If you get off on this sort of thing you'd like watching comic panel show BBC's "QI" (Quite Interesting) hosted by Stephen Fry. Early series DVDs can be rented at Scarecrow Video.

Hard boiled is a favorable effect if you like egg salad.

I read 2,201 Fascinating Facts by David Louis about a dozen times when I was a teenager. Although time has shown that a few of these "facts" were not actually facts, the book has served me well over the years as I managed to retain much of the most obscure information from that book to be brought up at the most opportune times.

I love books like that! Just to randomly dip into them and find out something odd...

Great bathroom book!

The next 6 seasons of Mythbusters just wrote themselves.

@1 yes! "They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58rbknKBJ…

And what a great find, Mr. K. Because Stimpson donated his papers to the U. of Iowa, they maintain an info page on him:

In 1922 he worked on the Valparaiso Messenger before moving to Washington, where he became a correspondent for several newspapers, including the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Houston, Texas, Chronicle. He worked for a while at the Washington Herald.
He was the author of a syndicated column "Information Roundup," and became an expert on Shakespeare and the Bible, as well as American history and politics. He was also an associate editor of the weekly magazine Pathfinder. He was elected president of the National Press Club in 1935.
He wrote ten informational books. He intended to write a trilogy of books about America comprised of A Book About American History, A Book About American Politics, and A Book About American Government. He was working on this last book in September 1952 when he died at the age of fifty-five. He had been in poor health with a bad heart and diabetes and had been virtually blind for about a year at the time of his death.

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/MSC/T…

And the vintage New York Times review of this book opened:

George Stimpson, an Iowa farm boy who became a Washington newspaper correspondent and president of the National Press Club, collects facts with the same zeal with which some men collect stamps, match covers or dollars. With a "curiosity" more insatiable than that of the elephant's child he has spent much of his life asking questions and finding answers. With omnivorous and voracious hunger he has gathered unto himself information upon a hundred subjects without apparent order, plan or discrimination. The trivial and useless seem to interest him as much as the fundamental and important, the odd and fascinating as much as the dull and obvious. Examples of all these varieties may be found in Mr. Stimpson's "A
Book About a Thousand Things."

The PI used to post a syndicated daily column on the comics page that was short blurs on obscure "facts". Many of which would turn out not to be facts, but you know how pop culture gets all honey badger about the truth.

Oh man! We had that book in my house growing up - I liked the explanations of why watch hands were always at a certain time in advertisements. One theory was that it was time a certain watch maker heard about the death of Lincoln.

Honey Badgers is good eating.

Cause the honey makes em sweeter.

The Constitution follows the American flag— sometimes. The little red school-house follows it always.

In these degenerate days, cold-hearted, unsentimental vandals have advocated painting the little school-house in more subdued colors. They even have accomplished their diabolic purpose here and there over this fair land of ours, but they never can quite conceal the historic fact that the cornerstone of our national progress has been painted red, so far back in the dim and misty past that the memory of man dare not tackle the problem of when and where it was anything but red... The school-house at Deadwood was an especially diminutive and more than usually glaring specimen of the genus. It was a crude one-story structure with an abundance of small, square-paned...
An answer of sorts from Trusty Five-Fifteen by George Frank Lydston, 1921

That too was exactly why barns were painted red. Red ochre was super cheap back in the oldentimedays.