my sister sent me one of those annoying round robin emails full of junk. this one was full of supposedly true facts. many of these are just badly concocted, unverified and unverifiable statistics but having nothing better to do (yeah, right) i tried to verify a few of the more intriguing “facts”:

• most lipstick contains fish scales:
  i don’t think this kind of thing is particularly strange but i can believe that pearl essence is used to make cosmetics shimmery.
• wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
  i don’t know about 700 bit but this sounds feasible

the soft plastic headphones used on airplanes create a warm, moist environment in the ear canal that is ideal for breeding bacteria.

• between 1937 and 1945 heinz produced a version of alphabetti spaghetti especially for the german market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas.
  not true:

the h.j. heinz company did not produce pasta, in any shape, for the german market during world war II. interested parties can still spell out all manner of war-related terms using heinz’ standard alphabetti spaghetti product, though.