In 2007, Scotland spent £125,000 devising a new national slogan. The winning entry was: “Welcome to Scotland.”
100 Mind-Blowing Spent Facts
The Guinness World Record for the longest time spent searching for the Loch Ness Monster is held by Steve Feltham, who camped at Loch Ness for 25 years.
There was a snail glued to a specimen card in the British Museum mid-1800s. It spent four years glued there before scientists realized it was still alive.
The longest time someone has spent holding their breath underwater is 24 minutes and 37 seconds.
Apollo 11 astronauts spent weeks in quarantine at NASA HQ following their landmark trip to and from the moon, where they dined on a range of Stouffer’s entrées, sides and desserts.
The book 3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan notes that when Miles Davis moved to New York City at 18, he spent his first few weeks attending classes at Julliard and going to Harlem to see performances at Minton’s Playhouse and the Savoy Ballroom, as well as clubs on 52nd Street.
The shortest war in history lasted 38 minutes. When the sultan of British-protected Zanzibar died and a new one took over without British approval in 1896, the Brits were not happy. Tension escalated when Sultan Khalid bin Barghash refused to step down, but the British warships spent less than 40 minutes bombarding the palace before Khalid fled, marking the (very quick) end of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.
A cat spends on average 15 hours a day sleeping (jealous). This means the majority of its life is spent asleep.
Netflix spent $0 on marketing its DVD rental business, but over 6 million people still used it. Remember how compact disks feel in your hand? The frustration of wiping it clean when it starts to skip? Nowadays, it’s all Netflix and chill. However, one of the coolest fun facts about Netflix is how it owned the marketing game in 2014. Despite spending nothing on marketing, sales for DVD rentals soared at an all-time high that year.
The average person spends 6 months of their life waiting for traffic lights to turn green. The average waiting time spent at a stoplight is 75 seconds. This also accounts for 20% of all driving time.
There is a bridge made especially for squirrels. This was built to give the small creatures a safe pathway to use to cross the N44 motorway. Officials from the Netherlands spent approximately 120,000 pounds on this project. Only five squirrels were able to use this bridge.
The CIA spent 25 million dollars on “spy cats.” In the 1960s, the CIA tried using cats to gather intel on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. They equipped cats with a batter, microphone and antenna to record data. You can guess how that turned out.
The shortest war in history lasted less than an hour. When the sultan of Zanzibar died and a new one took over without British approval in 1896, the Brits saw it as disrespect. When the unofficially appointed Sultan Khalid bin Barghash refused to step down, British warships spent 38 minutes bombing the palace before Khalid fled. This marked the end of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.
A man reached level 90 in World of Warcraft without leaving the starting zone, ever. The player Double agent spent 173.5 days mining and picking herbs for XP. Technically, he was stuck in the Wandering Isles for life – he couldn’t even play PvP since you’d need to have a faction for that.
He spent his time in prison reading, writing, and participating in religious activities.
The film’s screenplay went through multiple revisions. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian spent several years working on the script, refining and capturing the essence of the story.
The first rap song to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song was Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” It rapidly became one of Eminem’s most successful singles, staying at the top of the charts for 23 weeks running (that in itself won the song a Guinness World Record!). Eminem didn’t attend the Academy Awards as he thought he wouldn’t win, so instead spent the evening at home sleeping and watching cartoons with his daughter. One of his producers ended up accepting the award on Eminem’s behalf.
Roosters have built-in earplugs, so they don’t deafen themselves when they crow. Anyone who’s ever spent a night outside the city knows one thing, and that’s the fact that roosters are loud! Researchers measured how loud roosters do crow and found them to be as loud as 140 decibels – well over the amount needed to cause permanent ear damage and even deafness. When they studied what happens when roosters crow, they discovered that in opening their jaw to crow, their outer ear canals close up, essentially giving them natural earplugs.
Since the launch of the popular mobile game, Candy Crush, in 2012, players have spent a total of 73 billion hours (equivalent to 8.3 million years) playing this game.
Monthly Amazon Web Visits Reach 2.9 billion. How many times have you signed into your Amazon account this month? Shopping on Amazon was already hot before the pandemic struck. Amazon’s monthly visitor totals averaged around 2.5 billion in September 2021 alone. That number rose to 2.8 billion in October and 2.9 billion in November. During these virtual visits, browsers spent around 7 minutes perusing more than 9 pages of products each before they finally made buying decisions. Amazon recommendations help drive sales, as do positive and negative reviews from shoppers. The addition of the membership program Amazon Prime to the consumer shopping experience has further boosted visitor numbers seeking membership perks.
Amazon Prime Members Stats Just Keep Climbing. Launched as a membership service for Amazon patrons in 2005, Prime boasts 214.43 million international users and remains the most-visited U.S. multi-platform in the U.S., serving 98 million active users every month. Niches driving Prime traffic are Amazon Music (16.46 million users) and Prime Video (46.3 million). Members spent $1400 annually on goods and services driven by offers of discounted pricing and free shipping. Expanding its media influence, Amazon Studios has begun to rack up Emmy Award nominations for original productions available only to members. During Covid lockdowns, an estimated 37% of Prime members bought food and beverages from Amazon.
An average 21-year-old has spent 5,000 hours playing video games. These days, by 21, you’ll have also sent 250,000 emails and texts and spent 10,000 hours on a cell phone. That’s a lot of time!
An estimated $1-$3 is spent per year by each taxpayer to remove graffiti.
Absent monarch. Richard the Lionheart only spent six months of his ten-year reign in England.
Christmas is cancelled. A Christmas-themed one from the brilliant Joanna McCunn on that old chestnut, did Cromwell ban Christmas… In 1644 the Puritan parliament declared every last Wednesday of the month would be a legally mandated fast day. Christmas Day fell on the last Wednesday of the month so no feasting was to be allowed that year. Time should be spent in even more solemn humiliation, repenting of your sins for making Christmas a time of carnal and sensual delights in the past. In 1647 they went the whole hog, banning all celebrations of Christmas and Easter for good! (Charles II reversed this when he came to the throne in 1660).
We can thank Albert Einstein for a lot of our current understanding of the physics of time. Rather than viewing time as a set order, he proved that it’s relative. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, there’s an inverse relationship between your speed and the speed of time. The faster you move, the slower time moves. This is why someone blasting through space will age slower than the people still hanging out on Earth: Astronaut Scott Kelly was born several minutes after his twin brother, Mark, but after Scott spent 340 days living on the International Space Station, he returned to Earth around an extra 5 milliseconds younger than his “big” brother. Had Scott been travelling at a speed close to the speed of light, that age difference would have become much more pronounced.
88 per cent of companies spent more than $1 million preparing for the GDPR. (IT Governance)
In 2020, tech giant Apple spent a jaw-dropping $237.15 million to advertise its products on YouTube. Guess that explains why their products aren’t cheap!