New And Improved Fact System

Sorry for not updating in a while, but I am back with some amazing new facts for you. This list is called Atrocious Animals! (Thanks to my friend Ally for reading these out loud from my copy of The Guinness Book of World Records 2012. We appreciate it!)
In this section, "animals" classifies insects, fish, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Just not humans even though we are mammals.

• The most venomous spider is called the phoneutria, which means "murderess" in Greek. It is also known as the Brazilian Wandering Spider. It lives in Brazil, mostly the Amazon Rainforest.
• Boxwood is a shrub once found in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It is ranked as "critically endangered" by the I.U.C.N. (I have no clue what that is.)
• The largest predatory fish is the Great White Shark. That's predictable, but did you know that adults average 14 to 15 feet in length and can weigh up to 1700 pounds! They are listed as the most dangerous shark. It has caused 251 out of 1860 confirmed, unprovoked shark attacks on humans.
• The longest snake fangs belong to the venomous Gaboon viper of Africa. The fangs are two inches long.
• The largest burrowing mammal is the wombat. They live in Australia and can grow up to four feet in length. Their top weight is 77 pounds. The burrows get up to 65 feet long and can be even 6 feet underground with interconnecting tunnels...lots of them.
• The leatherback sea turtle is the largest living turtle species. They live in Nova Scotia, Cape Sable, South of Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• The world's smallest parasite is the pneumocystis jiarovbcii. It causes pneumonia in humans and it is 0.01-0.02 inches long.
• The laziest freshwater turtle is the Cantor's Giant Softshelled. It is native to the Makong River in Cambodia (Asia). It spends 95% of its life motionless in the riverbottom waiting for prey. It only surfaces to breathe air twice a day!
• The most tentacled octopus is just a common octopus, taken alive in Matoya Bay in Japan. It had 96 tentacles because all of the normal tentacles (8) had branched out into many different ones!

Happy Thanksgiving--All the Best Holiday Facts!

• The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (Macy's Day) started in 1924, and has been shown at 9:00am every Thanksgiving morning since then.
• Thanksgiving's name comes from the day where Pilgrims gave thanks for everything they had in their new lives!
• The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the year 1621. However, it did not become a nation holiday until Abraham Lincoln encouraged this. He was not appeased until 1941, when Thanksgiving was made a national holiday and was printed on calendars nationwide.
• There is an American Thanksgiving postage stamp which was issued in 2001. 
• People celebrate Thanksgiving in China, Rome, Brazil, Korea, Canada, and America.  (this fact was posted after much debate so if you find something is incorrect or missing please let me know!) However it is proven that each country celebrates it on a different day.
• Thanksgiving is always celebrated on the last Thursday of November, so unlike Christmas and other holidays, Thanksgiving does not have a "set" date.
• Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national turkey of America because he believed Thanksgiving was pretty much the most important American holiday. He told people the eagle has bad moral character.
• Do you eat cranberries at Thanksgiving? To check if your cranberries are ripe, bounce them on a clean floor.
• Thanksgiving is rumoured to have brought the creation of TV dinners.
• America eats the weight of Singapore in turkey every Thanksgiving! That either means Singapore is one skinny country, or America just needs a serious diet plan.

Many people believe that a normal Thanksgiving should go something like this:

9:00: watch the parade!
11:00: begin cooking the food
3:00: eat the food
3:45: THE PIE!
4:00: spend the rest of the day hanging out with the family and friends and watching football

I'm going to take this time to share with you two graphs derived from Thanksgiving Tweets about what kind and how much food is being eaten on Thanksgiving. Then there is a separate graph for the pie!

Are any of these traditional Thanksgiving foods going to be on YOUR table this year?

What kind of pie do you eat on Thanksgiving? *coughcough...apple!*

Welcome to the Weekly Weird News

BREAKING NEWS!!!!

This week, in honor of this being the first week of WWN, we will have a list of firsts shown for all of you. You may be asking yourself, "Will I ever need any of the facts by WWN?" And the answer is, "No, probably not." They're just cool to read.

The first first on the list of firsts on the first post is:

• The first e-mail ever sent was sent my Ray Tomlison, in 1971 to himself. It was a test e-mail that consisted of letters: QWERTYUIOP. Tomlinson is more famous, however, for developing the @ sign.
• On December 3, 1992, the words MERRY CHRISTMAS were sent from a computer belonging to British engineer Neil Papworth to the mobile phone of his friend Richard Jarvis.
• The first movie ever made was The Horse in Motion in the year 1878.  
• "Kinseska Muren" by Swedish artist Evert Taube was the first rap song ever recorded, in the early 1920s. A music video was produced but was grainy and low quality that would, today, be laughable.
• The first YouTube video ever was uploaded on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. It was called "Me at the Zoo."
• The first language ever spoken is undetermined, but suspected to be a very non-complex, few-words series of odd noises (caveman, Neandrethal speak) with no grammar or way to write it besides pictures describing sights, foreshadows, thoughts, etc.
• The first book ever published was called The Epic of Gilgamesh, and is credited as the first work of fiction. The author is unknown, but the time period was the time the Chinese developed the printing press.

TRIVIA QUESTION: WHEN WAS THE PRINTING PRESS INVENTED?