31 Random Trivia That We Bet Will Impress Anyone | Random List #197

In 1855, Stephen Foster, the mayor of Los Angeles, convinced a mob to not kill an accused murderer, but to try him in a court of law. When the accused man was acquitted, the mayor resigned and led a lynch mob to kill the man. He was re-elected a year later.

2. Angelo Poffo, the father of Macho Man Randy Savage, destroyed the World Record for consecutive sit-ups with 6,033 in 4 hours and 10 minutes. This record is still unbroken.

3. Japan's most celebrated generals have been masters of Ikebana, the art of flower arranging, finding that it calmed their minds and helped them make clear decisions in the field of battle.

4. James Watt calculated the horsepower by measuring the output of an actual horse in order to quantify how many horses his steam engines could replace.

5. Your body odors changes when you’ve been successfully infected by Plasmodium (Malaria), thereby making you a better target for mosquitos and spreading the disease.

A professional wrestler named Kerry Von Erich had to have his foot amputated after a bad accident but continued wrestling while secretly wearing a prosthetic - even showering in his boots so no one would know. His injury wasn't public knowledge until his death from suicide 7 years later.

7. When the very famous mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (creator of the modern Pierrot) was accused of murder in 1836, hundreds of Parisians came to the courthouse, not for the trial itself but just to finally hear the voice of the mime.

8. Archeologists are using LiDAR to survey the South American rainforests. The results have helped reveal over 60,000 previously undiscovered ruins, part of a much greater civilization than previously thought.

9. When the husband of Cassandra Harris (Lisl in For Your Eyes Only) visited the set one day, producer Cubby Broccoli took such a liking to him that he thought he would be a perfect choice to play James Bond. That man was Pierce Brosnan, who made his Bond debut over a decade later.

10. Stanley Kubrick recorded a typist hammering out “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” because he believed each typewriter key made a slightly different sound and he wanted the audio track of “The Shining” to be perfectly accurate.

A Texas plumber's truck was traded to a dealership in 2013. The dealership then auctioned and shipped to Turkey with his business' decals still on it. The truck eventually ended up in Syria, where it was outfitted with an anti-aircraft gun and used in the country’s civil war.

12. Rapper Coolio's cameo in Batman & Robin was an Easter Egg setting up the fifth movie in the series. Coolio is uncredited as playing Dr. Jonathan Crane aka The Scarecrow who would've been the main villain in Batman Unchained.

13. Elvis Presley was a huge Monty Python fan. He would watch Python all night. He would learn and recite them. Took the tapes on his plane. He would call people Squire from the "Nudge Nudge" sketch.

14. Scientists used Sunflowers near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear accident, to extract radioactive cesium from contaminated ponds nearby. This process was again used in 2011 at Fukushima to extract radiation from the nearby communities.

15. Parasocial Relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person pours emotions and effort into the relationship and the other doesn't know the first exists.

Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it.

17. Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff wrote a novel, City of Thieves, about 2 people surviving the Nazi onslaught in Russia. This novel was later the "major artistic inspiration" for the hit video game The Last of Us.

18. Because regular air is toxic at high pressures, deep sea divers live on a mix of helium and oxygen, meaning they live and speak with a squeaky helium voice for around a month while working.

19. Keanu Reeve’s first name Keanu is Hawaiian, Ke’Anu meaning “Cool breeze over the mountains, but almost went with Chuck Spadina as his stage name when starting out in Hollywood at his agent's request.

20. Luz Long was a German competitor against Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Owens was later quoted saying “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four karat friendship that I felt for Luz Long.” Owens was the best man at his son’s wedding.

After 3 years at Harvard, American computer programmer Gabe Newell dropped out to join Microsoft in 1983. He later said: "I learned more in 3 months at Microsoft than in my entire time at Harvard."

22. When the Romanov family was executed in 1918 the daughters Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria survived the initial gunfire because they had over 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds) of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which the bullets ricocheted off. They were subsequently killed with bayonets.

23. Aristotle observed that fossils of seashells in rocks resembled those found on beaches. He inferred that the fossils in rocks were formed by organisms, and he reasoned that the positions of land and sea had been changing slowly since ancient times. Leonardo da Vinci agreed with this reasoning.

24. 1 gram of uranium 235 has 19,870,900,000 calories and would take over 50 million hours of cycling to burn off.

25. The murderer Dr. Crippen fled to Quebec from London in 1910 after being investigated for the murder of his wife. The Chief Inspector of the case Walter Dew was alerted and reached Quebec before Crippen. Dew greeted Crippen as he got off of his ship and promptly arrested him.