33 Obscure Random Facts That’ll Improve Your Mood | Random List #258

In 1820, Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted numerous sections from the New Testament to make his own Bible. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all "miracles" of Jesus and most mentions of the "supernatural". It's called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

2. In 2016, an employee at brewing company Brewdog printed "Mother F**cker Day" on 200,000 cans of their Punk IPA, after saying the company was not punk enough anymore, all of which had to be recalled. The Company made him an employee of the month.

3. Vincent Van Gogh was named after his dead older brother, who died in infancy exactly a year before he was born. It’s been suggested that being given the same name might have had a deep psychological impact on him and influenced his art.

4. Camels once existed in Canada's far north. The Yukon giant camel was a 3.5 million-year-old ancestor of the living domestic camel found today in the deserts of Asia and Africa.

5. Actor, director, and producer Orson Welles refused admission into Harvard at the age of 16 so that he could travel. When he landed in Dublin he convinced everyone that he was a famous Broadway star and began producing plays. When he grew bored of the farce, he went to North Africa to draw pictures.

Child labor in the United States was largely ended by a photographer named Lewis Wickes Hine. He took photos of child laborers at eye level to humanize and personalize each child. He captured nearly identical pictures across the country to show lawmakers this was a systemic problem.

7. Thomas Edison produced a film called Fred Ott’s Sneeze, a 5-second film where Fred Ott, one of Edison’s assistants, sneezes. It is the oldest surviving film with copyright.

8. During the 1965-66 Indonesian Communist purge, over 500,000 to 1 million communists were killed, and the US played a significant role in the killings, supplying economic, technical, and military aid to the Indonesian military when the killings began and providing “kill lists.”

9. Cats often avoid consuming food or water from sides of their bowls to prevent 'whisker fatigue.' Whiskers brushing against a bowl can trigger sensory overload, causing them pain and stress whenever eating or drinking.

10. Elephants like to paint and play music. Some paintings have been compared to abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and have sold for $25,000. Other elephants have been taught to play in an orchestra and reportedly have a strong sense of rhythm and enjoy improvisation.

The guitar in Lil Nas X Old Town road was sampled from Nine Inch Nails. Nine Inch Nails ended up winning a country music award because of this.

12. The first-ever Ironman Triathlon was won by US Navy Communications Specialist Gordon Haller. The runner-up John Dunbar, a US Navy Seal, was winning after the second transition but lost his lead when he ran out of the water and his support crew started giving him beer instead.

13. The "cookies" Sesame Street's Cookie Monster eats are not real cookies, as the oils from them would damage the puppet. He instead eats painted rice cakes disguised as cookies.

14. Rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard's verse on the hit song "Ghetto Supastar" was the result of him showing up at the wrong studio, loving the song, and asking to be part of it.

15. Albert Battel was a German Army Lieutenant. He blocked Waffen SS troops from taking Jews from a Ghetto for execution and his Sargent threatened to shoot the SS if they tried. He then broke into the Ghetto with army trucks and evacuated 100 Jews into the protection of the German army.

The Wolf of Wall Street movie was funded by a fraudulent bond scheme run by Goldman Sachs employees and a Malaysian PM.

17. The RMS Carpathia only heard the Titanic's distress call because Carpathia's wireless operator, Harold Cottam, was listening to his telegraph while getting into his pajamas, several minutes after his shift had ended. Had he signed off when he was supposed to, there may have been no rescue.

18. Baby hatches are places where mothers can safely and anonymously abandon their newborns (usually in hospitals or churches). In Germany, babies abandoned in this way are looked after for 8 weeks, during which time, the mother can 'reclaim' her child without legal repercussions.

19. In the middle ages, some people used to "clip" coins. Coins in medieval Europe were made of gold or silver. The purpose of clipping was to remove slivers of this material from the edge of the coin. Doing this enough times and they had enough metal for a new coin. If caught, the punishment was death.

20. In 1963, the first message sent on the Moscow–Washington hotline was the test phrase "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890". Later, the confused Russian translators responded, "What does it mean when your people say 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'?"

The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta which was accidentally discovered in 1902 is believed to predate the pyramids by up to 1000 years according to historians. It housed up to 7000 bodies of an unknown Neolithic civilization who mysteriously disappeared in 2500 B.C. without explanation.

22. The word with the most meanings in English is the verb 'set', with 430 senses listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words or 326,000 characters.

23. Actress and pin-up girl Rita Hayworth's face was painted on several atomic bombs tested in the late 1940s without her authorization. When she found out she flew into a rage and held a press conference announcing she didn’t condone this.

24. Alfred Hitchcock used to play sadistic pranks on his coworkers. Once he had a bet with the prop guy to spend a night tied to the camera. The man agreed and had a drink with Alfred but Alfred put laxatives in his drink. When people came in the morning, he was found crying in his own poop puddle.

25. Princess Diana once shook hands with a man who had AIDS. This event helped in removing the public stigma around the disease.