Page 55 - Other Facts

Lost your wallet at New York City? There is an 82 % chance of getting it back!

If you lose your wallet in a big city such as New York City, do you expect to ever see it again? Do you expect to recover your money and keep the party on? Well, New Yorkers surely know how to make your hopes stay high!

Students in an urban studies class at Barnard College recently dropped wallets on the street as part of an experiment to see whether or not New Yorkers returned them. The outcome surprised them all: In 132 drops from the Bronx to Brooklyn, the wallet was stolen a mere two percent of the time! 3% of the time, the person tried but failed to give it back, and 13% of the time, no one picked it up.

Ironically, the riskiest place to lose your wallet is in the Upper East Side of the city. Students attempted to drop it in a neighborhood where the median income is $126,000, and expected a higher than average drop rate. In fact it was worse there than in other places!

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North Koreans must dust their pictures of their dear leader or else!

If a North Korean doesn’t keep their picture of Kim Il-Sung properly dusted, they’re sentenced to hard labor and treated as political prisoners! It's common knowledge that the North Korean people are very repressed and under strict dictatorial rules. Their fearless leader, Kim Il-Sung, is very serious about how reverent they are to him, his statues, and his photos. He even has an official list of ten principles. Within each principle there are articles, it’s not just a simple sentence per principle. Every home in North Korea must have a picture hanging of Kim Il-Sung.

Article six of the third principle states “Su Ryong Comrade Kim Il-sung’s portraits, busts, statues, badges containing his portrait, publications containing his portrait, art paintings containing his portrait, signs displaying his teachings, and the Party’s basic motto must be treated with reverence and protected with utmost care.” Il-Sung’s portraits must be dusted daily with a clean cloth, not with a household rag.

If not properly and respectfully taken care of, a family can be incarcerated as political prisoners and punished with hard labor.

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Tic Tacs are labeled as having zero sugar even though that is their main ingredient!

Tic Tac is a brand of mint produced by the Italian confectioner Ferrero. They were first introduced in 1969 and come in a variety of flavors from fruity to minty. For a long time, the individual Tic Tacs were colored to correlate the flavor they were, but today in many countries the Tic Tac box is colored to represent the flavor and the actual Tic Tacs are just white.

The Ti Tac container itself has become very popular and recycled by many for other uses with its flip open tab. Each Tic Tac weighs just under 0.5 grams. Since the US regulations states that if a single serving contains less than 0.5 grams of sugar it is allowable to express the amount of sugar in a serving as zero.

A single serving of Tic Tacs is a single Tic Tac, so in the US they are labeled as having zero sugar, even though it is their main ingredient.

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It’s A Wonderful Life was a box-office flop and only became popular after a copyright debacle made it free to show on TV!

When the movie was released in 1946, it was given a 28 year copyright term with an eligibility of a 28 year copyright renewal. A request wasn’t put in for the renewal, though, and it fell into the public domain in 1975. The movie studio saw the film as a gem and subsequently fought for the rights of the film for a decade. Had they not done that, the movie would have become another dollar movie in those large bins.

The movie was a financial box-office flop when it was released. It came in at 26th in the box-office ranks. During the time it was in the public domain, the film was showed on a variety of networks throughout the year. Today, NBC owns the rights to the film and it plays only twice a year. The royalties for the film are outrageously expensive. Copyright laws are becoming more intricate and absurd as time goes on and their length is ever growing.

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If you eat a teaspoon of sugar after eating something spicy, it will completely neutralize the heat.

Maybe you’ve been out eating Indian food and realized too late that you have a low tolerance for spice. The most common response to something too spicy seems to be water, but as we all know it doesn’t work that well. Actually, drinking lots of water spreads the spiciness around, so it’s best not to go that route. Dairy products can work better. Yogurt, milk, sour cream, cheese, etc, all work to a degree.

Dairy helps to kind of absorb some of the spiciness. So feel free to follow up that pepper with a scoop of ice cream. The best way, though, is sugar. A sugar cube or a teaspoon of sugar will suffice. The sugar absorbs all the spicy oil that coats the mouth, and gives a strong, different taste to replace it with. So if you’re ever off to dinner with friends, you’ll be more prepared.

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