The word "whiskey" comes from the Gaelic term "usquebaugh," which translates as "water of life."

Baseball may be America's favorite pastime, but it's certainly not the country's favorite spectator sport. In a 2004 survey, 10 percent of Americans reported that they most liked to watch baseball. Basketball was chosen as the top spectator sport by 14 percent of Americans, and football was picked by 37 percent.

Never heard of the Chicago Stags (founded 1946) or the Chicago Zephyrs (founded 1962)? That's probably because they weren't very good basketball teams. Experts claim the same was true for the Chicago Bulls. But that team's luck changed in 1984, when it scored the third pick of the NBA draft and picked up 21-year-old shooting guard Michael Jordan.

Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has to remain on the throne until September 2015 in order to overtake Victoria as the longest-reigning monarch in the country's history.

An Illinois man, dedicated to cleaning the Mississippi River, has found 1,916 tires on the river's banks since he first started looking in 1997.

Johannes Fibiger won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1926 for his discovery that rats can develop cancer if they feast on cockroaches infested with parasitic worms.