Useless facts

Apricot pits can be fatal if ingested. The pit contains cyanogenetic glycosides, which are converted into cyanide upon digestion!

The uncooked sprouts that sometimes appear on potatoes are toxic, and though the toxicity level is low for adults, young children have died from ingesting them.

"The custom of driving on the left or right side of the road varies from country to country, and its origins predate the invention of the automobile. During the 1700s, in England, horse-drawn coaches were the main mode of transportation for urban dwellers. British coachmen used to sit on a seat on the right side of the carriage. If the coach traveled down the right side of the road, the coachman's whip would have struck pedestrians strolling along the adjacent sidewalk. By keeping to the left, the coachman had room to use his whip and the pedestrians were safe. The coach drivers could just as easily have sat on the left side and driven on the right, but that is not the way it turned out."

Another version is that most men being right handed therefore having a right handed sword arm, drove on the left so the could easily repel Highwaymen, vagabonds and ner-do-wells. Also apparently true in Japan, popularised by the Samurai.

Odds are that if you had a touch of what you thought was the flu or "a bug", and you had a headache, accompanied by diarrhea or vomiting, it was not the flu, but food poisoning. The flu is a virus and its typical symptoms are more respiratory in nature.

Each year, roughly one third of the U.S. population will get noticeable food poisoning and mistakenly call it the "stomach flu".  The most common cause of the "stomach flu" is salmonella poisoning, the symptoms of which can appear from several hours to even a few days after the tainted food is consumed, and is most often "self inflicted". Most likely causes: undercooked meat, cross contamination when uncooked meats and raw veggies share the same cutting board, etc.

In 1659, Massachusetts made celebrating Christmas illegal as pronounced by the Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony-----

 "For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county."