I Didn't Know Zat! # 8

1. The brand ‘walkman’ belongs to the electronics giant Sony.

2. Stepehen Hawking, the famous Astrophysicist, suffers from a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease.

3. Lalu Prasad Yadav belongs to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).

4. We normally relate a lexicographer with Dictionaries, for a lexicographer is a person who is an editor of a dictionary.

5. Georges Lemaitre first put forward the Big Bang Theory.

I Didn't Know Zat! # 7

1. John F Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his book 'Profiles In Courage' and is the only US president to do so.

2. Wings, a 1927 silent movie about World War I fighter pilots, is the only silent movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

3. There are exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (approx. Forty Three Quintillion) permutations for a Rubik's Cube!

4. Bock's Car is the name of the US Army Air Forces B-29 Bomber that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

5. Indiana Jones was named after George Lucas' pet dog.

I Didn't Know Zat! # 6

1. The name Polo is derived from the Tibetan word "pulu", meaning ball.

2. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named the Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010. He is the second youngest person to get this distinction after Charles Lindbergh, the first Man of the Year back in 1927.

3. The Wikileaks website claims to have been "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa" back in 2006.

4. 14 one-year calendars make a Perpetual calendar.

5. Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein' had the subtitle 'Or The Modern Prometheus'.

I Didn't Know Zat! # 5

1. Harshavardhan Navathe was the first to bag the Rs. 1,00,00,000 prize money on quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati.

2. Kung Fu is a colloquial chinese term that literally means 'hard work.'

3. Europe has no deserts.

4. The seven rays in the Statue of Liberty’s crown represent the Earth’s seven seas and continents.

5. The first 6 planets - from Mercury to Saturn have no "Official Discoverers"!

I Didn't Know Zat! # 4

1. Scooby-Doo was named after a scat-style phrase at the end of Frank Sinatra's song 'Strangers in the Night', which contained the phrase "dooby-doo".

2. Arcelor - the steel company that Mittal Steel took over was formed out of the merger of Arbed from Luxembourg, Usinor from France and Aceralia from Spain.

3. "Fischer chess" is a variant of standard chess wherein the pieces are placed on the board in random order before the game starts.

4. In June 1869, Thomas Alva Edison was granted his first patent (#90,646), for an electric voting machine.

5. Alexander Graham Bell's preferred salutation was "Ahoy-Hoy" instead of Hello.

I Didn't Know Zat! # 3

1. New Zealand was the only team that went through the 2010 Football World Cup undefeated.

2. The guillotine was invented by Dr.Antoine Louis, secretary of the College of Surgeons. It was initially called Louisette or Louison, before being named guillotine for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who recommended its use.

3. The newton, named after the physicist Isaac Newton, is approximately the force exerted by gravity on an apple at the Earth’s surface.

4. Henry Ford is the only American mentioned in Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf”.

5. Before being renamed, Melbourne used to be known as Batmania - after one, John Batman who settled there in 1835.

I Didn't Know Zat! # 2

As a measure to make the blog more attractive, I will make an attempt to add more visuals along with the dry facts! The "I Didn't Know Zat!" series will continue till April 1.

1. The Pope travels in his special aircraft, The "Shepherd One".

2. The Slogan of the infamous Ku Klux Klan is "America's Oldest Civil Rights Organization."

3. Tea parties weren't invented until the 1830s; which means the 1773 Boston Tea Party wasn't known by that name until more than 60 years after the event. At the time it was referred to as "the destruction of the tea".

4. There are only 180 geo-stationary spots available for satellites orbitting Earth.

5. The term "Middle East" was coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US navy officer and geostrategist.