1. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, although he was born in Britain, around 385AD. His parents Calpurnius and Conchessa were Roman citizens living in either Scotland or Wales, according to different versions of his story.
2. As a boy of 14 he was captured and taken to Ireland where he spent six years in slavery herding sheep. He returned to Ireland in his 30s as a missionary among the Celtic pagans.
3. Legend has it that he used the native shamrock as a symbol of the holy trinity when preaching and brought the Latin alphabet to Ireland.
4. Miracles attributed to him include the driving of serpents out of Ireland. However, evidence suggests post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes in the first place.
5. Wearing green, eating green food and even drinking green beer, is said to commemorate St Patrick’s use of the shamrock – although blue was the original colour of his vestments.
6. St Patrick was said to have proclaimed that everyone should have a drop of the “hard stuff” on his feast day after chastising an innkeeper who served a short measure of whiskey. In the custom known as “drowning the shamrock”, the shamrock that has been worn on a lapel or hat is put in the last drink of the evening.
7. Popular Irish toasts on St Patrick’s Day, include: may the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends beneath it never fall out.
8. St. Patrick’s Day was first celebrated in America in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1737. Around 34 million modern Americans claim Irish ancestry.
9. It is believed that St Patrick died on March 17 in 461AD. It is a national holiday in Ireland, and on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, which was founded by Irish refugees. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and a provincial holiday in the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
10. Dublin has a parade that attracts hundreds of thousands of people, while in Chicago the river is dyed green for a few hours. The biggest parade is normally held in New York, while the largest celebration in the southern hemisphere is in Sydney, Australia.

1.Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States.

2.By the fall of 1621 only half of the pilgrims, who had sailed on the Mayflower, survived. The survivors, thankful to be alive, decided to give a thanksgiving feast.

3.Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the second Monday in October in Canada.

4.The Plymouth Pilgrims were the first to celebrate the Thanksgiving.

5.The pilgrims arrived in North America in December 1620.

6.The Pilgrims sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to reach North America.

7.The pilgrims sailed on the ship, which was known by the name of ‘Mayflower’.

8.They celebrated the first Thanksgiving Day in the fall of 1621.

9.They celebrated the first Thanksgiving Day at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

10.The drink that the Puritans brought with them in the Mayflower was the beer.

11.The Wampanoag Indians were the people who taught the Pilgrims how to cultivate the land.

12.The Pilgrim leader, Governor William Bradford, had organized the first Thanksgiving feast in the year 1621 and invited the neighboring Wampanoag Indians also to the feast.

13.The first Thanksgiving feast was held in the presence of around ninety Wampanoag Indians and the Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, was also invited there.

14.The first Thanksgiving celebration lasted three days.

15.President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving Day Proclamation in the year 1789 and again in 1795.

16.The state of New York officially made Thanksgiving Day an annual custom in 1817.

17.Sarah Josepha Hale, an editor with a magazine, started a Thanksgiving campaign in 1827 and it was result of her efforts that in 1863 Thanksgiving was observed as a day for national thanksgiving and prayer.

18.Abraham Lincoln issued a ‘Thanksgiving Proclamation’ on third October 1863 and officially set aside the last Thursday of November as the national day for Thanksgiving. Whereas earlier the presidents used to make an annual proclamation to specify the day when Thanksgiving was to be held.

19.President Franklin D. Roosevelt restored Thursday before last of November as Thanksgiving Day in the year 1939. He did so to make the Christmas shopping season longer and hus stimulate the economy of the state.

20.Congress passed an official proclamation in 1941 and declared that now onwards Thanksgiving will be observed as a legal holiday on the fourth Thursday of November every year.

85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S.

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.

In every episode of “Seinfeld” there is a Superman somewhere.

Camel’s milk does not curdle.

Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.

Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.

According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged for trying.

In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.

In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.

The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

The “L.L.” in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.

A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.

Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.

A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.

Dogs and cats consume almost $7 billion worth of pet food a year.

1. Nicholas Cage’s real name is Nicholas Coppola, but he changed it to disassociate himself with Francis Ford. After the recent release of Bangkok Dangerous, one wonders if this was such a good idea

2. Samuel L. Jackson politely requests that anyone who claims not to enjoy watching themselves in movies to please stop lying.

3. Francis McDormand and Joel Coen have been married since 1984, the year of the Coen Brothers’ debut film, Blood Simple.

4. The late Paul Newman was originally cast in the role of Captain Quint in Jaws (1975).

5. Sigourney Weaver’s real name is Susan Weaver, but she changed her first name to be named after a character in the classic novel “The Great Gatsby.”

6. Oprah is actually a typo. Her parents wanted to use the biblical name Orpah, but the midwife couldn’t spell so it became Oprah.

7. The Dark Knight is the first Batman film not to have “Batman” in the title.

8. 78% of all musicians-turned-actors are rappers, and of those, 58% are black, and only two are any good.

9. “Beverly Hills 90210” star Luke Perry was born Coy Luther Perry but changed his first name to Luke after the lead character in his favorite movie, Cool Hand Luke.

10. Paul Newman, who starred in Cool Hand Luke, was one of the celebrities on the “Enemies List” kept by Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

11. Samuel L. Jackson’s starring role of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction was ranked by the UK’s Empire magazine as the second coolest movie character of all time, after Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden, from Fight Club.

12. Jean Claude Van-Damme, ladies and gentlemen, speaks FIVE LANGUAGES.

13. The title “Quantum of Solace” has been kicked around since the time of License to Kill (1989).

14. No one really knew who Samuel L. Jackson was until 1994, when Pulp Fiction was released. By then, he was 46 years old.

15. By 2006, twelve years after his break-out role in Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson’s films had grossed more money at the box office than any other actor in cinematic history (more than $3 billion).

16. I made fun of Hannah Montana’s Best of Both Worlds concert DVD in my “New DVDs This Week” post here on Hollywire a couple months ago. It went on to become the highest grossing Super Bowl weekend release ever. Oops.

17. Sean Connery wore a toupee in every James Bond film that he starred in, beginning with Dr. No (1962).

18. At Parklane Academy, a private school that she attended in McCombs, Mississippi until October 1994, Britney Spears was on the girls basketball team.

19. I am writing all of this from the heart of China in a city called Luoyang, one of the most intensely Communist cities in the country. Brad Pitt is unable to visit me here, since he’s been banned from ever entering China because of his role in the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet (feel free to send the wife though, Brad!).

20. Kevin Bacon has had at least a supporting role in 27% of all American movies made since 1982.

21. The first trailer for Cloverfield was shown before Transformers in 2007. It showed an explosion in the heart of New York City and the Statue of Liberty’s head being thrown down the street. It was shot with a hand-held video camera and gave no title.

22. The movie is actually named after the boulevard in Santa Monica, California, where the Bad Robot offices were located during the making of the film. “Cloverfield” was originally just a codename for the movie.

23. Johnny Depp dropped out of school at age 15 with hopes of becoming a rock star.

24. Among the first films ever made was a series of shorts in the late 1870s that showed a horse galloping. Audiences were absolutely amazed.

25. Britney Spears’ name is an anagram for “Presbyterians.”

26. Jack Nicholson hates giving interviews so much that he has not appeared on a talk show since 1971.27. It took $7,500,000 to build the Titanic, approximately 20,000,000 tons of iceberg to sink it, and $200,000,000 to make a movie about it.

28. Titanic passenger Stuart Collet’s insurance claim for lost college-lecture notes – $50. Passenger Charlotte Cardeza’s insurance claim for lost luggage – $177,352.

29. New York Evening Sun headline on April 15, 1912 – “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION.” Oops!

30. Okay just one more. After the tragedy, Senator W. A. Smith asked, “What exactly is an iceberg composed of?” Fifth Officer Harold Lowe politely responded, “Ice, I suppose, sir.”

31. Since the commercial success of The Happening this year, M. Night Shyamalan has been working feverishly on the script for a film he plans to call The Anticlimax.

32. Superman could clearly kick the asses of both Spiderman and Batman simultaneously. In fact, I don’t understand why there was ever any debate about this.

33. In America, our films and television shows are played in NTSC format, which is 30 frames per second. In much of the rest of the world, they use PAL format, which is 24 frames per second. Our eyes see too slowly to tell the difference.

34. Wes Craven first proposed the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the most successful horror films of all time, in 1981, but no one was interested. It floated aimlessly until the now hugely successful New Line Cinema eventually picked it up.

35. A Nightmare on Elm Street was the first feature film that New Line Cinema ever produced. Prior to that, they were just a small distribution company for college campuses.

36. John Carpenter was a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan. Two characters in Halloween (1978), were named after characters in Hitchcock films – Tommy Doyle, from Rear Window (1954), and Sam Loomis, from Psycho (1960).

37. Jamie Lee Curtis made her acting debut in Halloween, and her mother, Janet Leigh, was the actress killed in the shower scene in Psycho, one of the most famous scenes in film history. Carpenter considered his casting of Curtis in Halloween to be the ultimate tribute to Hitchcock.

38. 19 years ago today, Hollywire’s own film critic (me) was in San Jose being scared out of his 10-year-old wits by the 7.1 Richter scale Bay Area earthquake.

39. Here’s a big surprise – when Michael Jackson was informed that his Thriller co-star Ola Ray had posed nude for Playboy in June 1980, Jackson confessed that he had never heard of the magazine.

40. Thanks to his background as an actor, Ronald Reagan is the only U.S. President to have ever worn a Nazi uniform.

41. Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket in Mel Stuart’s beloved Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), was offered a three-movie contract after the success of the film, but turned it down. He never acted again, and is now a veterinarian for large animals in rural New York state.

42. Mel Gibson is Empire magazine’s 12th greatest movie star of all time and 37th sexiest movie star ever, he was chosen numerous times as one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People (Sexiest Man Alive in 1985), and voted one of the Greatest Movie Stars of All Time by Entertainment Weekly. Despite all this, he met his wife through a dating service.

43. Contrary to popular belief, Angelina Jolie is actually not that attractive.

44. At one point, Jim Carrey and his family lived in a car and they all worked as janitors at a factory to make a living. As a child, Jim wore tap dancing shoes to bed, just in case his parents needed cheering up in the middle of the night.

45. The charming metal band Cannibal Corpse appeared in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) because they are Jim Carrey’s favorite band (!!).

46. Jim Carrey was Tupac Shakur’s favorite actor. While in prison, Carrey would write letters to Tupac to help him smile and laugh.

47. Tupac was cast in Menace II Society (1993) but was fired after a fist-fight with the film’s director, he auditioned for the part of Bubba in Forrest Gump (1994), and won a role in the film Woo (1998) but was shot and killed five days before filming began.

48. Brad Pitt’s first job was dancing in a chicken suit to attract customers to an El Pollo Loco restaurant on Sunset Blvd.

49. Okay, I made up number 8, 20, and 31, but they seem right, don’t they?

50. Everything else is true.

The term “soda water” was coined in 1798.

Botanically speaking, the banana is a herb and the tomato is a fruit.

Americans eat twice as much meat as Europeans, gobbling up some 50kg (110 lb) per capita.

China uses 45 billion chopsticks per year. 25 million trees are chopped down to make ‘em sticks.

The pull-ring tab was invented in 1962 and the re-sealable top in 1965.

Melba toast is named after Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba (1861-1931).

Maria Ann Smith introduced the Granny Smith apple in 1838.

The stay-on tab was invented in 1974.

The world’s oldest existing eatery opened in Kai-Feng, China in 1153.

Carrots have zero fat content.

The tall chef’s hat is called a toque.

The first European to encounter tea was the Portuguese Jesuit Jasper de Cruz in 1560.

Approximately one billion snails are served in restaurants annually.

The first cola-flavoured beverage was introduced in 1881.

Chocolate is the number one foodstuff flavour in the world, beating vanilla and banana by 3-to-1.

In the 1950’s some 80% of chickens in Europe and the US were free-ranging. By 1980, it was only 1%. Today, about 13% of chickens in the West are free-ranging.

The soda fountain was patented by Samuel Fahnestock in 1819, with the first bottled soda water available in 1835.

Tea is said to have been discovered in 2737 BC by a Chinese emperor when some tea leaves accidentally blew into a pot of boiling water.

Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John S. Pemberton in 1886.

The tea bag was introduced in 1908 by Thomas Sullivan of New York.

Plastic bottles were first used for soft drinks in 1970.

Coffee is the seed of a cherry from the tree genus Coffea

Over 90% of all fish caught are caught in the northern hemisphere.

Aluminum cans were introduced in 1957 and two years later the first diet cola was sold.

Over the last 40 years food production actually increased faster than population.

In 1929, the Howdy Company introduced its “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas,” which became 7 Up. 7 Up was invented by Charles Leiper Grigg.

Pepsi-Cola was invented by Caleb Bradham in 1890 as “Brad’s Drink” as a digestive aid and energy booster. In was renamed as Pepsi-Cola in 1898.

The first ice-cream soda was sold in 1874 in the US.

The scientific term for the common tomato is lycopersicon lycopersicum, which means “wolf peach.”

The first diet soft drink, called the “No-Cal Beverage” was launched in 1952.

The number of people who starved to death in the last 25 years of the 20th century is less than the number who starved to death in the last 25 years of the 19th century.

Forks, mostly being two-tined, used to known as “split spoons.”

An onion, apple and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavour are caused by their smell.

To make one kilo of honey bees have to visit 4 million flowers, traveling a distance equal to 4 times around the earth.

Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.

In September 1999 Dustin Philips of the US set a Guinness World Record by drinking a 400 ml (14-oz) bottle of tomato sauce through a straw in 33 seconds.

Wine is sold in tinted bottles because wine spoils when exposed to light.

The Polyethylene Terephthalate bottle was introduced in 1973.

Ice tea was introduced in 1904 at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Three quarters of fish caught are eaten – the rest is used to make things such as glue, soap, margarine and fertilizer.

In 1994, Chicago artist Dwight Kalb sent David Letterman a statue of Madonna, made of 180lb of ham.

An ounce of chocolate contains about 20 mg of caffeine.

Milk chocolate was invented by Daniel Peter, who sold the concept to his neighbour Henri Nestl¨¦.

Bananas consistently are the number one compliant of grocery shoppers. Most people complain when bananas are overripe or even freckled. The fact is that spotted bananas are sweeter, with a sugar content of more than 20%, compared with 3% in a green banana.

Vitamin A is known to prevent “night blindness,” and carrots are loaded with Vitamin A. One carrot provides more than 200% of recommended daily intake of Vitamin A.

There are more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes.

Watermelons are 97% water, lettuce 97%, tomatoes 95%, carrots 90%, and bread 30%.

Approximately 44 million tons of bananas are produced annually, compared to more than 60 million tomatoes. Apples are the third most popular (36 million tons), then oranges (34 million tons) and watermelons (22 million tons).

In the Middle Ages, sugar was a treasured luxury costing 9 times as much as milk.

Bananas are the world’s most popular fruit after tomatoes. In western countries, they could account for 3% of a grocer’s total sales.

The can opener was invented 48 years after cans were introduced.

TIP is the acronym for “To Insure Promptness.”

The world’s most expensive jam (jelly) is Confiture de groselles. It is a redcurrant jam (jelly) from a 14th century recipe made in the tiny French town of Bar-Le-Duc.

If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times faster than the population growth

More than 2500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products

The most expensive commercial ever made is one of the most famous. The famous ‘1984? Apple Macintosh commercial shown introducing Macintosh to the world, only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl. It was directed by Ridley Scott, and cost around $600,000 to $1 million to make. The commercial shows hundreds of people dressed in the same clothing going down dark hallways to a huge telescreen featuring Big Brother. A women in colored clothing (representing the creativity in Macintosh), runs down the hallway followed by the Thought Police. She hurls a sledge hammer at Big Brother and the screen explodes, while the drones look on with dropped jaws

4.5 million people have their health ‘adversely affected’ by air pollutants each year.

There are only four words in the English language which end in ‘-dous’: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

It took 1,175 animators working in Disney studios in Burbank, California, Orlando, Florida, and Paris, France to complete the animated Tarzan. Because of the time differences, production was able to occur around the clock for more than three years.

About 17% of humans are left handed. The same is true of chimpanzees and gorillas.

Pet superstores now sell about 40 percent of all pet food

One million Americans, about 3,000 each day, take up smoking each year. Most of them are children.

A man’s beard contains between 7000 and 15,000 hairs.

A hair is 70 per cent easier to cut when soaked in warm water for two minutes

During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble

4 million children die each year from inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn wood and Dung

Less than one per cent of the 500 Chinese cities have clean air, respiratory disease is China’s leading cause of death.

A beard grows an average of 140mm a year

Women’s hair is about half the diameter of men’s hair

One thing that humans do more than anything in their entire life is sleep. Most Americans sleep more than 6-8 hours a day, which is on average around 24 years of ones life!

In 1933, Mickey Mouse, an animated cartoon character, received 800,000 fan letters.

At – 40 degrees Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.

Less than 3% of Nestle’s sales are for chocolate. The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change

It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7% of the world’s population are drunk

The tip of a 1/3 inch long hour-hand on a wristwatch travels at 0.00000275 mph

4 million people die annually from diarrhea infections, caused by poor sanitary conditions

All consumption of alcohol is strictly regulated in Norway, and is only sold through state owned shops called Vinmonopolet. Nevertheless between 25 and 40 % of all alcohol consumed is either smuggled or illegally made at home

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag.

On an American one-dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the “1″ encased in the “shield” and a spider hidden in the front upper right-hand corner.

One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.

In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.

The United States Government keeps its supply of silver at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York.
The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.

52% of Americans drink coffee.

27% of Americans believe we never landed on the moon.

A Californian doctor has set the record of eating 17 bananas in two minutes.

Approximately 35 million Americans are linked by blood to one (or more) of the 102 pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620.

There are five US states with no sales tax. They are: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

Alaska is the state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work.

It was once illegal to take a bath in the wintertime in Indiana.

Ohio is the birthplace of more Presidents than any other state – eight.

Adding sugar to coffee is believed to have started in 1715, in the court of King Louis XIV, the French monarch.

According to an Old English system of time units, a moment is considered to be one and a half minutes.

According to a recent survey, more Americans lose their virginity in June than any other month.

According to a global survey in 1997 by Durex Condoms Canadians are the world’s fourth worst lovers. The worst three slots belong to South Africa, Russia, and Poland.

Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.

Abraham Lincoln’s ghost is said to haunt the White House.

Abraham Lincoln had to go across the street to the War Department to get news from the battlefield because there was no telegraph in the White House.

About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they’re still sitting on it.

About 80% of the city was burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

About 75% of the people in the U.S. live on 2% land.

About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money.

About 55% of all movies are rated R. About 500 movies are made in the US and 800 in India annually.

About 24% of the total ground area of Los Angeles is said to be committed to automobiles.

About 200,000,000 M&Ms are sold each day in the United States.

Abe Lincoln’s mother died when the family dairy cow ate poisonous mushrooms and Ms. Lincoln drank the milk.