In most workplaces, looking at meeting notes hardly qualifies as a pleasurable activity. Well, at Small Planet Supply we can hardly wait to open our weekly meeting summaries because our Tumwater Sales Associate, Taylor Groebner, livens them up with some interesting and (sometimes weird) fun facts. If you’re one of our USA customers, you’ve probably already been treated to Taylor’s cheerful (and efficient) demeanor. But if you haven’t, these Fun Fact excerpts from her meeting notes will make your day. It certainly has made ours!

Canada & USA:

• Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada.  

• Canada is the World’s Most Educated Country; over half its residents have college degrees.

• Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world’s lakes combined.

• New York City was the first capital city of the US, from 1785-1790.

• Chicago is the birthplace of the first ever Ferris wheel. It was 264 feet tall and debuted in 1893.

• Harvard was the first university founded (1636) in the United States 

States and Provinces:

• It is illegal to build, maintain, or use a nuclear weapon within Chico, California city limits.

• We know that kids can be annoying but please remember that in Florida it is a felony to sell your children. You’ve been warned.

• Idaho is the only state to have an active ban on cannibalism. Technically it is not a crime in the rest of the nation.

• According to Alberta's Health and Safety Code, it is against the law to paint a wooden ladder. The reason: to avoid disguising the condition of a shoddy ladder that's been made to look new thanks to a coat of paint.

Thanksgiving:

• A Thanksgiving mix-up inspired the first TV dinners. In 1953, a Swanson employee accidentally ordered a colossal shipment of Thanksgiving turkeys (260 tons, to be exact). To get rid of them all, salesman Gerry Thomas took inspiration from the prepared foods served on airplanes. He came up with the idea of filling 5,000 aluminum trays with the turkey – along with cornbread dressing, gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes to round out the meal. The 98-cents meals were a hit, especially with kids and increasingly busy households.

• Only male turkeys actually gobble. If you learned in preschool that a turkey goes "gobble, gobble," that's only about half true. Only male turkeys — appropriately named gobblers — actually make the sound. Female turkeys cackle instead.

• The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was originally called the "Macy's Christmas Parade" to kick off the holiday shopping season. Held in 1924, the first parade included a menagerie of circus mainstays, including monkeys, bears, camels, and elephants, all borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, instead of the traditional character balloons.

Dogs (Real Animals):

• Yawning is contagious—even for dogs. Research shows that the sound of a human yawn can trigger one from a dog. And it’s four times as likely to happen when it’s the yawn of a person he knows.

• When a dog is carefully choosing the perfect place to do his business, it is because they prefer to go poop in alignment with the Earth’s North-South magnetic axis. Scientists have no theories as to why yet.

• Dogs are not colorblind. They also see blue and yellow.

• The term “dog days” has nothing to do with dogs. It dates back to Roman times, when it was believed that Sirius, the Dog Star, added its heat to that of the sun from July 3 to August 11, creating exceptionally high temperatures. 

Imaginary Animals:

• The unicorn is the National Animal of Scotland.

• A mermaid documentary fooled so many people that the U.S. Government had to issue a statement to correct the confusion.

Work and Commuting Life:

• In Japan, napping on the job is honorable. To take it from one New York Times report, in Japan, napping on the job is seen as a sign of diligence—it’s seen as though you’re working yourself to exhaustion. There’s even a word for it: inemuri, which roughly translates to “present while sleeping.” Inemuri isn’t new by any means; it’s been around for more than 1,000 years. However, it’s usually only cool in white-collar jobs; you won’t find a barista napping on the clock. Also, inemuri isn’t only limited to work. It’s common (and totally normal) to sleep in public: in coffee shops, in stores, on trains and buses.

• Tailgating doesn’t speed up your commute. Research out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2017 suggests that if we all keep an equal distance (similar to how birds in flocks fly), we’d get to our destinations twice as fast. The study confirmed that maintaining an equal distance between cars on either end of you gets you to your destination significantly faster than if you tailgate the car in front of you.

Others Too Good Not to Add:

• The blob of toothpaste that you squeeze on your toothbrush has a name: a ‘nurdle’.

• Beauty and the Beast was written to help girls accept arranged marriages.

• The German word “kummerspeck” means weight gained from emotional eating. It literally translates to “grief bacon” or “sorrow fat.”

• In some Spanish-speaking countries, Tuesday the 13th is considered bad luck. Tuesday is feared because it is the day of the week associated with the Roman god of war, Mars. There is a cautionary saying: "On Tuesdays- don't get married, don't take a trip, and don't leave your home."