32 Awesome Random Facts About Nothing & Everything – Part 99

In a review of clinical drug trials, almost all negative studies were unpublished, leading to the false impression that 93% of antidepressant trials had positive results. When unpublished studies were included, 51% of all clinical trials were positive and 49% were negative.

2. Ian Fleming's last words were an apology to his ambulance drivers - "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days".

3. California does not allow you to name your child using anything other than the 26 English letters. This means that José is a banned name in California.

4. From over a million ancient Sumerian texts, which is the earliest human writing to have been discovered; only 30,000 have been translated. The rest of them have been sitting unread in museum warehouses for centuries.

5. Lottie Williams is the only person to have ever been hit by re-entering space debris. She was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 1997 at 3:30 am, when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She was hit by a piece from the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket that was launched in 1996. She was unhurt.

Despite producing over 38 billion ballpoint pens each year, China couldn’t acquire the technology to produce their own pen tips domestically until 2017.

7. Giraffe bread is the exact same thing as Tiger bread. Sainsbury’s renamed it to Giraffe bread after receiving a letter from a 3 year-old-girl saying it looked more like a giraffe.

8. Fucking Hell is a German Pilsner or pale lager with an alcohol content of 4.9%. It is named after the village of Fucking in Austria. Hell is the German word for 'pale' and a typical description of this kind of beer.

9. Mookie Betts of Boston Red Sox bowled a perfect 300 at the World Series of Bowling in the same week he was awarded an MLB Gold Glove.

10. During World War 1, the Germans thought that the shotgun was too inhumane a weapon, and lodged a complaint against the US.

J.P. Morgan of JPMorgan Chase & Co and Milton Hershey of Hershey's Chocolate were both in Europe and planned to travel back to the US on Titanic's Maiden Voyage but later changed their plans.

12. Abraham Lincoln's corpse was sent on a two-week funeral tour across America to be shown openly to thousands of people. In the course of the trip, the body visibly decomposed, bloated, and darkened. In New York City alone, the body was seen by over 150,000 people and was exposed to the air for 23 hours straight.

13. Rumblestrutting is a guinea pig behavior in which they strut around each other shaking their butts low to emit a rumbling sound. It can sound a lot like purring, but it's part of their herd rituals to determine dominance.

14. The word 'Jehovah’ is a Latinized derivative of God's given name 'YHWH’. This translated abbreviation stemming from 4 Hebrew consonants called the ‘tetragrammaton’ is regarded too sacred to be uttered and the letters were replaced by Latin-speaking Christian scholars.

15. President Garfield’s cause of death wasn’t so much as the bullet wound from his assassination attempt as much as it was the treatment he received afterwards. His doctors’ clumsy, unsanitary attempts to heal him resulted in a severe, painful infection that killed him three months later.

Maple syrup and maple sugar were used during the American Civil War and by abolitionists in the years before the war because most cane sugar and molasses were produced by Southern slaves.

17. Giant tortoises on whaling voyages were stored helplessly on their backs for up to six months before being killed and eaten. While alive, they drank gallons of water at a time and kept it in a special bladder, making a properly-butchered tortoise a source of cool, perfectly drinkable water.

18. Ann Wilson of Heart wrote the song Barracuda after her recording company created a rumor that her sister and she were having an incestuous relationship for publicity. Following a concert, a fan asked how her “lover” was. Enraged, she went directly to her hotel room and began writing the lyrics.

19. Marilyn Monroe never intentionally posed for the first issue of Playboy. Hefner paid $500 to a Chicago calendar company for the photos which were taken 4 years earlier. Marilyn was paid $50 for the initial shoot and had to buy a copy of the magazine herself to see the photos.

20. In 2016, a rural city in Victoria, Australia had a tumbleweed outbreak so bad that they named it "hairy panic." Tumbleweed was piling up around homes, at times reportedly reaching roof height.

According to Zipf's Law, in almost every language, the most common word will occur 2 times as often as the second most common word, 3 times as often as the third most common word, and so on.

22. The Weather Channel released a compilation of the music used during their 'Local on the 8s' segment. It peaked #1 on the Billboard Top 100 chart for Contemporary Jazz.

23. After Nelson Mandela's death, NHL goalie Jonathan Bernier gave a TV interview in which he referred to Mandela as 'one of the most-known athletes' and 'a great guy off and on the ice'.

24. “The New Shadow” was a supposed sequel to Lord Of The Rings that told of the reign of Aragorn’s descendant, men turning back to evil, and a plot to oust the king of Gondor. Tolkien quickly abandoned it after writing only 13 pages.

25. Most of the wasabi we eat in the US is fake. Real Wasabi is hard to cultivate and expensive to mass produce.