“20 Fun Facts You Can Use to Impress Your Friends”

Example from the page:

5. If you feel bad about your mile time, just compare yourself to the sloth. It takes them an entire month to travel one mile.

That doesn’t seem that slow to me. When I was high school, they didn’t need a stopwatch to time my 100-yard dash. They just tore pages off a desk calendar, like in those old movies. Running my heat against a sloth would have been my only chance for a W.

I sort of did that in our state’s Senior Games three years ago. I finished my tennis matches and the tournament director asked if I would mind playing an extra singles match against a guy with nobody else in his age class. (Their rules required the guy to play at least one match – against anyone, win or lose – to qualify for a medal.) It was a nice day, I had some energy left, and I had nothing to lose, so I agreed, not knowing which age class the guy was in. After the match, my friend Rocky asked me how I did, and I said “I won 6-0, 6-0.” He knows that I kinda suck at tennis, so he said “You’ve been practicing.” No, not exactly. I was as bad as ever. The guy I beat was 97 years old. I not only won in straight sets, but I pitched a perfect game. He never won a rally. All I needed to do was hit the ball over the net and it was a sure winner. Some of my shots were within his reach, but he came nowhere near returning them. The only time he ever got a ball over the net was when he served, and he didn’t always manage that.

In essence, I ran the 100 against a sloth.

But he got his gold medal as the top guy in his age class!

The story is good for a laugh, but if I live to 97, I hope I have the energy to go out there and try to cover the whole tennis court, however unsuccessfully.

Here’s a wild one:

8. Children of identical twins are genetically half siblings, even though they are legally cousins.

I had to think about that a second. It means (1) that if one man had one child with each of identical twin women, the kids would be genetically full siblings, even though they had different mothers; (2) that if identical twin men married identical twin women, their children would be all be genetic siblings, even those that had no common parent!

In the latter case, the children with no common parent would legally be first cousins, and therefore allowed to marry each other in some states, despite being full siblings biologically. (There is no state where legal siblings can marry, but the laws don’t consider this oddball case of biological siblings with no common parent.)