26Eric Lomax
A British ex-POW named Eric Lomax was captured in 1942 by Japanese forces. Many years after the war, he tracked down the Japanese man who had tortured him, and forgave him.
27. English singer Robert Plant once donated $10,000 to KBOO, a non-profit community radio station in Portland Oregon, to never play "Stairway to Heaven" ever again.
28. There are certain rare train services running in United Kingdom that have been nicknamed ghost trains, which only see a couple of passengers every day. They only exist and serve because closing lines and stations is difficult and costly, so rail companies would rather run infrequent services than go through the cumbersome process.
29. Pronoia, the opposite of paranoia, is the delusion that everyone is secretly plotting your success.
30. A popular form of software debugging aptly named ‘rubber duck debugging’ exists. The name is in reference to the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, where a programmer would debug code by explaining it, word by word, to his rubber duck.
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31Yamaguchi-gumi
Japan's largest Yakuza group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, holds an annual Halloween party for neighborhood children in Kobe. "Not only were the decorations great and the gift bags full of tasty stuff, there were two big lines for cotton candy. And the gangsters were super nice."
32. Evidence suggests that 'Brainstorming' is counter-productive, and produces fewer original ideas than when individuals work alone.
33. In 1917, you could order a belt-fed machine gun from a Sears catalog that said: "Machine guns are used largely by police organizations, home guards and municipalities in case of riots."
34. Stan Lee had a contract awarding him 10% of the net profits of anything based on his characters. The first Spider-Man made more than $800 million in revenue, but the producers claimed it did not make any profit and Lee received nothing.
35. Before "A Hard Day's Night" was released in America, a United Artists executive requested to dub the voices of the Beatles with mid-Atlantic accents. McCartney angrily replied, "Look, if we can understand a f*cking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool."
