34 Random Phenomenal Facts That Are Absolutely True – Part 88

Mr. Homn, the Lurch-like attendant of Lwaxana Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by Carel Struycken, the actor who portrayed Lurch in The Addams Family.

2. Spongebob Squarepants’ birthday is July 14, 1986. He is 34 years old (as of 2020).

3. In 1973, the National Lampoon magazine had a front cover featuring a dog with a gun to its head, saying “if you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog”. Three years later, somebody tracked the dog down and killed it. The dog was named Cheeseface.

4. The language you grow up speaking determines how quickly you will learn to count. Chinese speaking children learn to count to 100 an entire year earlier than their English speaking counterparts.

5. The 5 oldest companies, still running, are in Japan, and 52.8% of the world's 985 oldest companies (that's 520) are in Japan.

All of the drawings in Grey's Anatomy (human anatomy textbook) are of real people. They were nameless and poor, coming out of the hospital mortuary or out of a workhouse where they had died. The illustrator (Henry Carter) represented them with reverence because he saw the human body as the image of God.

7. In Argentina, the 7th son of a couple automatically receives the godfathership of the President to prevent him from turning in to a werewolf.

8. After Steve Jobs discovered a loophole that allowed a 6-month grace period before requiring a license plate on a leased car, Jobs would lease the same Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG every six months in order to avoid having a plate.

9. Leonardo DiCaprio’s haircut from Titanic was outlawed by the Taliban.

10. Hawaii consumes more Spam per capita than any other state, with five cans eaten per person per year which is about 7 million cans total.

Sniper schools use brain games such as ‘Kim's Game’ where items on a tray are memorized for one minute, covered and recalled to train their situational awareness skills.

12. There is a theory which suggests that early humans were first inspired to settle down and adopt agriculture in order to produce beer, rather than bread.

13. Lemons, limes and most of the other citrus fruits we eat do not occur naturally in the wild. They are the result of generations of interbreeding between various combinations of the four "original" citrus fruits.

14. Transformers: The Last Knight has aspect ratio changes throughout the film, often randomly, mid-scene and between shots. The film's trailer itself includes shots of 8 different ratios.

15. Emily Rosa became the youngest person to publish in a medical journal (at 11 years old) when her school science project was published. It demonstrated that Reiki (a type of alternative medicine) practitioners could not detect the alleged "life force" under experimental conditions.

World War 2 Black Sheep Squadron member Bill Case cheated death by randomly lowering the seat in his cockpit. In battle, a bullet from a Japanese Zero hit his cockpit and bloodied his scalp. If he had been sitting an inch higher, he would be dead. He went on to live another 52 years.

17. Scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who created one of the earliest racial classification systems believed that none of the races were inherently inferior to the others, nor that colored peoples were uncivilized. His classification system became very influential but his opposition to racism was mostly ignored.

18. Born in 1779 into a family plagued by severe mental illness, Peter Roget's (British physician) childhood was dominated by the depression and misery of those around him. In an effort to cope, he developed a compulsion for making lists. His lifelong passion culminated in the publication of Roget's Thesaurus in 1852.

19. In 1979, the governments of the USA, France, Canada and the USSR signed a treaty to create a worldwide network of search-and-rescue satellites and ground stations. To date, this system has saved at least 42,000 lives and works everywhere on Earth. A beacon costs $200 and has a 5-year battery!

20. Pine trees scatter their needles across the forest floor to make it easier for fires to burn all of the other trees. Pine is fire resistant so it survives.

Queen Isabella of France was so frustrated, humiliated and tired of her husband that she fled England, tricked him to send their son, invaded England with her lover (enemy and fugitive of her husband) and defeated him.

22. Two-thirds of the way between your 31st and 32nd birthdays, you will turn one billion seconds old.

23. A Humboldt penguin escaped from Tokyo Sea Life Park and thrived in Tokyo Bay for 82 days after scaling the 13-foot high wall and managing to get through a barbed-wire fence into the bay. The penguin, known only by its number (337) was later recaptured by the zookeepers.

24. The owners of the Titanic demanded huge sums of money at the time to return the bodies of ship's crew to their grieving families.

25. A pianist named Reginald Dwight was touring with a band called Simon Dupree and the Big Sound. They laughed at him when he told them he was adopting the stage name of Elton John.