32 Unheard Of Random Facts To Enjoy With Your Coffee | Random List #268

In 1963, Barbie introduced a teenaged “babysitter” Barbie which was sold with a doll-sized book titled "How To Lose Weight," and read “Don’t Eat.” Babysitter Barbie also came with a pink scale, with the weight permanently reading 110, 35 pounds less than a woman her height should weigh.

2. Ewan McGregor's character in Black Hawk Down is fictionally named because the real person was convicted of child molestation in 1999. The Pentagon gave permission to use actual Army Black Hawks in the movie if the producers agreed to change the name from John Stebbins to 'John Grimes.'

3. The oldest federal enforcement agency in America is the United States Postal Inspection Service, a fact-finding, investigative agency of fully sworn-in federal agents. Founded in 1772 by Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin, it predates both the Declaration of Independence and the USA.

4. A Japanese Emergency Worker named Miki Endo saved thousands of lives during the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami by warning the people of Minamisanriku city via the Emergency Broadcast System. She did not leave her spot and was eventually killed in the subsequent disaster.

5. Humans are 99.9% genetically identical to each other. The 0.1% difference accounts for the various differences, like skin color, hair color, eyes, and even diseases.

Ultramarathoner Jasmin Paris won the 268-mile Spine Race in 2019 in a record-setting 83 hours 12 minutes, while stopping at aid stations to express milk for her daughter.

7. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a Japanese military leader who unified Japan and became the de facto leader of Japan, was never granted the title of Shogun because he had no traceable samurai lineage, and his father was an ashigaru – a peasant employed by the samurai as a foot soldier.

8. Christopher Walken first trained as a dancer and has danced in over 50 of his films, also starring in a music video which won a Grammy for Best Music Video of 2002.

9. The reason Jonathan Frakes has a distinctive way of sitting (known as the Riker maneuver) on The Next Generation is because he injured his back working as a furniture mover. This is also why he leans on chairs and consoles or has one leg propped up on something.

10. Researchers documented elephants exhibiting contagious yawning in response to yawns by humans familiar to them. While spontaneous yawning is common across all vertebrate classes, contagious yawning is less common and has been observed only in a few species of social animals.

The year 536 A.D. is considered by some scholars to be the worst year ever to be alive due to volcanos, extreme weather, and famine throughout Europe and Asia.

12. In the 1980s, a classical bassist named Christopher Roberts hiked into Papua New Guinea's jungles with his bass and tape recorder. By doing so, he preserved a tribe’s rich musical heritage and history, which were being lost because of mining and missionaries.

13. Jean Mill was a cat breeder and conservationist who worked to protect the Asian leopard cat. She disliked the fur trade so much that she successfully crossed an Asian leopard with a domestic cat, creating the Bengal Cat breed, so that people can own cats with the same style of fur.

14. In 1888, Edward Bellamy predicted the credit card. He wrote a book called "looking backwards" in which everyone uses a mechanical device to monitor and use their money/credit. The device he describes is almost identical to the credit card we use today.

15. In feudal Japan, merchants were at/near the bottom of the social hierarchy because they didn't produce goods. Artisans were a step above them because they produced non-essential goods and peasants were above artisans because they produced food.

Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan played the same character on the ‘All My Children’ soap opera. Jordan landed the role of Reggie Porter after Boseman was fired from it for Refusing to Play a Racial Stereotype.

17. Hindus in America are the highest educated religious group with 77% of all Hindus in the United States having college degrees.

18. Spain has been in the wrong time zone for 7 decades. Spain's dictator Francisco Franco set the country's clocks an hour ahead in World War 2 in order to be aligned with Nazi Germany, and the change was never reverted.

19. For the Sci-Fi Horror film, 'Event Horizon' Sam Neill requested that the Australian flag on his character's uniform remove the Union Flag from the corner and for it to be replaced with the Aboriginal flag, the way he thought it should look in 2047.

20. NASA hired 11 deaf men to study the body's responses to foreign gravitational environments. They were chosen because their disabled inner ear made them immune to motion sickness.

The lady in Tom and Jerry is called Mammy Two Shoes and her face was shown in one episode.

22. An hour-long hot bath can burn 130 calories, the same amount you would burn by walking for 30 minutes.

23. Momčilo Gavrić was the youngest soldier to be enlisted during World War 1. He enlisted in the Serbian army at the age of 8 after Austro-Hungarian soldiers killed his family in 1914. He survived the war and lived until 1993.

24. During his military service in India, British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton kept a menagerie of monkeys in an attempt to learn their language. His wife later claimed that he could speak over 60 words of monkey.

25. People in Maine are called Downeasters because it's downwind and east sailing from Boston. It's also why they "ship up" to Boston.