50 Random Facts List #38

Portuguese soldiers used black swords in the Age of Discovery in order to not reflect the light and announce their presence on ships, avoiding also it's rusting when used near salt water.

27. Best Buy removed the fighting video game "Primal Rage" from its shelves after an Arizona woman complained that her 11-year-old son had faithfully portrayed one of the game's gorilla-like character's "golden shower/urination" fatality move.

28. In 2010, a group of Weight Watchers members gathered to see how much weight they had lost, only for the floor to collapse under their combined weight.

29. The Michelin Man's 'real' name is Bibendum, and the reason he's white is because he was created before carbon was added as a preservative and a strengthener to the basic rubber material. Before 1912, tires were a gray-white or light and translucent-beige color.

30. Arizona has a law called the "Stupid Motorist Law" that allows the state to charge drivers for their rescue if they ignore barricades and get stuck in flooded roadways.

The Plum Island Pink House is a house in which the wife of a divorcing couple forced her ex-husband to build a replica of their family home as part of the divorce settlement. She didn't specify the location, so he built it in the middle of a salt marsh and plumbed it solely with salt water. It's uninhabitable.

32. American sharpshooter Annie Oakley was such a great shooter that she could repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet.

33. Ed Sheeran's childhood friend was struggling financially and asked him to put one of her songs on his then-nearly completed album "X". Instead, they wrote "Thinking Out Loud" together which was released as a single and hit #1. She'll never have to worry about money again.

34. 'The Mountain' actor named Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson from Game of Thrones beat the 1,000-year-old world record for taking 5 steps with a 10-meter log that weighed 1,430 lb.

35. It's forbidden to fly over Disneyland and you will be intercepted by fighter jets, just like near the White House Airspace.

Walt Disney helped the Army design a Mickey Mouse gas mask in the '40s to make chemical warfare less frightening to kids.

37. Smoking near an Apple device will void the warranty.

38. Domestic geese do a perfect job of weeding mint fields. They hate mint but love the plants that compete with it.

39. In 1850s British explorer, Sir Richard Burton called Somalis superstitious for believing mosquitos caused malaria.

40. The longest surgery to date was a 96-hour marathon to remove a 300-lb ovarian cyst from a 600-lb woman. Simply hacking it out would have killed her, so the surgeon gradually drained fluid from the cyst over the course of 4 days, shrinking it to 100 lb. and allowing for a successful removal.

A "fossil word" is a word that is no longer used in general speech but remains in use because it is part of an idiom. For example, amok as in "run amok", or turpitude as in "moral turpitude". There are many other examples.

42. Milton Berle, considered America's first TV star, had a massive p*nis. In his autobiography, Berle tells of a man who accosted him in a steam bath and challenged him to compare sizes, leading a bystander to remark, "go ahead, Milton, just take out enough to win"

43. In 1997, Microsoft saved Apple from bankruptcy by investing $150 million into the company.

44. A highly religious physician by the name of Rene' Laennec invented the stethoscope because he was uncomfortable putting his ear to the chest of women.

45. The double leg amputee war veteran named Gregory D. Gadson in the film "Battleship" is played by an actual double leg amputee war veteran.

Stephen Colbert's father and 2 brothers died in a plane crash when he was 10. His improv teacher told him "you gotta learn to love the bomb" and as a result, years later he came to realize "I love the thing that I most wish had not happened."

47. Cyril of Alexandria claimed that "camel" is a Greek misspelling in the phrase "It's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven." He claimed camel was actually "kamilos," meaning rope.

48. North Korean "Ghost Ships" keep washing up on Japanese shores full of corpses.

49. There are languages with no words for numbers, and people who speak them have trouble keeping track of amounts higher than 5.

50. In 1986, serial killer Wayne Nance broke into Doug and Kris Welles’s home. Despite being bound, stabbed in the chest, and then later shot, Doug managed to save his wife by shooting their attacker in one of the few known cases of a serial killer being killed by their intended victim.