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777 facts about the number 7 page seven |
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667 |
Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth, died in 1862. As a token of his love he had a pile of his unpublished manuscripts wrapped in her golden tresses and buried with her in her coffin. He had a change of heart seven years later, however, and exhumed her in order to publish the poems. |
668 |
Gilgamesh was an historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, on the River Euphrates in modern Iraq; he lived about 2700 B.C. Many stories and myths were written about him, some of which were written down in about 2000 B.C. in the Sumerian language on clay tablets which still survive. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one such story, with the tablets actually naming an author (which is extremely rare in the ancient world): Shin-eqi-unninni. This is the oldest known named human author! Extracts from the (translated) tablets are as follows: Tablet I: Tablet II: Tablet IV: Tablet VI: Tablet VII: Tablet IX: Tablet X: Tablet XI: |
669 |
The first UK National Lottery in 1994 had a prize fund of £15.8 million, which was shared between seven winners. |
670 |
Here's a picture of a partridge in a pear tree bearing seven pears. |
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671 |
The average adult spends seventy-seven minutes a day eating, and - in the UK - the average person throws away his own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks. |
672 |
"The Palace was seven miles from Whitechapel. Seven miles of roiling chaos." |
673 |
There are seven islands in the Spanish archipelago known as the Canaries (off the north-west coast of Morocco): they are El Hierro, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, La Gomera, La Palma, Lanzarote and Tenerife. |
674 |
In Peru, there exist ancient Indian pyramids in which the guaca, or tomb of the sun, always has seven steps. |
675 |
In an experiment to determine the fastest method of emptying a bottle of liquid, it was found that employing a circular motion (to force a small vortex to form in the neck of the bottle, allowing air to pass continuously through the eye of said vortex to replace the liquid) was the most efficient method, emptying a 750ml wine bottle in 7.7 seconds. |
676 |
Omar Khayyam's poem the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has the following
lines: |
677 |
The average human body comprises enough fat to make seven bars of soap. |
678 |
In a Sumerian Myth called The Gods Down Tools, Enlil, Lord of the Winds, sends a flood 'to drown every mortal' in which water rolled down the rivers and cascaded out of the sky for seven days and seven nights. |
679 |
When I saw a map of Maize Maze locations, upon visiting the one in Singleton, Lancashire, UK in 2007, I was delighted to find that out of 51 Maize Mazes worldwide the Singleton one was number seven in the list. |
680 |
In Celtic Myth, a Cockatrice reportedly hatches from a spherical, leathery egg laid in a compost heap by a seven-year-old cockerel, whilst Sirius the Dog Star is in the ascendant, after said egg has been incubated by a toad. |
681 |
In the film Rat Race, where the contestants end up at the 'Feed The Earth' rally at the end, the banners for the 'Feed The Earth' group feature seven human figures in silhouette holding hands over an earth / globe map. |
682 |
Proverbs 6:16-19 lists seven things that makes God mad – haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run to evil, a false witness, and a man who sows discord. |
683 |
Willard Wigen is an artist sculpting out of dust particles, sugar crystals, etc. to create 'Microscopic Art'. One of his pieces is The royal court in the eye of a needle, and features seven tiny figures. |
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684 |
There are seven members of the crow family:
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685 |
Ritz crackers have 7 holes. |
686 |
A quote from Liverpudlian funnyman Ken Dodd: "If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute, I've got to have them". |
687 |
The seventh planet in the solar system is Uranus. |
688 |
In a Native American myth called A Prickly Situation, Porcupine is stranded by the army of the Beaver People on an island seven miles offshore. |
689 |
The Earth's magnetic field is pulled into a long magnetic tail by its interaction with the solar wind, typically to seven million kilometres or more. |
690 |
The Book of Stupid Lists contains several lists of seven things, but they're all far too stupid to reprint here apart from this one:
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691 |
On May 1st 2oo7 I received a telephone message on my answering machine. It was a robotic voice reading out a text message that Mandy had sent to me, saying "I've just laid seven bricks and I'm knackered'. |
692 |
The average life span of a major league baseball is seven pitches. |
693 |
I received a wonderful Xmas present from Jane and Izzy in 2006 - a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with seven images of Queen Elizabeth II on it, to commemorate her golden jubilee. When I'd completed it, I took a photograph. |
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694 |
The Sarladais Tower of Lanquis Chateau in Dordogne, France has seven sides. |
695 |
According to DNA experts in the 1987 Virginia prosecution, the chances of somebody other than Timothy Spencer (The South Side Rapist) leaving semen behind at each of the murder scenes were less than one in seven hundred million. |
696 |
On October 14, 2007, Anne Dickson of Fife, Scotland gave birth to her baby boy Rhys (after being told at the hospital that she wasn't in labour) whilst travelling home on the number seven Stagecoach bus. |
697 |
There are seven films in the George Formby Collection DVD box set. |
698 |
In a 2oo7 article stating that my hometown of Blackpool had become the drugs death capital of the UK, with a death rate of 19.4 per 100,000 people over 16 years old, it was stated that of the annual national number of deaths (1,366), 77 per cent were males. |
699 |
In the episode of Wacky Races (a
Hanna-Barbera cartoon which
started in the late 1960's) titled Seesaw to Arkansas, the Anthill
Mob find a house to use as a hideaway. Upon entering, they find that it
has seven hats, seven coats, seven chairs and seven little beds, and
therefore deduce that The Seven Dwarves live there. |
700 |
There is a sculpture (made of earth and seeded with grass) alongside the M8 motorway in Scotland called Sawtooth Ramps, resembling seven linked pyramids. |
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701 |
On the cover of the Crass album Penis Envy, the blow-up doll has seven eyelashes above its left eye. |
702 |
Seven of the known moons in our solar system are larger than the planet Pluto. |
703 |
In the book Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle (in my edition, on page 105 - seven times fifteen) Inspector Picard sends a telegram bearing seven words: "Nailed Mantes Nurenberg - have Lazare's trail - Picard". |
704 |
David Koresh originally became a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, before joining a disaffected Seventh Day Adventist group calling themselves the Branch Davidians. Later, when he had worked up the ladder to complete control of the group, he would claim that he was the Keeper of the Seven Seals, and could trigger the end of the world. The siege at Waco lasted seven weeks. |
705 |
Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess was held in cell No. 7 of Berlin's Spandau prison from 1967 until his suicide in 1987, aged 93. Hess was officially known as prisoner number seven. (Hess was born on 26 / 4 / 1894. 2+6+4+1+8+9+4 = 34; 3+4 = 7) |
706 |
Human milk contains seven per cent protein. |
707 |
In a story published on 14th December 2007, it was reported that computer skills are still undervalued in the UK boardroom, according to software giant Microsoft. It surveyed 500 UK business leaders and found that a knowledge of information technology (IT) was seen as the seventh most important workplace skill. |
708 |
7 May 1977: The Prime Minister opened the seven-nation summit meeting at 10 Downing Street, London, UK. The conference ended with a joint declaration of seven pledges to prevent world economic disorder and create more jobs, especially for the young. |
709 |
At the start of the 1857 Grand National horse race, there were seven false starts. |
710 |
There are seven sea turtle species (of which three are critically endangered, three are endangered and one has unknown status). |
711 |
The actor Robert Reed wrote a memo explaining why he refused to play
in episode 116 of The Brady Bunch, which started with the following list
of seven items: |
712 |
The Group of 77 at the United Nations is a loose coalition of
developing nations, designed to promote its members' collective economic
interests and create an enhanced joint negotiating capacity in the United
Nations. (There were 77 founding members of the organization, but the
organization has since expanded to 130 member countries). |
713 |
When I saw The Boredoms perform live in Manchester, UK on 22 / 10 / 2oo7 (these digits add up to two sevens, tenuously) they used a guitar-based percussion instrument consisting of seven stringed necks fastened to an upright frame. |
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714 |
In John Carpenter's film The Village of the Damned - near the beginning, I'd like to think it was seven minutes into the film but it might have been a little more - , there is a shot of a car driving towards the town past a roadsign that reads: 'Midwich 7 (miles)'. |
715 |
In 2008 Emma Kon, an epilepsy sufferer from the UK, had a 'risky' operation in which UK surgeons hacked away seven parts of her brain. Emma began having chronic convulsions after a near-fatal brain virus at 17 left her in a three-week coma and gave her amnesia. The operation was undertaken after her family paid £7,000 for Belgian experts to pinpoint the parts of her brain behind the attacks. |
716 |
The Apostles, 1980's avant-garde and post-punk band, released seven singles and seven albums during their career. |
717 |
There are seven canonical hours: matins, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers and compline. |
718 |
Golfer Jon Sharples hit a hole in one on 7 / 7 / 07 off the seventh tee with his 7 Iron at Brampton Park, Cambridgeshire, UK. |
719 |
"She remembered reading an article which had explained that the central processing unit of the human brain only had seven memory registers, which meant that if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and then thought of something else, one of the other seven would instantly drop out." |
720 |
The top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7, which is for key alleged al-Qaida members and is so secret that its very existence was not publicly known until it was mentioned in December 2007. |
721 |
To exorcise a person of possession by an evil Djhinn (as told in the
book Arabian Nights): |
722 |
Francesco Lentini, 'The Three-Legged Wonder', found difficulty coming to terms with the extra leg that grew from the right-hand side of his body. He visited an institution for severely handicapped and deformed children at the age of seven; this helped him snap out of the depression induced by becoming aware that he was an oddity. After marrying and having children, he retired to Florida where he died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven. |
723 |
For determining sea level, satellite readings are taken and then averaged out over an area of seven kilometres in diameter. |
724 |
Goldfrapp have an album called Seventh Tree. |
725 |
The book Encyclopaedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano has so many references to the number seven that to go through the book again and pull them all out for inclusion here would be too mammoth a task to endure (and it is unclear which of the facts are real and which might be fictional). I think the author must be as obsessed with the number seven as I am! All I can suggest is that you track down a copy of the book for yourself and see how many you can spot (I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are 77 references to the number seven contained within its pages). |
726 |
Aleistair Crowley wrote a Cabbalistic text entitled 777. |
727 |
When Burke & Hare were questioned about murders committed for the supply of bodies for anatomical dissection, they were let down by their alibi. Mr Burke instructed his wife to tell the police that a missing woman had left their house at 7. She said 7pm, he told them 7am. |
728 |
In the film D.A.R.Y.L, Daryl is wearing shirt #7 when he plays baseball. When his foster father comes into Daryl's bedroom, he is wearing a shirt with five buttons up the front and one on each breast pocket - seven buttons in total. |
729 |
My friend HeF's fridge-freezer and washing machine both malfunctioned
at the same time, during December 2007. They were both on an insurance
policy, which would see them mended or replaced. When he contacted the
insurers, he was told that both policies had expired, and were not renewed
as the machines were now seven years old. |
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730 |
My hometown of Blackpool has the seventh highest density of licensed premises in the UK. |
731 |
Here’s a list of the world’s seven smelliest
creatures: |
732 |
Find seven horses: |
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733 |
One of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s earliest recollections is that at age seven, he knew he “would like to go to Mars instead of the Moon”. |
734 |
HMP Strangeways in Manchester, UK (known as HM Prison Manchester since 1990) staged the fastest execution in British history - seven seconds. |
735 |
A Central European mediaeval superstition suggested that a woman could reclaim her lost virginity by bearing seven bastards. |
736 |
In the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent are in the Horse and Groom public house at lunchtime, just before the world is about to end, they drink bitter beer (as a muscle relaxant) and then Ford buys four packets of peanuts (later used to replace salt and proteins) which cost 28p - seven pence each. |
737 |
On page 77 of my copy of the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it states that Zaphod Beeblebrox was recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Galaxy for the seventh time. |
738 | In Mostly Harmless, the fifth book of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Tricia McMillan is accosted by aliens and flown to the planet Rupert - this takes roughly the same length of time as her flight across the Atlantic, about seven hours. |
739 | In the film Mr Deeds, Adam Sandler's character Longfellow Deeds rescues seven cats from a burning building. |
740 |
In relation to body-size, barnacles have the biggest penises in the animal kingdom - up to seven times their own body-length. |
741 |
It is claimed that a DNA test which looks at a part of a person's genetic code called the mitochondrial DNA can trace an individual's ancestry back to one of the seven founding mothers of ancient races that existed between about 15,000 and 45,000 years ago. |
742 |
In an essay titled What we need is an Avant Gardener . . . written by Andy Martin, we learn that "The American composer Lamonte Young must have achieved a world record for the shortest music score of all time in his Composition No.7 (1960). On a single sheet of paper is written 'B and F#, to be held for a long time'." |
743 |
According to legend, St Raphael (the patron saint for happy encounters) helped Tobias enter into marriage with Sarah, who had seen seven previous bridegrooms perish on the eve of their weddings. |
744 |
Andy
Paciorek sent me an e-mail on 02 12 2007 (2+1+2+2+7=14, two sevens) at
12:49 PM (1+2+4+9=16, 1+6=7) which told me: |
745 |
Andy
Paciorek also sent me the following e-mail: "Howdi Stan - found an old scrap of paper with the words 'Composer Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone have worked together on seven films' - dunno if I've sent that fact about seven before or exactly what those seven films are. I know some of them". |
746 |
Larry Silverstein, who leased the World Trade Centre only seven weeks before 9/11, commented that his reason for purchasing the towers was, "I felt a compelling urge to own them". Silverstein had breakfast in Windows On The World Restaurant (on the 107th floors of the North Tower) every morning following the purchase, however on 9/11 he didn't show up; neither did his daughter who worked in building seven. |
747 |
David Bruno e-mailed me the following: |
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748 |
In the chapel in Edinburgh Castle there is the St. Margaret altar cloth. The middle cloth has seven lines used in a prism to create a spectrum (rainbow) meaning completion and perfection. |
749 |
The Seven Sacraments are baptism, communion, confirmation, penance, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction. |
750 |
Ronnie Hazlehurst, composer and former musical director at the BBC, was closely involved with the Eurovision Song Contest and conducted the UK entry on seven occasions (most notably in 1977 using a rolled-up umbrella). |
751 |
In the episode Call of the Yeti from the television programme The Mighty Boosh series two, in the scene where the Yeti is chasing Howard, Vince, Nabu and Bollo through Shamansbury's, the cashier makes an announcement over the intercom: "security to aisle seven please". |
752 |
Laurel and Hardy's 1927 film The Second Hundred Years was their seventh, and was widely regarded as the first 'proper' Laurel and Hardy film. |
753 |
The jury in a Miami terrorism conspiracy trial were told that seven men plotted to bring down the US Government by poisoning salt shakers and bombing landmark buildings. The 'Liberty City Seven' aimed to create chaos as part of a holy war to pave the way for Al Qaeda-affiliated guerrillas to take over the United States. Allegedly. |
754 |
". . . British doctors' warnings that today's drinking culture is leading to a rapid rise in liver disease and more than seven million people are putting their health at risk". |
755 |
On August 30th, 1980, the Bergen County grand jury returned a twenty-one-count indictment against serial killer Richard Cottingham. He was ultimately convicted of seven murders and assaults in New Jersey and New York. |
756 |
The Walpiri people (Australian Aboriginals) manufacture a boomerang called the wirlki, also known as the 'hooked' or 'number seven' boomerang. |
757 |
A typical new American home contains approx seven tonnes of Gypsum, which is used in the manufacture of plaster, plasterboard, cement, paper, tiles and textiles. (Blackboard chalks are also made out of Gypsum, not Chalk). |
758 |
Football: in the 1953 Cup Final between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, Sir Stanley Matthews (who virtually won the game for Blackpool single-handed) wore the number seven shirt. Blackpool beat Bolton 4-3, meaning that there were seven goals in the game. |
759 |
In the Coen Brothers' film Fargo, the character Marge is a police officer who wears a badge which is a star with seven points. (Having seen other seven-pointed examples in films, I wonder if all police badges in America have seven points?) |
760 |
In the film Killing Ariel, there is a scene in which Ariel defends herself against Rick by hitting him round the head seven times with an old camera. Later, when he slumps against the wall and slides to the floor in the bathroom, his head leaves a bloody trail against the wall that resembles a figure '7'. Later still Rick chops Ariel up with a chainsaw, and we see seven separate piles of earth after he's buried her in pieces. Toward the end of the film, Rick 's psychiatrist tells him that "the police say you murdered seven women during those years". |
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761 |
Seawater contains about 70 times the amount of salt that humans can safely metabolise. |
762 |
World consumption of bottled water is increasing by seven per cent per year. |
763 |
Rainforests receive seven times as much rain per annum as England. |
764 |
A religious system which existed in Nigeria until recent times saw the Ju-Ju, or priest-king, elected for seven years, during which time he had the riches of his people heaped upon him. At the end of the seven years, he was expected to kill himself. |
765 |
When police in Brisbane, Australia, arrested 43-year-old James Everding (4+3=7) he had no explanation for the seven chainsaws he had in his car. His legal defence claimed he suffered from" voices in his head". |
766 |
The renowned Belgian anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, published a seven volume tract entitled 'On the Fabric of the Human Body'. (A seven word title). |
767 |
The first photographs of the surface of Mars transmitted by Viking I occurred exactly seven years to the day after the first manned Moon landing. |
768 |
Stilton Cheese is made exclusively in the UK counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire from local milk. Only seven dairies, using the original centuries-old recipe, are licensed to produce Stilton. |
769 |
The UK's Rich List database in 2000 suggested that you're seven times more likely to be a millionaire if you're called Patel than if you're called Smith. |
770 |
This picture (reproduced from a 1925 postcard) is of a Troupe of Midget Performers who appeared at the Regina Fair in 1925. There are seven of them. |
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771 |
Michael
Jackson signed his will on 7 / 7 / 2002. |
772 |
An album by 1970's progressive rock band Egg is titled Seven is a Jolly Good Time. |
773 |
In the film Layer Cake, the opening title sequence ends with the name of the film overlaid across a front door with the number seven upon it. |
774 |
The first Emperor of China created one enormous empire by invading and conquering seven neighbouring provinces. |
775 |
The Reverend Jim Jones of The People's Temple and his wife Marceline (Baldwin) adopted seven children from various ethnic backgrounds. |
776 |
"There are currently about seven thousand people in the UK and throughout the world who need a bone marrow transplant". |
777 |
When Helle Høst visited Blackpool from her native Denmark in November 2oo8, she was kind enough to bring for me seven packs of Piratos, a Danish salt liquorice to which I was nearly-addicted for quite a while. |
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Well,
if you've made it this far I'm amazed. Congratulations - what an
achievement! I should think you deserve some sort of reward, so how about a top secret special bonus extra page of another 77 facts about the number 7 that you can't get to from anywhere other than right here, right now? Click this link! |
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