse didn't speak the language.
633. Big Ben is not the name of the clock in London, rather it's the name of 7 1/2 foot tall, 9 foot in diameter, 13 1/2 ton bell which has kept ringing out the hour since 1859. Its installation was supervised by the Commissioner of Public Works, Sir Benjamin Hall. Sir Benjamin's height and waistline were both substantial, earning him the nickname of "Big Ben." The press and members of Parliament affectionately gave that name to the new bell, and it stuck.
634. Female anacondas are the largest snakes and can weigh more than 200 pounds (91 kilograms). Although the longest anaconda was measured at 28 feet (8.5 meters), it was not weighed, but scientific estimates place it at about 500 pounds (227 kilograms).
635. In many countries, urine was once used as a cleaning detergent.
636. The first children's book that was published in the US was called "Spiritual Mild for Boston Babes in wither England Drawn from the Breast of Both Testaments for Their Soul's Nourishment."
637. There is only one animal that can completely turn its stomach inside out and that's the starfish.
638. Rhode Island was the only state to reject the 18th Amendment to the Constitution (you may remember that was the one that prohibited alcohol).
639. Hundreds of years ago people put coins for safe keeping in a jar made of "pygg," a kind of clay. Finally, in eighteenth century England, some whimsical manufacturer thought of making banks shaped like the animal suggested by the name of the clay, and they've been piggy banks ever since.
640. Only one major league player legally ran around the bases backwards after hitting a homerun, Jimmy Piersall of the New York Mets.
641. In medieval times, most people were unable to read or write. When it came time to sign a document, people who could not write usually made an "X" mark. Of course, an "X" is not much of a signature. To add a sense of commitment, it became customary to kiss the "X" after writing it. Kissing the "X" was "performance law," a ritual act that bound the parties the way legal documents bind us today. This act, witnessed by the person who wrote the text, represented a solemn guarantee of the truthfulness of what was written, and an oath to carry out whatever obligations were stated in the document. Over the years, the "X" and the kiss became interchangeable.
642. Karmuela Searle died while playing Tarzan. During the filming of The Son of Tarzan he was mauled to death by an elephant.
643. Pope John Paul II wrote a play that premiered on a theater in London.
644. At St. Helen's school in Newbury, OH, students are required to learn to ride a unicycle in gym class. The headmaster believes that everyone should have one daffy skill.
645. If you visit Calama in the Atacama Desert you won't see rain because not one drop of rainfall has been recorded there.
646. Cinderella got to wear glass slippers thanks to a lousy translator. In the original version, she wore squirrel fur slippers, but the translator goofed.
647. In 1893 two fighters were duking it out for the lightweight championship of the south. They ended in a draw after 110 rounds.
648. "Starboard" comes from the Old English word for the paddles that Vikings used on the right side of their ships to steer: "steorbords." In that spirit, the left side became "larboard"--from lade, "to load" and bord, "side" (ships were loaded from the left side). But later the English thought that larboard sounded too close to starboard so they arbitrarily changed it to "port."
649. Against Army regulations, George Armstrong Custer often wore a blue velvet uniform.
650. At 101, Larry Lewis ran the 100 yard dash in 17.8 seconds setting a new world record for runners 100 years old or older.
651. In 1908, Michael Murphy proposed that sprinters on track teams be allowed to start form a crouching position. This was the first time this was permitted.
652. Stonewall Jackson died when he was accidentally hit by fire from his own troop.
653. According to various estimates by scientists, every day 35-150 species of life become extinct.
654. The middle initial in Harry S Truman stands for nothing. Both grandfathers' names started with S and Harry's parents didn't want any family squabbles.
655. In 1961 Matisse's Le Bateau hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 47 days before someone noticed it was upside down. That's why all works of art are now stamped, "This end up."
656. The largest man-made explosion was the explosion of a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on March 1, 1954. The resulting fireball was expected to be the equivalent of 3-6 million tons of TNT (3-6 megatons), but it turned out to yield a whopping 15 megatons. The titanic explosion, which blasted out a crater 2,000 meters (6560 feet) across, was 1,200 times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. It completely vaporized three islands and cast radioactive debris over an area of 50,000 square miles (129,400 square km).
657. With the end of the commercial use of the Morse Code this year (1999), no sailor will ever again send an "SOS" signal. Those letters, by the way, stood for nothing. They were chosen because 3 dots, 3 dashes, 3 dots were easy to remember, easy to send, and easy to pick up.
658. The distress signal "Mayday" means nothing--in English, that is. But the French phrase from which it comes, via corruption, m'aidez, is very meaningful: it means "help me."
659. Lobsters can move up to 25 feet per second underwater.
660. Some spiders have eight eyes.
661. The monarch butterfly's sense of taste is about 12,000 times more sensitive than a human's.
662. Sixty cows can produce a ton of milk a day.
663. A lead pencil is good for about 50,000 words.
664. In 1555, Ivan the Terrible ordered the construction of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. He was so thrilled with the work done by the two architects that he had them blinded so they could never be able to build anything else more beautiful.
665. Did you see this 1993 film, said to have the longest title in cinema history?: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Zombified, Flesh-eating, Sub-Humanoid Living Dead - Part 4
666. The world record for kite height was set in 1919 by the German Weather Bureau, when a series of eight kites was lofted to an altitude of 31,955 feet (9740 meters). During the retrieval of the kites, the line broke when the tension reached 145 kilograms (319 pounds). The single-kite record is 12,471 feet (3801 meters) by the US Meteorological Service in 1896.
667. Rain contains vitamin B12.
668. Blind and deaf from an early age, Helen Keller developed a keen sense of smell. It was stated that she could identify her friends simply by their odor.
669. Eskimos do use refrigerators, only they use them to keep their food from freezing.
670. Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev composed an opera, The Giant, at the age of seven years old.
671. President James Garfield was ambidextrous and could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other simultaneously.
672. A mosquito has 47 teeth.
673. Lightening, not people, starts most forest fires.
674. Historians now believe that the Boston Tea Party was not a rebellion against taxes, but a way to steal the tea from the government.
675. Squirrels don't dig up nuts they previously buried. They actually track down nuts other squirrels buried. You see, squirrels have a keen sense of smell but a lousy memory. They forget where they buried their own stash, but can sniff out others.
676. Historically, only Hawaiian men danced the Hula.
677. Contrary to belief, most black widow spiders don't eat their mates.
678. To survive, every bird must eat at least half its own weight in food each day.
679. The foot is 12 inches long because the arm of King Henry I of England measured 36 inches, and he decreed that the standard foot should be 1/3 of that measurement.
680. The Pacific end of the Panama Canal is actually about 27 miles east of the Atlantic terminus.
681. Why "penthouse"? The word comes from "pentis," Middle English (about the 14th century) for shed. When the fancy apartments on top of apartment buildings began to appear around 1900, they reminded people--in terms of their location--of the small shed-like structures that covered the top of the stairsleading to the roof. The word pentis then just got stretched out a bit into penthouse.
682. On an island in northern Wales there's a village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.
683. According to The Guinness Book of Records, the quickest picker upper when it comes to beer is one Tom Gaskin, who in Northern Ireland in 1996 managed to lift a 137-pound keg over his head 902 times in only six hours.
684. Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, was supposedly killed by a tortoise that was dropped on his head by an eagle who mistook the chrome dome for a rock.
685. The forest of Canadian Lake District is so dense that during winter the snow stays on top of the trees and the forest floor stays bare.
686. Some dinosaurs were as small as hens.
687. During the blackout of 1977 when New York City was without power from early evening to late the next afternoon, a record 80 million telephone calls were made.
688. During the Roman Empire, the Romans used lead as sweetening agent.
689. Mayflies live only one day as an adult. During that day they molt twice, mate, and lay eggs in water.
690. In Britain, banks are required to accept any check that's correctly made out, no matter what it's written on. It took the editor of the humor magazine Punch to put this rule to a test: he made out a check to a writer on the side of a cow.
691. Crickets hear with their legs.
692. Real estate developers are forever coming up with warm sounding names for what had only recently been a swamp or garbage dump--witness all the Pleasant Valleys, Forest Glens, and the like. The man who started this practice was the Norseman, Eric the Red, who in 982 A.D. discovered a huge piece of real estate in the North Atlantic covered with ice and called it Greenland, solely to attract settlers.
693. By the age of 60, most people have lost 50% of their taste buds.
694. Queen Supayalat of Burma ordered about 100 of her husband's relatives clubbed to death. She did this to ensure the throne to her husband.
695. Theaters in Glendale, California can show horror films only on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.
696. You can't plow a cotton field with an elephant in North Carolina.
697. In Lehigh, Nebraska it's against the law to sell donut holes.
698. So many visitors were taking his cigars, so Thomas Edison devised a plan to discourage the practice. He had several boxes of cigars custom-made with cabbage leaves. But when the offensive smelling stogies were delivered to his office, his secretary sent them on to his home where his wife went ahead and packed the items in his luggage, and the offensive items accompanied Mr. Edison on his business trip. This just goes to show you that even a genius can't outsmart his wife.
699. The Tokyo World Lanes Bowling Center is the largest bowling establishment in the world with 252 lanes.
700. Billiards great Henry Lewis once sank 46 balls in a row....using his nose as his cue stick.

Where I learn some of this crazy stuff:
The Learning Kingdom
MailBits.com
Win Ben Stein's Money
Accord Publishing's 1999 Nose It All Calendar
Hot Topic pay stubs
E-mails which worm their way into my inbox
Tyler Whitney's Completely Random Home Page
UselessKnowledge.com
The Danny Baker Show
PhiLL's Site Of Useless Information
Buy-ology - TLC
Spam page
Silly Putty page
Other interesting things too long for the TTUF's