32 Quick Random Facts Stronger Than Your Morning Coffee | Random List #32

Benjamin Lay was an 18th century Quaker vegetarian abolitionist who once kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily, to show them how Africans felt when their relatives were sold overseas.

2. In order to explore and exploit economic benefits from The Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand's government appointed a "Minister of Lord of the Rings" to their cabinet.

3. Ernst Leitz, the founder of Leica camera, smuggled Jews out of Germany by giving them jobs overseas and he gave each one a camera as a symbol of freedom.

4. The classic peace symbol is based on the semaphore signal for N and D, which stands for Nuclear Disarmament.

5. Dogs have slits on the outside of each nostril, which allows them to exhale without disturbing the scent particles in front of his nose. Breathing out the side slits helps release air while holding scent particles in the nostrils so that a dog isn't as likely to lose a scent.

Timothy the tortoise served as a mascot on HMS Queen during the bombardment of Sevastopol in 1854. She was, until her death in 2004, the last surviving witness to the Crimean war.

7. All life on the Earth currently is descended from the 4% that survived the Permian mass extinction.

8. A disgruntled former 7-Eleven owner named Abu Musa in South Boston opened a new convenience store across the street from his old location. He named it 6-Twelve.

9. Leslie Nielsen used to carry a fart noise maker everywhere he went.

10. The Pledge of Allegiance was a marketing tool to sell flags to US schools.

The Foo Fighters once canceled a tour so they could play for David Letterman on his first show back from heart surgery.

12. Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, 9 months prior to Rosa Parks. She was not promoted because she was a teenager who was impregnated by a married man.

13. The word "dude" was 19th-century slang for a dandy and was likely shortened from "doodle" as in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

14. When Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, returned to university at Harvard, he wrote in his diary that kids wearing Weezer T-Shirts would never recognize him.

15. During the 1912 Olympics, one of the Japanese athletes named Kanakuri Shizō abandoned the race and didn't notify race officials. He later completed it when he was notified of this in 1967, making his official finish time 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes, 20.3 seconds.

When communicating about floral resources bees on cocaine like to talk more and also tend to exaggerate how much was actually there in the first place.

17. Pocahontas and Shakespeare were alive at the same time and died only a year apart.

18. In 2015, Spanish workers destroyed a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb, mistaking it for a broken picnic table. They replaced it with a ‘better' picnic table.

19. License plate sized tiles known as "Toynbee tiles" began appearing around the United States and South America in the 80's that contained cryptic messages about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. Over 300 have been found so far and has influenced copycat artists.

20. After winning the 1962 European Cup, Benfica coach Béla Guttmann asked for a pay rise. When denied, he allegedly cursed the club and said: "Not in a hundred years from now will Benfica ever win a European Cup". They have since reached 8 European Cup finals and lost all of them.

Despite critical acclaim, "The Wire" received poor ratings, which the creator attributed to the complexity of the plot, a poor time slot, heavy use of esoteric slang, and a predominantly black cast.

22. On August 1st each year the people of Warsaw, Poland stop everything to pay homage to the Warsaw Uprising, the largest rebellion of World War 2, which cost over 200,000 lives and destruction of the capital.

23. Bumblebees can fly higher than Mount Everest.

24. Johnny Knoxville has to use a catheter twice a day as a result of a stunt gone wrong.

25. A man named Bob Teixeira in Charlotte, North Carolina spent $1,200 to convert his diesel car to run on vegetable oil. He was fined $1,000 by the state for not paying gasoline taxes and told he would need to post a $2,500 bond before using the oil