Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson wanted to become a singer because his mom used to sing to him as a child. He believed he got his talent from his mother Katherine and God.

When Michael and his brothers were signed to Motown as the Jackson 5, he and his brother Marlon lived with Diana Ross until their father Joseph bought their house in Los Angeles. I always thought it was just Michael that lived with Diana. I didn’t realize that Marlon lived with her too.

Michael and his siblings used to dance around the house in their socks when they were kids. I think that is cute that they were able to do that together.

Despite how great a dancer Michael was, he never had a formal training. He was naturally able to dance. It took Michael a short period of time to learn the dance steps he performed in his video “Thriller”.

Speaking of Michael’s dancing, he learned the moonwalk from breakdancer Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers from the 80s movies Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Michael learned the dances he performed on the Motown 25th Anniversary Special in less than a year.

Did you know that Michael used to love to read? I have that in common with Michael because I love to read too. He and his mother used to go to bookstores all of the time and pick up books to read.

Michael wasn’t the first artist to write “We Are The World”. Quincy Jones wanted Stevie Wonder to write the song, but Stevie ended up not doing the song. Michael was Quincy’s second choice to write it. That was a good decision because the song is one of the biggest singles of all time.

Have you heard that Michael was the closest to his sister Janet Jackson? When he was growing up, he was closest to his brother Marlon. When they got older, Michael was closest to Janet. I think that might be because she didn’t need anything from him the way his other siblings did. They had things in common since they were both successful.

Michael thought that Janet was a fierce performer. He knew that they had similar styles, but he really enjoyed her work.

Speaking of Janet, Michael wanted to do another track with her before they did “Scream”. She turned him down because she didn’t want people to think that she was riding on his coattails. She did do backing vocals for him on his “Thriller” cd. She sings in “P.Y.T.”

If you can believe it, Michael considered his cd “Bad” a flop. It didn’t sell as many copies as “Thriller” which is why he considered the cd a flop. It wasn’t a flop by any means. The cd sold over 25 million copies in the United States alone. Singers can’t sell that many cds now. He was only competing against himself for record sales.

Michael’s cd “Dangerous” was his second highest selling cd.

Michael considered “Childhood” his most honest song. I’m not surprised since he was robbed of a childhood thanks to Joe Jackson.

In case you didn’t hear, “Billie Jean” was allegedly written about Paula Abdul’s relationship with his older brother Jackie. There were reports that Paula and Jackie were having an affair and she was pregnant. Jackie was married to his first wife at the time that he was allegedly having an affair with Paula. In related trivia: Michael wrote “Billie Jean” in five minutes. He also wrote the song in his car while he was traveling with his brother Marlon.

Paul McCartney wrote “Girlfriend” from the “Off The Wall” cd specifically for Michael. They went on to do two other songs together. I knew that they did “The Girl is Mine” and “Say, Say, Say”, but I didn’t know he wrote “Girlfriend”.

In the movie The Wiz, Michael was originally only supposed to sing in one song, but another song was added in for him to sing.

unusual facts about human body

1. Don’t stick out your tongue if you want to hide your identity. Similar to fingerprints, everyone also has a unique tongue print!


2. Your pet isn’t the only one in the house with a shedding problem. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour. That works out to about 1.5 pounds each year, so the average person will lose around 105 pounds of skin by age 70.


3. An adult has fewer bones than a baby. We start off life with 350 bones, but because bones fuse together during growth, we end up with only 206 as adults.


4. Did you know that you get a new stomach lining every three to four days? If you didn’t, the strong acids your stomach uses to digest food would also digest your stomach.


5. Your nose is not as sensitive as a dog’s, but it can remember 50,000 different scents.


6. The small intestine is about four times as long as the average adult is tall. If it weren’t looped back and forth upon itself, its length of 18 to 23 feet wouldn’t fit into the abdominal cavity, making things rather messy.


7. This will really make your skin crawl: Every square inch of skin on the human body has about 32 million bacteria on it, but fortunately, the vast majority of them are harmless.


8. The source of smelly feet, like smelly armpits, is sweat. And people sweat buckets from their feet. A pair of feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.


9. The air from a human sneeze can travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more — another good reason to cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze — or duck when you hear one coming your way.


10. Blood has a long road to travel: Laid end to end, there are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. And the hard-working heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through those vessels every day.


11. You may not want to swim in your spit, but if you saved it all up, you could. In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva — enough to fill two swimming pools!


12. By 60 years of age, 60-percent of men and 40-percent of women will snore. But the sound of a snore can seem deafening. While snores average around 60 decibels, the noise level of normal speech, they can reach more than 80 decibels. Eighty decibels is as loud as the sound of a pneumatic drill breaking up concrete. Noise levels over 85 decibels are considered hazardous to the human ear.


13. Blondes may or may not have more fun, but they definitely have more hair. Hair color helps determine how dense the hair on your head is, and blondes (only natural ones, of course), top the list. The average human head has 100,000 hair follicles, each of which is capable of producing 20 individual hairs during a person’s lifetime. Blondes average 146,000 follicles. People with black hair tend to have about 110,000 follicles, while those with brown hair are right on target with 100,000 follicles. Redheads have the least dense hair, averaging about 86,000 follicles.


14. If you’re clipping your fingernails more often than your toenails, that’s only natural. The nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. Fingernails grow fastest on the hand that you write with and on the longest fingers. On average, nails grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.


15. No wonder babies have such a hard time holding up their heads: The human head is one-quarter of our total length at birth but only one-eighth of our total length by the time we reach adulthood.


16. If you say that you’re dying to get a good night’s sleep, you could mean that literally. You can go without eating for weeks without succumbing, but eleven days is tops for going without sleep. After eleven days, you’ll be asleep — forever!

CatStuff

• Both humans and cats have identical regions in the brain responsible for emotion.
• A cat's brain is more similar to a man's brain than that of a dog.
• A cat has more bones than a human; humans have 206, but the cat has 230 (some cites list 245 bones, and state that bones may fuse together as the cat ages).
• Cats have 30 vertebrae (humans have 33 vertebrae during early development; 26 after the sacral and coccygeal regions fuse)
• The cat's clavicle, or collarbone, does not connect with other bones but is buried in the muscles of the shoulder region. This lack of a functioning collarbone allows them to fit through any opening the size of their head.
• The cat has 500 skeletal muscles (humans have 650).
• Cats have 32 muscles that control the outer ear (compared to human's 6 muscles each). A cat can rotate its ears independently 180 degrees, and can turn in the direction of sound 10 times faster than those of the best watchdog.
• Cats' hearing is much more sensitive than humans and dogs.
• Cats' hearing stops at 65 khz (kilohertz); humans' hearing stops at 20 khz.
• A cat sees about 6 times better than a human at night, and needs 1/6 the amount of of light that a human does - it has a layer of extra reflecting cells which absorb light.
• Recent studies have shown that cats can see blue and green. There is disagreement as to whether they can see red.
• A cat's field of vision is about 185 degrees.
• Blue-eyed, pure white cats are frequently deaf.
• It may take as long as 2 weeks for a kitten to be able to hear well. Their eyes usually open between 7 and 10 days, but sometimes it happens in as little as 2 days.
• A cat has approximately 60 to 80 million olfactory cells (a human has between 5 and 20 million).
• Cats have a special scent organ located in the roof of their mouth, called the Jacobson's organ. It analyzes smells - and is the reason why you will sometimes see your cat "sneer" (called the flehmen response or flehming) when they encounter a strong odor.
• A cat has a total of 24 whiskers, 4 rows of whiskers on each side. The upper two rows can move independently of the bottom two rows. A cat uses its whiskers for measuring distances.
• Cats have 30 teeth (12 incisors, 10 premolars, 4 canines, and 4 molars), while dogs have 42. Kittens have baby teeth, which are replaced by permanent teeth around the age of 7 months.
• A cat's jaw has only up and down motion; it does not have any lateral, side to side motion, like dogs and humans. For this reason, don't rely on feeding dry food as a dental care program - cats need to have their teeth cleaned by a vet.
• When a cat drinks, its tongue - which has tiny barbs on it - scoops the liquid up backwards.
• Cats purr at the same frequency as an idling diesel engine, about 26 cycles per second.
• Domestic cats purr both when inhaling and when exhaling.
• The cat's front paw has 5 toes, but the back paws have 4. Some cats are born with as many as 7 front toes and extra back toes (polydactl).
• Cats step with both left legs, then both right legs when they walk or run.
• Cats walk on their toes.
• A domestic cat can sprint at about 31 miles per hour.
• The heaviest cat on record weighed 46 lbs.
• A kitten will typically weigh about 3 ounces at birth. The typical male housecat will weigh between 7 and 9 pounds, slightly less for female housecats.
• Cats take between 20-40 breaths per minute.
• Normal body temperature for a cat is 102 degrees F.
• A cat's normal pulse is 140-240 beats per minute, with an average of 195.
• Cat's urine glows under a black light.
• Cats lose almost as much fluid in the saliva while grooming themselves as they do through urination.
• Almost 10% of a cat's bones are in its tail, and the tail is used to maintain balance.
• The domestic cat is the only species able to hold its tail vertically while walking. You can also learn about your cat's present state of mind by observing the posture of his tail.
• If a cat is frightened, the hair stands up fairly evenly all over the body; when the cat threatens or is ready to attack, the hair stands up only in a narrow band along the spine and tail