Checking trivia

For Christmas I received a small calendar of popular trivia.

I cannot find anywhere in this 365-page publication (it shrinks in size as the days go by) documentation of any of the bits of trivia so I've been using Google search skills to find more information about these tiny factoids, urban legends, bits of folk wisdom, and down-right deceptions.

For example, today's trivia asserts "A duck's quack doesn't echo, and nobody knows why."

Scientists at the University of Salford in Manchester, England, did acoustic laboratory research and soundly debunked this myth. 

Their work was part of an early 2000's British Association Festival of Science. You can check them out for yourself at: www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk

I'm researching a couple of the early trivia assertions and will report back later (it is hoped). Here's two examples:

• The average person presses the snooze button on their (sic) alarm clock three times each morning.
• In Japan, over 20 percent of all publications are comic books.

If nothing else comes from these often misleading tidbits, they are great writer's prompts and Google researcher's challenges.