Strange But True: Shattering Glass

By Lucie Winborne

  • You've no doubt heard of shattering a glass with your voice, but how about singing at a pitch so low only an elephant can hear it? That feat belongs to Tim Storms, who possesses a 10-octave vocal range and holds the Guinness World Record for lowest note produced by a human and widest vocal range.

  • In some parts of the world, tarantulas have "pet" frogs, which they protect from predators.

  • At the Harvard-Yale annual college football matchup in 2004, Yale students played quite the trick on their opponents by dressing as Harvard pep squad members and handing out crimson and gold placards to the crowd. While told their cards would spell out "Go Harvard" when raised, the actual message read "We Suck."

  • Two of the most common paint colors at Walt Disney World are "Go Away Green" and "Blending Blue." Their curious monikers attest to the fact that Disney Imagineers created them to make your eyes ignore them.

  • The first known dental filling dates to the Neolithic period and was made of beeswax.

  • You don't need a body to play video games -- just a mind! Lab-grown human and mouse brain cells inhabiting a petri dish became sentient enough to learn how to play Pong.

  • Billy Joel's song "Only the Good Die Young" was banned by some radio stations for being "anti-Catholic." Joel hardly minded, however, as the resulting publicity made the tune so popular that he wrote to the president of Seton Hall College in New Jersey (the first entity to forbid it) requesting a ban on his next record as well.

***

Thought for the Day: "People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year." -- Peter Drucker

(c) 2022 King Features Synd., Inc.

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