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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.

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E I G H T E E N   H A L F   T R U T H S .

BY CHRISTOPHER PAINTER

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1. Orange is the absence of all color.

2. A person cannot taste food unless it is mixed with blood.

3. George Washington's wooden eyes are on permanent display at the Smithsonian.

4. There's a tiny, almost invisible thread embedded in all U.S. Currency, and it is made from bumble bees.

5. The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every single fox cliche once.

6. If you feed a dog chocolate, it will not be able to sneeze with its eyes open.

7. The cheetah is faster than any other animal on land at making excuses.

8. Due to wartime rationing and a scarcity of all metals, the Oscars given out during World War II were manufactured from cattle bones.

9. Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for money.

10. A shark can detect one part of gin in 100 million parts of tonic.

11. Both Hitler and Napoleon were each missing one goat.

12. A rhinoceros horn is made of hate, accumulated and gradually hardened over the years.

13. Some almonds contain cashews.

14. An elephant can smell a broken heart up to three miles away.

15. The average human requires more calories to smile while eating a piece of celery than to frown and vomit it back up.

16. An ostrich's eye is larger than its capacity to love.

17. Leonardo da Vinci could simultaneously write backwards and upside-down with one hand and kill a man with the other.

18. Starfish harbor no regrets.

 

 

OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
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Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75 By Sarah Vowell
The Ten Worst Films of 1942; As Reviewed by Ezra Pound Over Italian Radio By Greg Purcell
Election 2000, as seen from Chile By Marc Herman
Conversations While Canvassing For Bill Bradley in Small New Hampshire Towns By David Gaffen
The Zapruder Film: The Novelization By Mike Sacks

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