Free The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham

with your bare hands.
    It’s against the law to ride down the streets of Brewton, Alabama, in a motorboat.
    Most burglaries occur in the winter.
    The state legislature in North Dakota has rejected a proposal to erect signs specifically warning motorists not to throw human waste on to the roadside. Maintenance workers report at least twenty incidents of road crews being sprayed with urine after rupturing urine-?filled plastic bottles that became swollen in the hot sun. Opponents of the measure say they’re afraid the signs would discourage tourism.
    Under the law of Mississippi, there’s no such thing as a female Peeping Tom.
    THAT’S WHAT WE CALL A MILESTONE
    In 1976, a Los Angeles secretary named Jannene Swift officially married a fifty-?pound rock. The ceremony was witnessed by more than twenty people.

ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
    Ancient Sybarites taught their horses to dance to music to make their parades more glamorous.
    Ancient Sumerians thought the liver made blood and the heart was the center of thought.
    The ancient Etruscans painted women white and men red in the wall paintings they used to decorate tombs.
    Abdul Kassam Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
    At the turn of the previous millennium, Dublin had the largest slave market in the world, run by the Vikings.
    A two-?hundred-?year-?old piece of Tibetan cheese was auctioned off for $1,513 in 1993.
    Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant “plenty of excrement.”
    In 1281, the Mongol army of Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan but was ravaged by a hurricane that destroyed their fleet.
    The Toltecs, seventh-?century native Mexicans, went to battle with wooden swords so as not to kill their enemies.
    There was a pony express in Persia many centuries before Christ. Riders on this ancient circuit, wearing special colored headbands, delivered the mail across the vast stretch of Asia Minor, sometimes riding for hundreds of miles without a break.
    In ancient Japan, public contests were held to see who in a town could break wind loudest and longest. Winners were awarded many prizes and received great acclaim.

UNRECORDED HISTORY
    During the Cambrian period, about five hundred million years ago, a day was only 20.6 hours long.
    The name of the asteroid that was believed to have killed the dinosaurs was Chixalub (pronounced sheesh-?uh-?loob).

WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN
    Ra was the sun god of ancient Egypt.
    In ancient Egypt, the apricot was called the egg of the sun, killing a cat was a crime punishable by death, and Egyptians paid their taxes in honey.
    Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the death of their cats.
    Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
    About three hundred years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were thirty.
    According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian men never became bald. The reason for this, Herodotus claimed, was that as children, Egyptian males had their heads shaved, and their scalps were continually exposed to the health-?giving rays of the sun. In Egypt around 1500 B.C.E., a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.
    If a surgeon in ancient Egypt lost a patient while performing an operation, his hands were cut off.
    Pharaoh Ramses II died in 1225 B.C.E. At the time of his death, he had fathered 111 sons and 67 daughters.
    The Egyptian city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E.
    The Egyptian hieroglyph for one hundred thousand is a tadpole.
    The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C.E.
    Cleopatra married two of her brothers.
    Preparing an Egyptian mummy sometimes took up to seventy days. Dead Egyptian noblewomen were