Yep, loads. including a few specifically aimed at armadillos.

• Elephants are the only land mammal that cannot jump.
• The Eiffel Tower in Paris weighs over 1000 elephants.
• A crocodile can’t stick its tongue out.
• A shrimp’s heart is in its head.
• A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule won’t.
• In the state of Minnesota, citizens may not enter Wisconsin with a chicken on their head.
• Polar bear livers are poisonous because they contain too much vitamin C.
• Polar bears are all left handed.
• A study conducted in Germany appears to show listening to loud rock music causes homosexuality in rats.
• Contray to the phrase “sweating like a pig”, pigs can’t actually sweat.
• A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. - Recently disproved slightly
• All porcupines float in water.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
• It’s possible to lead a cow upstairs … but not downstairs.
• A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
• If someone places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
• A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
• Sharks never get sick, they are immune to all known diseases.
• Goats and octopus’ eyes have rectangular pupils.
• The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
• Apart from humans, dolphins are the only animal that has sex for fun.
• Apart from humans, certain species of chimpanzee are the only animals to experiment sexually. They have been known to ‘wife swap’ and indulge in group sex.
• Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can’t find any food.
• A cockroach will live nine days without it’s head before it starves to death.
• The female preying mantis devours her partner while they’re mating or she might rip his head off before because he cannot ‘perform’ with his head is attached to his body.
• In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.
• Rats and horses can’t vomit.
• Most lipstick contains fish scales.
• In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.

Armadillos… crunchy on the outside, squidgy on the inside.

• Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
• Armadillos have four babies at a time. They are perfect quadruplets.
• Armadillos can walk underwater.
• If disconnected, the sex organs of an armadillo are still active.
• When an armadillo is frightened it jumps straight into the air.
• Most armadillos seen dead on the road did not get hit by the wheels.
• Armadillos have a very low need of oxygen. Even when burrowing they can stop breathing for 6 minutes.

The lazy yanks. When we invaded in the late 18th Century, our cash was particularly useless. The nearest money oriented society… no, not the Canadians, but the Spanish.

Spanish pesos were also called piastres, pieces of eight… and Dollars… pieces of eight incidentally, worth eight reales… A one-real coin was made by cutting pieces of eight into 8 bits, a quarter is worth 2 bits… oh American slang.

Back to Dollars. The first U.S. specific dollar, in 1794, it was the same in weight and value, oh and had the same name as the Spanish equivalent. Since three of the four names for the Spanish dollar start with a ‘p’, pluralised with an ‘s’ It was common to write this for the U.S. version. As time progressed, the ‘s’ moved up to a superscipt position and when writing fast, and with a sloppy hand, one tended to transpose the characters over each other, if you reduce the ‘p’ to a single stroke, you end up with an ‘s’ with the line through it.

Pretty crap really…. true though, check a book called "A History of Mathematical Notations, Volume II: Notations Mainly in Higher Mathematics" by Florian Cajori.

There are several other explanations, like it’s an adaptation of the digit ‘8’ meaning 8 reales… but the best one I heard is so patriotic I want to cry… Its a thin ‘u’ transposed over a fat ‘S’ standing for United States. Schmucks.

The name dollar derives from the Dutch or Low German word daler (in German taler or thaler) - originally Joachimstaler, referring to a coin from the silver mines of Joachimstal, in Bohemia (now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic), which opened in 1516… the origin of the silver used to make Spanish Dollars.

Whats all the fuss about the joining the EMU and having a single European currency? The truth is that us Brits are still using the original single currency brought over when the Romans invaded.

See, before the Romans brought us money, we had a bartering system… great if you had a couple hours, but basically you couldn’t line the pockets of judges with 3 chickens, a goat, and an hour with your sister now could you.

The Libra Pondo was a pound in weight of precious metal. Funnily enough the Romans chopped that up into 40 gold coins for ease of spending… oh and pocket lining. Both the Lira (the original and still current roman/Italian currency) and the British pound are denoted by a fancy capital ‘L’. The British Pound is a little more fancy though.

Funnily enough, the origin of the word quid… appears to stem from the Latin phrase ‘quid pro quo’ meaning to give something in return for something else… all British currency notes are promissory notes… they all have written on them 'I promise to pay the bearer the sum of X pounds'… I’m surprised though, that with all that tradition, Italian notes today don’t say 'I promise to pay the bearer cock all unless you bring MCMXXXIV mates'