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309

On the seventh week following Easter the Russian Rusalkies (water nymphs) gather feathers and straw to build their underwater nests.

310

In the Celtic wonder tale Cold Feet and the Queen of the Lonesome Island, the eponymous hero meets a hag whose finger and toenails are made of steel, each weighing seven pounds. He grew so large that, by the age of seven, he could no longer fit in his mother’s house, and on his adventure to the Lonesome Island he met a man who was seven hundred years old.

311

There are seven known species of the Coniopterygidae family (small Lace-Wing type insects) resident in Britain.

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The plant Silverweed provides nourishment for some Faerie Troops. Their name for this food is Seventh Bread.

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The Welsh poem (The English title of which is I shall praise the sovereign or The Spoils of Annwn) first credited to the Celtic Bard, Taleisin [though now thought to be of a medieval or later origin] describes seven expeditions to Otherworld fortresses.

319

Amongst Australia's most notorious convicted killers are James Miller who claimed the lives of seven victims in the 1970s and Ivan Millat, the Backpack Murderer, who killed seven tourists between 1989 & 1992.

320

To protest against Student Loans a bloke called Mark McGowan plans to roll a monkey nut along the ground with his nose for seven miles between Goldsmiths College and Downing Street. (I can't remember when I made a note of this, so he might have done it by now . . . or he might have seen sense and not bothered).

321

Apu, in the episode of The Simpsons about Valentines Day, sent his wife Manjula seven days worth of valentines.

322

Ancient Rome was built on seven named hills:

• Palatine
• Capitoline
• Aventine
• Caelian
• Esquiline
• Viminal
• Quirinal-Colline

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The strange orchid-mimicking South American arachnid Epicadus Heterogaster  is commonly known as the Seven-Spined Crab Spider.

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Speaking anthropologically rather than biologically the Chukchi people of Siberia are said to have seven genders. That’s one gender for each of the letters in either of the words Chukchi or Siberia.

327

The opening line to Germaine Knight's version of the Mabinogion tale - Pwyll & Rhiannon (which she retitled Queen Mare and her Consort and published in her Pagan family magazine - The Triple Spiral) reads as follows - "Mead Moon, the seventh full moon sine Yule, shone bright in the Midsummer sky . . ."

328

Rhiannon (as mentioned above) is a tragic heroine of Welsh Celtic myth an considered by some to be a Horse-goddess. She is also said to be frequently accompanied by seven blackbirds.

329

There’s a 1980 LP record by Jon Anderson called Song of Seven. The last track on side two is called Song of Seven.

330

There are seven known species of Machiladae (insects belonging to the Bristle-Tail family and fairly similar to Silverfish) in Britain.

331

Sefkhet -Abwy, the Egyptian Goddess of Writing & Libraries was also known as 'she who has seven horns' (due to her seven pronged crown).

332

Ingmar Bergman’s film entitled The Seventh Seal is probably best remembered for the scene where a knight plays chess with death himself.

333

Mrs Violet Peek of Denver, Colorado, is the mother of seven children – each born on a different day of the week. At least, this was the case in 1969 when the book from which this fact came was published.

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In Greek Gnosticism, the heavens were said to be governed by seven androgynous spirits. 

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Many Hawk-Moth (Sphingidae) Caterpillars are marked with seven diagonal side stripes. (These caterpillars are also often known as Sphinxes, due to their distinctive resting posture).

338

A letter I received from British Telecom on 27th November 2003 agreed to credit my telephone account with the sum of 77p, which equalled a 20% discount on calls made to my internet provider during the billing period August to November 2003 - the total number of calls in this time period was 77.

339

The luxury liner Lusitania was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland on the 7th May, 1915.

340

Seven women were known to have had relationships of some sort with Adolf Hitler.

341

In Assyro-Babylonian Myth, there are seven precincts of the Underworld.

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In the short story The Blue Bottle by Ray Bradbury (as featured in the anthology Long After Midnight) the Blue Bottle (an ancient Martian artifact that can grant the deepest wishes of those that come to possess it) is discovered in one of the ". . . seven rooms filled with glitter and shine".

344

There are seven known species of Lonchopteridae (Pointed-Wing Flies) in Britain.

345

The following seven people died when the fishing vessel Solway Harvester was shipwrecked, in force nine winds and "horrendous" conditions, on 11th January 2000, 11 miles off the Isle of Man.

Pictured, left to right: Craig Mills, age 29. Robin Mills, age 33. David Mills, age 18. David Lyons, age 17. Wesley Jolly, age 17. John Murphy, age 22. Martin Milligan, 26 (pictured with girlfriend Allison McIlwraith).

346

The Faeries are said to commune at prehistoric burial mounds in Ireland every seven years to mourn their banishment from Heaven.

347

The sketch in Chris Morris’ surreal comedy show Jam, where office workers fall down an empty lift-shaft whilst a hapless security guard watches on, occurs on the seventh floor.

348

When devotees of Aum Shrinrikyo (the Supreme Truth Society), now known as the Aum cult, made their first experimental sarin gas attack, in Matsumoto, Japan, on June 27th 1994 the result was seven people dead (and over 200 injured).
(See also facts #483 & #484)

349

Recently at Baal Hill Farm in Wolsingham, County Durham, a woman pulled a knife out of her boot and stabbed her husband to death in front of their ten-year-old daughter. The punishment for this as imposed by the courts was seven years imprisonment. (Obviously 'recent', in this context, depends upon when you read this).

350

John Reginald Halliday Christie was one of seven children. Before progressing to rape, murder and necrophilia, he once spent seven months in prison for stealing money and postal orders from letters when he worked for the Post Office.

351

On my X-ray Spex CD, Poly Styrene (on the back cover photograph) is wearing a badge of a six spot / one spot domino. Enough said.

352

The artist Paul Gauguin was born on the 7th June, fathered seven known children, exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Show and executed and transported back to Paris seven paintings whilst seriously ill in Tahiti. His paintings The Yellow Christ (1889) and one of the versions of Horsemen on the beach (1902) both feature seven people, and the name Gauguin has seven letters.

353

Seven species of tree have the potential to actually worsen air quality if over-planted. These are:

• Crack Willow
• Poplar
• English Oak
• Red Oak
• Sallow
• Sessile Oak
• White Willow

Carefully managed planting of these alongside other species, however, improves air quality.

354

Following several massacres by disgruntled postmen and the anthrax-spore terrorist letter campaign of 2001, 77% of Americans questioned in a poll feared that they may be targeted by an unspecified postal threat.

355

In March 2003 in Berkshire, England, it took surgeons seven hours to remove a forked harpoon head from the face of teenager Matthew Hawkins. He had been shot with the weapon during a neighbourhood argument. There are seven letters in the word ‘harpoon’ and the names ‘Matthew’ and ‘Hawkins’.

356

On July 4th 2003, whilst on a journey to Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire, I spied several metal rods lying at the side of the road as I drove through a roundabout junction. Intuiting how good they would look included in one of my welded figure sculptures, I stopped at the same point as I travelled back again early in the morning of the 5th July and picked them up. You’ll not be surprised to find that there were seven of them. One was longer and a slightly different shape to the others, but I hardly think that this kind of pedantic quibble should prevent a fact as worthy as this from being listed here.

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The Siberian Shamans' astral ascent into the spirit realm was symbolised as climbing a seven-branched birch pole.

360

On average, insects and other arthropods moult their skins between four and seven times in their lives.

361

A disgruntled worker is said to have wrecked a seven-storey office block in Birmingham on April 23rd 2003. He knocked the nozzles off fire hydrants on the seventh (and sixth) floors and caused approximately £1 million worth of damage to the building.

362

JK Rowling intends to write seven Harry Potter books in total.

363

Fred West, serial killer, liked wearing old and worn clothes to such an extent that he once used a pair of new jeans as a draught-excluder for seven years before putting them on. Three of his children – Stephen, Mae and Tara – wrote a poem to their dead sister Heather that began with the line, “It seems we lived a seven year con”. When 25 Cromwell Street was demolished and the land turned into a walkway, seven cast-iron bollards were erected to prevent vehicular access at the Cromwell Street end.

364

Seen on a wall behind a service counter:

Burger King Seven Step Service Procedure
 1. Smile, greet and take order
 2. Suggestive sell 1 item
 3. Repeat and total order
 4. Cash transaction
 5. Assemble Order
 6. Repeat and deliver order
 7. Polite parting phrase

365

“The first time I took it I got very high indeed . . . I spent the whole evening running around trying to find a pencil and paper because when I went back into the bedroom later, I discovered the Meaning of Life. And I suddenly felt like a reporter, on behalf of my local newspaper in Liverpool, I wanted to tell my people what it was . . . I eventually found it and I wrote it down, and gave it Mal for safekeeping. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, ‘There are seven levels!’ And we pissed ourselves laughing, I mean, ‘What the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels?’ But looking back, it's actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn't know that then”

(Barry Miles, ‘Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now’, Secker & Warburg 1997, p.188-189).

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True Thomas of Ercildoune was a renowned prophet or seer in 13th Century Scotland. The Ballad of True Thomas relates how he became enchanted by the Queen of Faeries and how after seven years spent in the Otherworld, he returned to the everyday world with clairvoyant powers.

368

Woodlice most frequently have seven pairs of legs.

369

The instruction for the Seventhth Degree of Aleister Crowley's Magical Order the Ordo Templi Orientis is the aim to find the one true God.

370

Guandong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) reported in April 2003 that a measured combination of TCM and western medicine had brought down the fever of most of their SARS patients after an average period of seven days.

371

In May 2003, seven people died near the Cambodia / Vietnam border. SARS was initially suspected but it is now thought that they were killed by another new killer 'bug' - an unidentified form of Pneumonia.

372

A fortune teller in Cambodia declared that three-year-old Ouen Sambath was the son of a dragon in a past life and is destined to become a Kruu Khmer (tradition healer) at the age of seven, due to the boy’s close friendship with a python called Chamreun (Lucky). To buy enough chicken to keep the snake well fed (& thus less likely to devour the infant) costs 40,000 Cambodian rial – the equivalent of £7 – each week.

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The ship Mary Celeste, when embarking on what was to be its last voyage in 1872 from New York, bound for Genoa, was carrying a cargo of 1700 casks of crude alcohol; its Captain (Benjamin Spooner Briggs) was 37 years old, and he was leading a crew of seven. Captain David Morehouse of the ship Dei Gratia, also leading a crew of seven, salvaged the Mary Celeste and was awarded £1700 salvage money in 1873.

375

Conspiracy theories and military research into sonic weapons followed the claim by researcher Vladimir Gaureau that sound waves operating at a frequency of 7Hz could induce involuntary defecation, nausea, epileptic fits and rupture of internal organs. There are seven letters each in the name 'Gaureau' and the word 'weapons'.

376

Sgt. Howie, in the film The Wicker Man, is greeted at the harbour by a deputation of seven male islanders upon his first arrival at SummerIsle.

377

In November 1982 various crime specialists in America put forward the idea of a National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (or NCAVC), a proposal that was unanimously accepted seven months later. The FBI handbook Sexual Homicide: Its Patterns and Motives estimates conservatively that the success rate of the NVAVC has been about seventy-seven per cent.

378

County Durham is currently comprised of seven district councils. These are in alphabetical order - Chester-le-Street, Derwentside, Durham City, Easington, Sedgefield, Teesdale and Wear Valley.

(Taken in this order Andy Paciorek, Numero Uno ‘Facts about the Number Seven’ fact finder and contributor, lives in the seventh district, Wear Valley, and his dad once claimed that it was "seven years since I last drank Lucozade").

379

The John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination on 22nd November 1963 has been described as ‘Seven seconds that shook the world’. Also:

• JFK was born in 1917. He started at Harvard University in 1937. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Profiles in Courage in 1957. 
• Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, was a Boeing 707 (which, on the day of the assassination, landed at Love Field, Dallas, Texas). The motorcade in which JFK was travelling left Love Field at 11.47am.
• After the shooting, police scoured the area and sealed off the Texas Book Depository building at 12.37pm. After finding a kind of ‘sniper’s nest’ in front of a half-open window, it took a further seven minutes for police to find a Mannlichter-Cacarno rifle stashed behind some packing cases. This rifle had a seven-round magazine. It was later calculated that it wouldn’t be possible to fire this rifle three times in much less than seven seconds.
• Air Force One took off from Love Field with the body of JFK aboard at 2.47pm.
• Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who officially shot JFK, was in turn shot by Jack Ruby (who had moved to Dallas in 1947) and was pronounced dead at 1.07pm on 24th November.
• Public opinion polls after Lee Harvey Oswald was so publicly murdered showed that a seven to one majority of Texans were in favour of a light sentence for Jack Ruby.
• The Warren Commission, the investigative body formed to ascertain the truth about the assassination of JFK, comprised seven men.

380

In the early evening of January 17th, 1950, workers in the vault of the Boston branch of Brinks Incorporated, the American money-moving firm, were surrounded by seven masked men. After stealing a staggering amount of money said men left quietly and nonchalantly at around seven p.m.

381

There are seven known species of Leaf-Cutter Bees in Britain.

382

When the 24 Hours of TG box set of cassettes was originally released in 1979, the complete set would have cost you £77 if you lived in the UK.

383

“Walter watched the naked man scrape up seven pieces of dirt with his thumbnail and pop them into his mouth before he forced himself to look away.”

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I got out my old NIV (New International Version) Bible, and did some searching around. I'm assuming you already know some of the Joseph story (Technicolor Dreamcoat and all . . .I've actually never seen/heard the musical!). His brothers sold him into slavery because he was always talking about these dreams where he'd be king some day and such. They threw him in a cistern, and then when they saw some merchants coming by, they sold him into slavery in Egypt.
As a slight diversion, it's worth noting that on the same page that this all happens, one of Joseph's brothers (Judah) marries a woman and gives birth to a son named Onan. And yes, it's as in THAT Onan. Mr. "Seed spilled upon the ground." Onanism and all that.
Aaaaaaaanyway, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt to a man named Potiphar, "one of the Pharoah's officials, the captain of the guard."
Joseph did well for himself at this point, and Potiphar, seeing that he seemed to have a pretty good streak of luck/god on his side and all that, put him in charge of the household. "with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything but the food that he ate."
Okay, it looks like this is a much longer story than I thought, so let's summarize quick. Potiphar's wife tries to seduce Joseph, he says no, and as he runs away from her, his overcloak is left behind. She says "he tried to ravage me and I screamed," so Joseph is put in prison. But again, because he's Mr. Favored In God's Eyes, he gets put in charge of all those held in the prison (teacher's pet, I guess).
Later, there was a cupbearer and a baker in the service of Pharaoh (trust me, this is all going somewhere) who were put in this prison because they had offended the Pharaoh in some way. Soon after they had dreams, and Joseph interprets these as well. The cupbearer has one where he sees a vine with three branches, which bud into grapes. The cupbearer, in the dream, squeezes the grapes into Pharaoh's cup and puts it in his hands. Joseph says this means that in three days, Pharaoh will put you back in your favoured position. So the baker, liking the sound of that interpretation, tells his dream as well. In his dream, the baker had three baskets of bread, but the birds were eating from the top one. Joseph said this meant in three days, Pharaoh would come and have them chop off his head, hang him on a tree, and the birds would eat his flesh (far out . . .)
Joseph asked the cupbearer to remember him when he got out of prison, but of course, the cupbearer forgot him. Until two years later, when Pharaoh had a dream. Actually, there are TWO instances of seven here. In Pharaoh's initial dream, there are seven heads of grain, healthy and good, growing on a single stalk. Next to them, a stalk with seven withered and inferior heads of grain grew up. The seven withered heads of grain swallowed the seven fat and healthy ones. The cupbearer remembers Joseph's skill and tells Pharaoh about how he was right about his and the baker's dreams, so Pharaoh orders for him. He then tells Joseph two dreams . . . both the one about the seven skinny cows swallowing the seven fat cows (without putting on any noticeable weight, continuing to be just as emaciated), as well as the seven thin grains eating the seven fat ones. Of course, Joseph notes that these are the same dream, basically (duh). The seven fat things were seven years of prosperity that were coming, and the seven thin things were seven years of extreme famine that were coming right after. Joseph recommended that Egypt do some serious storehousing of leftover grain during the prosperous years, so that all could be fed during the lean years. Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of all this, even putting his signet ring on Joseph's finger.
Then there's some yadda yadda told you so stuff later about his brothers coming to Egypt during the famine and Joseph putting them through all sorts of tests and such, basically as an excuse to see his youngest brother Benjamin (who was living with their father at the time). At that point, the seven stuff kind of falls off. Anyway, it was the then-current Pharaoh (not King David) whom Joseph interpreted dreams for.

This is 77 facts about the Number 7 page five

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