Weird but interesting facts of life
Some are funny facts and some will make you say WTF. But being inconvenient and not useless, all those facts will enrich your knowledge base and help you pass through.
Humans appeared 200,000 years ago. Written history begins 5,500 years ago. This means 97% of human history is lost forever.
The gene that was bred into tomatoes by commercial farmers to give them a uniform color had the unintended result of preventing internal sugar reactions that give tomatoes flavor. This mutation (and lack of flavor) has been bred into almost all commercial American tomatoes.
During the search and rescue operations for the September 11th attacks, it was becoming rarer and rarer for rescue dogs to find anyone, leading them to feel failed, so firefighters hid in the rubble for the dogs to find them.
A woman who crashed her own funeral after her husband hired hitmen to kill her. They let her go, telling her they didn't believe in killing women. Five days later she appeared at her own funeral, with her husband pleading for forgiveness.
The infamous "hobbling" scene in Misery was originally written to be even ghastlier, but several directors and actors refused to film it. Harrison Ford, Robert de Niro, and others refused to star in the film, partly because of the scene.
George Crum invented the potato chips after a customer complaint that his french fries were too thick and soft. In order to teach him a lesson, he cut the potatoes as thin as possible, deep fried them to a crisp and salted them. The customers loved them and the potato chips were invented.
Pencils are painted yellow because in the 1890s, China had the best graphite in the world, and China associates the color yellow with royalty and respect.
Ridley Scott had plans to adapt the dystopian novel Brave New World into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Ridley Scott ultimately had trouble doing the book justice and stated, “I don’t know what to do with Brave New World. It’s tough….when you reanalyze it, maybe it should stay a book".
Mathematician Zachary Harris hacked into Google's email system and sent a e-mail phishing attack to Larry Page from Sergey Brin's e-mail account. All because he noticed a flaw in an e-mail sent from Google offering him a job and thought it was a test. It wasn't.
After Sinéad O'Connor refused to performed in New Jersey if 'The Star Spangled Banner' was played prior to her appearance, Frank Sinatra threatened to "kick her ass"
High" in High Crimes and Misdemeanors refers to "the office, not the offense" in fact, "the offense may not even be a breach of criminal statute" this is due to more being expected from our leaders and can even include dishonesty and abuse of authority.
Rectal stimulation is a proven method to get rid of hiccups.
A Frenchwoman, Jeanne de Clisson, became a pirate in the 1300's for revenge after her husband was beheaded. Selling her lands to buy 3 ships, they were painted black with red sails. Hunting French ships, when she caught nobles, she personally beheaded them with an axe.
George Washington Carver had nothing to do with inventing peanut butter, it was Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a Canadian
When visiting president Jimmy Carter, Willie Nelson and the president's son, James Earl Carter III, were caught smoking weed on the roof of the White House