26Märket Island
Märket is a tiny island divided by the Finnish-Swedish border. When the Finns inadvertently built a lighthouse on the wrong side of the border, the Swedes agreed to trade it for an equal spot of land on the other side, causing the border to zig-zag.
27. An Australian bird, called the rainbow lorikeet, routinely gets drunk from spring to summer. The small birds drink the fermented crimson flower nectar from the Weeping Boer-bean tree. When intoxicated these birds make loud drunken noises which many people find bothersome.
28. The last victim (David Gunby) of the 1966 University of Texas at Austin shooting died in 2001 after having to undergo dialysis for 35 years, 3 times a week, 5 hours each time. His death was ruled a homicide.
29. During World War 2, the Japanese military used plague-infected fleas and flies, covered in cholera, to infect the population of China. They were spread using low-flying planes and with bombs containing mixtures of insects and disease. 440,000 people died as a result.
30. In 2006, a 14-year-old girl named Elizabeth Shoaf was abducted and held captive in an underground bunker for 10 days. To survive, she befriended her captor and outsmarted him to obtain his phone. She texted her family and police were able to trace the number to a nearby phone line.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Jonathan Daniels
Harvard student and seminarian Jonathan Daniels traveled to the south to aid the civil rights movement. He was walking with a black girl when a deputy pointed his shotgun at her. Daniels jumped in front of her, sacrificing his life so that she could live.
32. Aretha Franklin required that she would be paid, in cash, prior to any performance, often carrying the money in a bag, on stage during the show.
33. Australia's first cops were all criminals. Their first police force was made up of 12 of the best-behaved convicts.
34. Christian Bale, who has a British accent, did all of his promotional interviews for Batman Begins in an American accent because he felt Batman was "such an American character" and he did not want audiences asking "What the hell is going on? Why do we have an English Batman?"
35. Dionne Quan, best known as the voice of Trixie Tang from Fairly Odd Parents and Kimi from Rugrats, is legally blind and all her acting scripts are written in Braille.
