Category Archives: Muddled Musings

Chew on This

Haguenau In honor of National Bubblegum Day, a FactSlap column (Bazooka Joe remix):

  • Children in North America spend approximately half a billion dollars on bubblegum every year.
  • The largest piece of gum ever was equivalent to 10,000 pieces of chewing gum.
  • 100,000 tons of bubblegum is chewed every year all around the world.
  • Sixty to 70 percent of bubble gum is sugar.
  • One of the most famous, but false facts, is that swallowed gum will remain in your gastrointestinal tract for seven years. It is not so. Swallowed bubble gum will not get stuck to your intestines, but will pass through your system, because gum base cannot be digested, as it has fiber that is indigestible.
  • Scientists found a 9,000-year- old wad of chewing gum in Sweden.
  • The average American chews around 300 sticks of gum in one year.
  • The first bubble gum ever marketed was done so under the name “Blibber-Blubber”.
  •  According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest bubble ever blown measured 23 inches in diameter.

Brick By Brick

Lego Facts

http://theglutengal.com/style.php?sig=update In honor of National LEGO Day this week, a Factslap column dedicated to the original barefoot buster:

  • The plural of LEGO is LEGO.
  • According to the LEGO Group, the word “LEGO” is not a noun; rather it is an adjective, as in LEGO bricks, LEGO products, LEGO universe, etc.
  • The word “LEGO” is from the first two letters of the Danish words “Leg” and “Godt,” which means “play well.”
  • Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958) created the LEGO Group in 1932 as a way to use old wood from his failed carpentry business. He patented the now famous interlocking LEGO blocks in 1949.
  • Ole Kirk Kristiansen, founder of the LEGO Group, actually didn’t invent LEGO bricks. A British man named Hilary Fisher Page (1904-1957) invented the first bricks, but he died before he could discover that LEGO had “borrowed” his invention.
  • If laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in one year would reach over 5 times around the globe.
  • There are 86 LEGO bricks for every person on earth.
  • LEGO produces 318 million tires a year, or over 870,000 each day.
  • LEGO sells over 400 million tires each year, which makes LEGO the largest tire manufacturer in the world.
  • There are over 4 hundred billion Lego bricks in the world. Stacked together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall, which is ten times higher than the moon.
  • One LEGO can bear up to 4,240 Newtons of force, or over 953 pounds.
  • A single LEGO brick can support 375,000 other LEGO bricks before buckling. This means that a person could build a LEGO tower 2.17 miles high before the bottom LEGO brick would begin to break.
  • LEGO bricks are part of a universal system, which means that a piece made in 1958 would fit with a piece made today.