Some very interesting stuff about AMERICA More people live in New York City than in 40 of the 50 states. The word "Pennsylvania" is misspelled on the Liberty Bell. There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in one foot of liquid. There's a town in Washington with treetop bridges made specifically to help squirrels cross the street In 1872, Russia sold Alaska to the United States for about 2 cents per acre. It would take you more than 400 years to spend a night in all of Las Vegas's hotel rooms. Western Michigan is home to a giant lavender labyrinth so big you can see it on Google Earth. There's an island full of wild monkeys off the coast of South Carolina called Morgan Island, and it's not open to humans. There's enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York City. Arizona and Hawaii are now the only states that don't observe daylight savings time. Boston has the worst drivers out of the nation's 200 largest cities. Kansas City has the best drivers. (no surprise) Kansas produces enough wheat each year to feed everyone in the world for about two weeks. Oregon's Crater Lake is deep enough to cover six Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other The Empire State building has its own zip code. (Benton, NH shares one with another town) The Los Angeles Coroner's Office has its own quirky gift shop called Skeletons in the Closet. The Library of Congress contains approximately 838 miles of bookshelves—long enough to stretch from Houston to Chicago. At 46 letters, Massachusetts's Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggcha ubunagungamaugg has the longest place name in the U.S. (even though it's based on a joke). (Reputed to mean: You fish on your side, I'll fish on mine and nobody fishes in the middle) In 1922, a man built a house and all his furniture entirely out of 100,000 newspapers. The structure still stands today in Rockport, Massachusetts. The entire Denver International Airport is twice the size of Manhattan. In 1893, an amendment was proposed to rename the country to the "United States of Earth." A highway in Lancaster, California plays the "William Tell Overture" as you drive over it, thanks to some well-placed grooves in the road The total length of Idaho's rivers could stretch across the United States about 40 times. The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire for 55 years. (coal in the ground) The one-woman town of Monowi, Nebraska is the only officially incorporated municipality with a population of 1. The sole, 83-year-old resident is the city's mayor, librarian, and bartender. The entire town of Whittier, Alaksa lives under one roof. The number of bourbon barrels in Kentucky outnumbers the state's population by more than two million. Montana's Glacier National Park has a canine "bark ranger" that helps herd wildlife away from high-traffic areas. You can watch more than 100 ponies swim to Chincoteague Island every year in Virginia. In 1943, the temperature in Spearfish, South Dakota jumped 49 degrees in two minutes (-4°F to 45°F), one of the most drastic changes on record. The world's tiniest park is in Portland OR, measuring a mere two feet wide. The inventor of the Ouija board lived and died in Baltimore; his tombstone stands as a reflection of his achievement. The biggest signature in human history belongs to Texas farmer Jimmie Luecke. The two-mile landmark can be seen from space. There are around 5,000 commercial airplanes flying over the United States at any given time. Only one-third of all $100 bills are actually inside the United States. In Colma, California the dead outnumber the living by nearly 1,000 to 1. The smallest county in the U.S., Kalawao County on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i, is also a leprosy colony where a few former patients still live. South Florida is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in the wild. |