1George B. McClellan
George B. McClellan, the mayor of New York in 1904, was to symbolically start the first train at City Hall station and hand it over to an engineer. However, he enjoyed himself so much that he refused to stop controlling the train until he reached 103rd street.
2. An American actor named James Stewart rose from the rank of Private to Colonel in only 4 years during his World War 2 military service, and eventually became a Brigadier General, making him the highest-ranking actor in American military history.
3. 900-year-old African coins were found on the coast of Australia, making them the oldest foreign artifacts found on the continent, predating the Europeans by centuries.
4. Following a traumatic event, a person may develop a sense of a foreshortened future, which is currently considered an avoidance symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They may also feel as though they won't be able to reach milestones in their life, such as a career or marriage.
5. UK's highest-paid entertainer in World War 2, George Formby, went to Normandy after the landings and gave 9 shows to frontline troops who’d held out for 56 days without relief, his audience in foxholes. He also crawled through trenches to tell jokes when the enemy was too close for a show.
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6Pinot noir
Pinot noir (red wine) became considerably more popular among consumers as a result of the film Sideways. Throughout the film, the main character speaks fondly of Pinot Noir while denigrating Merlot. A study estimated that Sideways cost American Merlot farmers over US$400 million in lost revenue.
7. Bobby Farrell, the member of the group Boney M., famous for the song Rasputin, died on the 30th of December in St. Petersburg, the same date and place that Grigori Rasputin died.
8. Our brains do not necessarily process everything as that would be an overload of information. A study from 2016 found that under the influence of LSD, the brain recruited many more regions for visual processing than normal, enriching the images people saw even when their eyes were shut.
9. Before asbestos was seen as hazardous, a Han dynasty general had a jacket made from it. He would pretend to spill wine on it at dinners. Then he'd throw it into a fire and pull it out to show it was still intact to impress his guests.
10. In 2007, six US cruise missiles with the nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a bomber, not reported missing, and remained mounted for 36 hours with no security precautions for nuclear weapons implemented.
11Roundabouts
Studies by the IIHS and Federal Highway Administration have shown that roundabouts typically achieve a 37% reduction in overall collisions, a 75% reduction in injury collisions and a 90 percent reduction in fatality collisions.
12. In 2013, Detroit was so broke that they were unable to print out death certificates because they had not been able to pay the company that provided the special embossed paper on which they were printed, and subsequently ran out.
13. In February 2020, a photographer snapped a rare photo of the only known pink manta ray near Australia. It likely has a genetic mutation causing the unusual coloration.
14. A McDonald's burger doesn't rot, not because there are any mysterious chemicals in it, but because low moisture and dehydration basically turns it into a jerky.
15. Iceland has the highest number of authors per head, and one in ten Icelandic people will publish a book in their lifetime.
16Kidz Bop
Despite censoring "dirty" language in songs, Kidz Bop has been criticized due to changing only individual lyrics and not the overall meaning and themes of songs. A University of Colorado professor called Kidz Bop "an abomination" due to it only censoring lyrics and not the overall content.
17. The U.S. Air Force had a doomsday weapon named SLAM. It was a rocket that was designed to fly fast and low over the Soviet Union, dropping hydrogen bombs over predetermined targets while its unshielded nuclear reactor contaminated everything in its path.
18. Henry Rathbone, the other man in the balcony with Lincoln the night he was assassinated was so consumed with guilt over not having prevented it that he slowly went mad and eventually stabbed his wife to death and tried to kill his children before he was committed to a mental asylum for the rest of his life.
19. In 1981, a group of scientists met to discuss ways of making future humans aware of nuclear waste disposal sites. One idea was genetically engineering cats to change color in the presence of radiation and introducing a cultural idea to run away when you see a cat change color.
20. John Morrissey went from being a famous gambler during the Gold Rush to a heavyweight boxing champ to the boss of the Irish mob to a New York senator to Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, which basically controlled New York politics for the Gilded Age, all before dying at the age of 47.
21Bear attack
The National Park Service has officially advised against sacrificing slower friends in a bear attack, ‘even if the friendship has run its course.’
22. The voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, Paul Winchell was one of the original inventors of an artificial heart, an automobile that runs on battery power, a method for breeding tilapia, and many other inventions that are still around today.
23. Honeybees can recognize human faces. Before it was thought that only large-brained mammals could distinguish faces, but honeybees can do this as well. They see faces in a compilation of 5,000 individual images, kind of like pixels.
24. There is a cemetery in the Netherlands that consists of tombs of the 8,300 US veterans who died there in World War 2. For the past 70 years, Dutch families have come to the cemetery every Sunday to care for a grave they adopted. Hundreds of people are currently on a waiting list to become caretakers.
25. Joaquin Phoenix grew up in a cult involved with pedophilia and his parents traveled to Venezuela to recruit followers (not knowing about the pedophilia). The cult was called ‘The Children of God.’
