1Jonathan Swift
Johnathan Swift wrote a satirical essay in 1729 where he proposed that poor Irish should sell their children as food for rich people to eat.
2. Coffin Torpedo is a small shotgun secured inside the lid of a coffin to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of the dead.” The shotgun fired lead balls at whoever pried the lid open and were used as an experimental deterrent to the rising tide of body snatchers in the late 1800s.
3. In 2000, the Sheriff of Dekalb County, Georgia, had his political rival (Derwin Brown) murdered after losing to him (Sidney Dorsey) in the Sheriff's election.
4. Cats are attracted to squares taped on the ground because they think of them as cozy, safe boxes.
5. In 2012 a German civil servant, in an email announced his retirement to his colleagues, admitting that he had done zero work for the last 14 years.
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6Blanket
We use a blanket at night to keep ourselves warm because our bodies can't thermoregulate when asleep.
7. South Korea once captured nine North Korean spies and a North Korean submarine using only a fishing net. Four of the captured senior officers killed the rest of the crew before killing themselves.
8. Sacha Baron Cohen, known for playing brainless idiots, has a degree in history from the University of Cambridge.
9. It only took 1 year and 45 days to build the Empire State Building.
10. 34% of all the Prime Ministers of England since 1721 went to the same boarding school, Eton.
11Marcel Marceau
French actor Marcel Marceau first used mime during World War 2 to keep Jewish children quiet while he helped them escape from occupied France to neutral Switzerland.
12. A Swedish couple was fined for naming their child Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116.
13. Dogs may have domesticated themselves. Historically, humans hunted wolves almost to extinction. This only changed when the boldest and friendliest scavenger wolves approached humans. Only then did the benefits of canine companionship become apparent.
14. The reason why Cashews are sold without shells is that the shells are poisonous. The Cashew tree is in the same family of plants as Poison Ivy. Eating the shell would cause a similar reaction to eating a Poison Ivy plant.
15. South Korea has the fastest global average internet connection speed while the United States ranks 10th.
16Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner, the 19th-century opera composer, once faked a homosexual attraction to a gay German king in order to get money from him.
17. Between the 14th-19th centuries, due to their early invention and love of ceramics, no glass was produced in China. Due to this, they were left behind in the progression of sciences and didn’t have things like glass windows and mirrors.
18. The ancient city of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey built in 10,000 B.C., is twice as old as Stonehenge, and completely disrupts our ideas of human development and agriculture.
19. In a 2004 episode of Sesame Street, Cookie Monster revealed that before he started eating cookies his name was Sid.
20. American journalist Wolf Blitzer did so poorly on Celebrity Jeopardy that he was negative $4,600 at one point and had to be bailed out by the show by giving him $1000.
21Phil Collins
Trey Parker and Matt Stone lost the Oscar for Best Song to Phil Collins in 1999. As a result, they brutally satirized him in the episode “Timmy 2000.” They have him sing a parody of “You’ll Be In My Heart,” get booed off stage and then had his Oscar shoved up his a*s.
22. The parents of murder victim Dee Dee Blanchard flushed her ashes down the toilet, saying she "got what she deserved." Blanchard was murdered in 2015 by her daughter Gypsy Rose who had endured years of unnecessary medical treatments and surgeries due to her mother's Munchausen by proxy.
23. Korean has 7 speech levels, each with different verb endings and vocab., reflecting formality/politeness.The highest, used for talking to royalty, is archaic but still used in historical dramas.The hagache level is now rarer, mostly used in novels. Middle management/bureaucrats sometimes use haoche.
24. Since the Federal Witness Protection Program was started in 1971, not one of the 8,500 witnesses or the 9,900 family members participating have been harmed. According to Gerald Shur, its creator, 95% of those who enter the program are "what we call criminals".
25. Some deaf people with schizophrenia don’t experience the common symptom of hearing voices, but rather, they see visual hallucinations of disembodied hands or lips making words.
