David McConnell started the California Perfume Company (CPC) in 1886. Today the company is known as Avon, which he named after his favorite playwright William Shakespeare, and Stratford on Avon

As of 2010, Avon had annual sales of $10.8 billion worldwide. It is the fifth-largest beauty company and largest direct selling enterprise in the world, with 6.4 million representatives. Avon Products is a multi-level marketing company. Their “Ding Dong Avon Calling” advertising campaign, which ran from the mid-1950s to 1967, has been called “one of the most deeply ingrained brand identities of the past century”. The company’s CEO is Sherilyn S. McCoy, who was appointed to that position in April 2012. The former CEO, Andrea Jung, became the executive chairman of the board. Jung was the longest tenured female CEO among Fortune 500 companies.

Ninety-nine percent of pumpkins sold in the United States are for the sole purpose of decoration

Pumpkins are commonly carved into decorative lanterns called jack-o’-lanterns for the Halloween season in North America. Throughout Britain and Ireland, there is a long tradition of carving lanterns from vegetables, particularly the turnip, mangelwurzel, or swede. The turnip has traditionally been used in Ireland and Scotland at Halloween, but immigrants to North America used the native pumpkin, which are both readily available and much larger – making them easier to carve than turnips. Not until 1837, does jack-o’-lantern appear as a term for a carved vegetable lantern, and the carved pumpkin lantern association with Halloween is recorded in 1866.

In the United States, the carved pumpkin was first associated with the harvest season in general, long before it became an emblem of Halloween. In 1900, an article on Thanksgiving entertaining recommended a lit jack-o’-lantern as part of the festivities that encourage kids and families to join together to make their own jack-o’-lanterns.

Pumpkin chucking is a competitive activity in which teams build various mechanical devices designed to throw a pumpkin as far as possible. Catapults, trebuchets, ballistas and air cannons are the most common mechanisms. Some pumpkin chuckers breed and grow special varieties of pumpkin under specialized conditions to improve the pumpkin’s chances of surviving a throw.

Pumpkin growers often compete to see whose pumpkins are the most massive. Festivals are often dedicated to the pumpkin and these competitions.

The Ohio towns of Barnesville and Circleville each hold a festival every year, the Barnesville Pumpkin Festival and the Circleville Pumpkin Show respectively. The town of Half Moon Bay, California, holds an annual Art and Pumpkin Festival, drawing over 250,000 visitors each year and including the World Champion Pumpkin Weigh-Off. Farmers from all over the US compete to determine who can grow the heaviest pumpkin. The winning pumpkin regularly tops the scale at more than 1500 pounds. Leonardo Urena, from Napa, California, grew the winner of the 2011 Weigh-Off with a 1,704-pound Atlantic Giant, setting a new California State record. The record for the world’s heaviest pumpkin was broken September 30, 2012, at the Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts. Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, entered a pumpkin weighing 2,009 pounds. A few days earlier on September 27, a pumpkin grown by Steve Geddes of Boscawen, New Hampshire, weighed in at 1,843.5 pounds at the Deerfield Fair in New Hampshire. That one held the world record for just five days. Prior to that, Guinness World Records had the world’s heaviest pumpkin set in 2010 by Chris Stevens, at a weight of 1,810 pounds, 8 ounces, at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota. The town of Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world, has held a Pumpkin Festival since 1966. The town, where Nestlé’s pumpkin packing plant is located (and where 90% of canned pumpkins eaten in the US are processed), held for several years a record for the number of carved and lit pumpkins in one place, before losing it to Boston, Massachusetts, in 2006. A large contributor of pumpkins to the Keene Pumpkin Fest in New Hampshire is local Keene State College, which hosts an event called Pumpkin Lobotomy on its main quadrangle. Usually held the day before the festival itself, Pumpkin Lobotomy has the air of a large party, with the school providing pumpkins and carving instruments alike (though some students prefer to use their own) and music provided by college radio station WKNH.

Ireland’s only Pumpkin Festival takes place each year in Virginia, County Cavan to find Ireland’s biggest pumpkins. This year the biggest pumpkin topped 1300 pounds. The event takes place over a holiday weekend, along with other entertainment and festive parades.
The city of Elk Grove, California, has held an annual Pumpkin Festival since 1995.

There are more than 2,400 flea species in the world

The large number of flea species may be attributed to the wide variety of host species they feed on, which provides so many specific ecological niches to adapt to. In any case, all these groups seem to represent a clade of closely related insect lineages, for which the names Mecopteroidea and Antliophora have been proposed.

Flea systematics are not entirely fixed. While, compared to many other insect groups, fleas have been studied and classified fairly thoroughly, details still remain to be learned about the evolutionary relationships among the different flea lineages.

The Canadian province of New Brunswick had a bloodless war with the US state of Maine in 1839

New Brunswick (French: Nouveau-Brunswick), is one of the three Maritime provinces in Canada, and the only officially bilingual province (French and English) in the country. The history of New Brunswick can be viewed according to four periods: pre-European contact, French colonization, British colonization and finally, New Brunswick since Confederation.

The aboriginal nations of New Brunswick include the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet/Wolastoqiyuk and Passamaquoddy. The Mi’kmaq territories are mostly in the east of the province. The Maliseets are located in the northwest and the Passamaquoddy tribe is situated in the southwest, around Passamaquoddy Bay. Amerindians have occupied New Brunswick since about 6000-8000 BCE.

Actor John Travolta was offered the role of Billy Flynn many times for the movie "Chicago." Richard Gere ended up playing the role

Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta’s acting career declined through the 1980s. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.

Lake Ontario was originally named Lake St. Louis

The lake was previously identified in some maps under different French names. In 1632 and 1656 is was referred to as Lac de St. Louis or Lake St. Louis by Samuel de Champlain and cartographer Nicolas Sanson respectively (likely for Louis XIV of France) In 1660 Jesuit historian Francis Creuxius coined the name Lacus Ontarius. In a map drawn in the Relation des Jésuites (1662–1663), the lake bears the legend “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois” with the name “Ondiara” in smaller type. A French map produced in 1712 (currently in the Canadian Museum of Civilization), created by military engineer Jean-Baptiste de Couagne, identified Lake Ontario as “Lac Frontenac”. Iroquois people called the lake “Skanadario”.

The Angel Falls in Venezuela were named after an American pilot, Jimmy Angel, whose plane got stuck on top of the mountain while searching for gold

The falls, which cascade from the top of Auyantepui in the remote Gran Sabana region of Venezuela, were not known to the outside world until Jimmie Angel flew over them on November 18, 1933 while searching for a valuable ore bed.
On October 9, 1937, Jimmie Angel returned to the falls with the intention of landing. On board his Flamingo monoplane that day were his second wife Marie, Gustavo Heny, and Miguel Delgado, Heny’s gardener.
Jimmie Angel attempted a landing but despite a successful touchdown, his El Rio Caroní aircraft nose-dived when it hit soft ground at the end of its landing run. The wheels sank in the mud making take-off impossible.
The occupants were unharmed but had to trek across difficult terrain and with low food supplies for 11 days to make their way off the tepui and down to the nearest settlement at Kamarata.
When word got out of their exploits, Angel received near-legendary status in Venezuela.
His aircraft remained atop Auyantepui until 1970, when it was disassembled into parts and lifted down by Venezuelan military helicopters. Today an El Rio Caroní can be seen outside the airport terminal at Ciudad Bolívar. The airplane was re-assembled in the city of Maracay’s aviation museum.