Random Thursday

This week in Weird But True we learn a bit of a mish-mash of facts from Leslie Gilbert Elman on a variety of things. After skimming the facts briefly before this post it looks like half of it continues currency before moving onto a reading/literature type theme.

(image borrowed from Lakeshore Learning)

The U.S. Mint produced 3.548 billion circulating coins in 2009; 2.354 billion of those were pennies.

FUN FACT: Pennies contain more zinc than copper whereas nickels contain more copper than nickel.

So...the majority coins produced are pennies...which is basically the coin that gets used less because all those vending machines won't take them.

(image borrowed from Wikipedia)

In February of 2010, the general manager of a mint in Chile was fired because thousands of fifty-peso coins had "Chile" spelled "Chiie." Though the coins were actually put into circulation in 2008 and it took two years to find the mistake.

That's just weird! But oddly, I would sooooo want a coin with a misspelled word on it! Think of the collectors value! Lol!

(image borrowed from Everything Everywhere Travel)

Andorra is a small town in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. This little principality has a literacy rate of 100%! The entire country encompasses just over 180 miles with fewer than 85,000 people living here.

Again, let's note my little book here was published in 2010, so these numbers could be different now!

(image borrowed from The National)

The most popular reality TV show in the Arab world is Million's Poet...think American Idol but for poets! Yes, here we have aspiring poets who read their poetry in front of judges and the TV broadcast and then viewers from home vote for their favorites until 1 winner remains. The winner receives a cash prize of 5 million dirhams, which is about $1.4 million dollars.

How cool is that?! But also, how nerve wracking to be voted on YOUR OWN words! And in front of live television?! EEK!

(image borrowed from Wikipedia Commons)

The longest poem in the world is still a work in progress and it continues to grow every day but about 4,000 verses. Andrei Gheorghe, a Romanian web developer, takes random tweets from Twitter and pairs them into rhyming couplets that get added to his collective work titled "The Longest Poem in the World."

But yet...when will it end?!