This article has some pretty interesting information on the roots of the written symbols &, #, !, $, and =.

For instance the question mark:

Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio – meaning “question” – at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem – readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Have you ever noticed that whenever they mention a phone number in movies or TV the number starts with 555? According Wikipedia many 555 numbers are reserved specifically for this purpose.

Here is a site dedicated to collecting the 555 phone numbers of different TV and movies characters. It is “mind-numbingly comprehensive”.

Here are some examples:

• Frasier’s Radio Show:  555-KACL
• Ghostbusters: 555-2020
• Jerry Seinfeld: 555-2390
• Homer Simpson (work): 555-7334

National Geographic has this short article about a festival during which people line their babies up to have men jump over them.

El Salto del Colacho, Spanish for “the devil’s jump,” is said to cleanse the babies of the “original sin” of conception and protect them from illness. The babies, born in the last twelve months, are dressed in their best clothes and laid on mattresses in the streets. Men dressed as devils, often carrying whips and truncheons, jump over babies by the dozen.

This is a photo and article about a road in the states that was died red after:

A tractor trailer carrying dye intended for mulch deposited some of its cargo on the highway after the load shifted.

Apparently the dye was easily washed off of the cars (the local car wash made some good money) and came off of the road pretty quickly too.

I can think of two places in Cape Town where paint spills have marked the road for years. I actually quite like coming around the corner and seeing the paint – it reminds me of good times.

According the this article, surnames in China are restricted. The result is that 85% of the 1.3 billion inhabitants share just 100 surnames. For instance there are 93 million people with the surname Wang!

Apparently the law is now being opened a little to reduce some of the resulting confusion.