(From the Sept 2002 issue of Gear magazine)
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The 1927 movie Don Juan had 127 on-screen kisses. This remains a record.
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In 1926 in Japan, where kissing was considered “unclean, immodest, indecorous, ungraceful and likely to spread disease,” Tokyo’s Prefect of Police cut 800,000 feet of celluloid kisses from American movies.
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Typically a person has their first kiss around the age of 14.
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After the first kiss, we then spend over 20,000 minutes kissing before we die.
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The longest kiss in history: 29 hours.
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Underwater: 2 minutes and 18 seconds.
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Ancient Romans eye-kissed as their form of greeting.
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In medieval Italy, if a man and a woman were seen kissing in public, they could be forced to marry. This pretty much kept PDA’s in check.
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Nose rubbing, once thought to be an Eskimo-only form of kissing, a result of their wearing so many clothes, is practiced by Polynesians and Malaysians, too.
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It’s a crime to kiss a “stranger” in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. How this is enforced isn’t clear; Having kissed, are you still strangers?
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Mustached men who “habitually kiss human beings” in Indiana are breaking the law and should seek an alternative.
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There is, apparently, no legal obstacle to kissing , say, cows in Indiana.
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In Boston, Massachusetts, the law forbids kissing in front of a church. Like there was a crowd there anyway.
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Husbands who kiss their wives before leaving home every day live up to five years longer than those who do not. This is a scientific fact.
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A kiss burns 26 calories per minute on average. More if done with enthusiasm. They ran tests for that.
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Heat seeking: Tests have discovered special neurons in people’s brains that help locate others lips in the dark.
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You’re more likely to catch the common cold by shaking hands than by kissing.
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Kissing stimulates the production of saliva, which washes away bits of food and bacteria, thus preventing cavities – that’s why the Academy of General Dentistry endorses it.
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The Bible endorses kissing as a gesture of kindness when it says, “Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity” (1 Peter 5:14)
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It took pilgrims visiting St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rom 503 years to kiss the toes off the metal statues of St. Peter. The lip-friction simply wore away the metal.
Karolina Stefanski