Chewy

Money

The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.

If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.

A million dollars' worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb).

One million dollars' worth of once-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.

TIP is the acronym for "To Insure Promptness."

The term "Blue Chip" comes from the colour of the poker chip with the highest value, blue.

Nessie, the Loch Ness monster is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason - Nessie is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism.

Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.

Annual global spending on education is $80 billion.

US and European expenditure on pet food is $17 billion per year.

The global expenditure on healthcare and nutrition is $13 billion.

Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.

In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period. The wood notes came in $1, $5 and $10 values.

The world's largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500.

The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.

About 30% of consumers use their credit card as their main means of buying Christmas goodies, 70% do not save to buy Christmas gifts and 86% of consumers do their Christmas shopping during December.

Excessive use of credit is cited as a major cause of non-business bankruptcy, second only to unemployment.

Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.

Iraq is the 6th largest oil supplier to the US.

The investing term "Blue Chip" derives from the colour of the highest value of poker chip, blue.

In the 1400s, global income rose only 0,1% per year; today it often tops 5%.

The average age of Forbes's 400 wealthiest individuals is 63.

In 1955 the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap.

The richest woman today is Liliane Bettencourt, the daughter of L'Oreal's founder. She has a net worth of $14 billion (depending on how the stock market did today).

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is the second wealthiest woman, with $5,2 billion.

Queen Elizabeth II is the 10th wealthiest woman in the world.

The term "smart money" refers to gamblers who have inside information or have arranged a fix, the gambling term for insuring the outcome of an event by illegal methods.

Small-time gamblers who place small bet in order to prolong the excitement of a game are called "dead fish" by game operators because the longer the playing time, the greater the chances of losing.

In gambling language, for a gambling house a "sure-thing" is a wager that a player has little chance of winning; "easy money" is their profit from an inexperienced bettor, an unlucky player is called a "stiff."

Australians are the heaviest gamblers in the world; an estimated 82% of Australians bet. That is twice as much per capita as Europeans or Americans. Yet, Australia, with less than 1% of the world population, has 20% of the world's poker machines.

There are more than 7 million millionaires in the world.

80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.

In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930, now struggling to reach $400 per ounce.

If Los Angeles County was a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world.

If California was a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world.

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year - about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth.

The 200 richest people in the world doubled their worth in the 4 years ending 1998.

In 1965, CEOs earned on average 44 times more than factory workers. In 1998, CEOs earned on average 326 times more than factory workers and in 1999, they earned 419 times more than factory workers.

The income gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest measured by average national income per head increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1998.

A third of the world's people live on less than $2 a day, with 1,2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.

In the 17th century, wool fabrics accounted for about two-thirds of England's foreign trade. Today, the leading wool producers are Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and China.

The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.

In 1990, the word "recession" appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.

Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.

Tourism is the world's biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.

In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

Movies and TV

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in 1926 in Soho, London. Ten years later there were only 100 TV sets in the world.

Today there are almost a billion TV sets in the world.

China has the most TV sets (200 million).

US citizens watch the most TV. By age 65, an American would have watched the equivalent of 9 years uninterrupted screening, viewing more than 20,000 TV commercials per year.

In the US there are more TV sets than telephones.

The first TV interview was made with Irish actress Peggy O'Neil in April 1930.

The first daily broadcast was started by the BBC in November 1936.

The first TV commercial was a 20-second ad for a Bulova clock, broadcasted by WNBT, New York during a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies in July 1941.Bulova paid $9 for that first TV spot. Bulova also was the first watch in space.

The first regular TV soap was DuMont TV's A Woman to Remember, which began its run in February 1947.

The first televised sporting event was a Japanese elementary school baseball game, broadcast in September 1931.

The world's first TV news helicopter was introduced by KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles on 4 July 1958.

In "Father of the Bride", Annie and Bryan marry on January 6. But in the opening montage of "Father of the Bride 2" there is a framed invitation of their wedding which states that they were married on October 9.

Towards the end of the Forrest Gump, Forrest narrates that his wife died on a Saturday. When he is at her grave in the next scene, the tomb stone shows her passing on March 22, 1982, which is a Monday.

STAR TREK's Captain James T. Kirk's middle name is Tiberius.

The largest movie theatre in the world, Radio City Music Hall in New York, opened in 1932 - it seats almost 6,000 people.

The first film animation was "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" made in 1906 by American J. Stuart Blacton.

In 1919, 18-year-old Walt Disney teamed up with Ub Iwerks, to produce a series of cartoons entitled "Alice in Cartoonland."

The Walt Disney company was founded in 1923, and in 1927 Walt came up with the idea for an animated mouse called Mortimer Mouse. His wife Lillian convinced him to change it to Mickey Mouse.

In 1937 Disney won a special Oscar for the first full-length animation: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, created Tom and Jerry in 1939.

The first Best Picture Oscar for an animation was awarded in 1991 for Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

Mel Blanc, who played the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots.

Jack Mercer was the voice of Popeye the Sailor for 45 years.

The video recording machine was invented by the Ampex corporation of California in 1956. The first video recorder, the Ampex VR1000, stood 1,1 m (3 ft 3 in) high and weighed as much as a small car: 665 kg (1,466 lb).

The home video recorder was introduced in 1972 by Philips of the Netherlands.

Japanese company JVC introduced the VHS system in 1976.

About 80% of VCRs are made by Japanese companies.

The first pop video was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, released in 1975.

On average, a movie makes about 5 times more from its video sales than ticket takings.

About one quarter of movie videos sold are animations.

In the 1926 film version of Don Juan actor Lionel Barrymore set the record for the most kisses ever in a single film. Barrymore embraced Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor 127 times.

The longest kiss in a movie is in Andy Warhol's Kiss. Rufus Collins and Naomi Levine kissed for the entire 50 minutes of the movie.

The first porn movie was the 1908 Fench film al'Ecu d'or oula bonne auberge, a French film made in 1908.

The first movie to use sound was "The Jazz Singer," released in 1927: the first words, spoken by Al Jolson, were: "Wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet."

The 1967 Russian movie War and Peace had 120,000 extras. The South Korean movie Monster Wang-magwi from the same year featured 157,000 extras. The 1945 German movie Kolberg had 187,000 and the movie with the most extras, the 1982 British movie Gandhi, featured 300,000 extras.