The useless bits of info to see if we can make a million posts thread

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Vincent Van Gogh comitted suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.

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Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an aligator while he hosted "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom."

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A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.

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Jamie Farr (who played Klinger on M*A*S*H) was the only member of the cast who actually served as a soldier in the Korean war

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The Les Nessman character on the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati wore a band-aid in every episode. Either on himself, his glasses, or his clothing.

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All of the officers in the Confederate army were given copies of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, to carry with them at all times. Robert E. Lee, among others, believed that the book symbolized their cause. Both revolts were defeated.

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The ancient Etruscans painted women white and men red in the wall paintings they used to decorate tombs.

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Dismas and Gestas were the names of the two thieves crucified with Jesus.

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The Eygptian god of the moon and knowledge, Thoth, has the head of an ibis.

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During the American revolution, inflation was so great that the price of corn rose 10,000%, the price of wheat 14,000%, the price of flour 15,000%, and the price of beef 33,000%.

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Crude oil was being drilled for in ancient China. In the 6th century it was recorded that hollow bamboo rods were driven into the ground in search of brine to provide salt for cattle. In the process, they also came across natural gas and flammable petroleum, which they used themselves or sold for fuel.

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Although you sometimes hear that Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to go around the world, he never did. He led the historic voyage that left Spain in 1519 with five ships under his command, but Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines by islanders in 1521. One of his ships completed the around-the-world trip, arriving in Spain in 1522 with a crew of eighteen -- but without Magellan

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Dinner guests in medieval England were expected to bring their own knives to the table -- hosts did not provide them. The fork did not appear until the sixteenth century and knives-and-forks were not in general use in England until the seventeenth century.

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During the Second World War the American automobile industry produced a grand total of 139 cars. Instead, that huge industrial capacity had been transformed into the "arsenal of democracy," turning out, in breathtaking volumes, the material that allowed the Allies to win the war. The Ford Motor Company alone had more military production than the entire Italian economy in the war years

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Jersey (in the Channel Islands, UK) was the only place that the Nazi's occupied in Great Britain during WorldWar II.