Strange BUT TRUE

• Most NASCAR teams use nitrogen in their tires instead of air. This allows the tire to have a much more consistent rate of expansion and contraction to heat and cold.

• North Koreans must have one of 28 state-approved haircuts.

• There’s alcohol in space! In 2006, astronomers discovered a cloud of alcohol in part of the Milky Way where stars are forming from gas and dust.

• In Albania, some women make an oath to become “sworn virgins” in order to live life as a man, with the rights and privileges of a man. For the rest of their lives, they are never again addressed as female.

• Over 2,500 left-handed people a year are killed by using equipment made for right-handed people. The deadliest item? The right-handed power saw.

• A traffic jam in Beijing lasted more than nine days.

• If you yelled for eight years, seven months and six days, you would produce enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

• A man with severe OCD and a phobia of germs attempted to commit suicide with a gun to his head. Instead of killing him, the bullet eliminated his mental illness without any other damage.

• In 2003, there were 86 days of below-freezing weather in Hell, Michigan.

• Until 2018, there were only two English words ending in “gry” — hungry and angry. Then the Oxford English Dictionary added a third — “hangry” (an irritable state induced by lack of food).

• A decibel is not its own unit, but actually 1/10th of the seldom used “Bel,” a unit named in honor of Alexander Graham Bell for his contribution to acoustics.

• “Backpfeifengesicht” is a German term for a face that badly needs a punch.

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Thought for the Day: “The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin