Dune, by Frank Herbert, the world's bestselling science fiction novel, was rejected more than 20 times before being accepted by a publisher of car manuals.
In particle physics, a "barn" is an area that covers a billionth of the cross-section of a silk fiber. It's called a barn because (in subatomic terms) it's so huge.
There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent.