1Billie Holiday
Jazz legend Billie Holiday was raised in a brothel by teenage parents, worked as a prostitute alongside her mother, was addicted to heroin her entire life and, weeks before her death at 44, was arrested for heroin possession in her hospital bed.
2. The Daisy Cutter was a bomb specifically designed to create helicopter landing pads in the thick jungle forests of Vietnam. The blast would level a 300+ feet circle while leaving the ground itself relatively unaffected.
3. Grace Slick, the lead singer of psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, planned to spike President Richard Nixon's tea with 600 micrograms of LSD after being invited to a tea party at the White House.
4. There are myths of an advanced civilization of red-haired people who disappeared after the last ice age (5,000+ years ago).
5. The weeks before Christmas is the most popular time for couples to break up, according to data analyzed from Facebook.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Matthew Birchinger
An 18th century German named Matthew Birchinger, also known as "the little man of Nuremberg," played instruments, was a calligrapher and a famous magician. He performed tricks that have never been explained. Yet he had no hands, legs, or thighs, and was less than 29 inches tall.
7. Poles (Polish people) once held the strong belief that they were the descendants of an old Iranian tribe.
8. In 2006, Jasmine Richardson at the age of 12 stabbed her little brother to death while her 23-year-old boyfriend murdered her parents. She's the youngest person in Canada to get charged with murder.
9. When Isaac Watts (English Christian minister) wrote: "Joy to the World", he didn't intend it to be about Christmas, but rather about Christ's promised return at the end of time.
10. Cheddar cheese wasn't the dominantly produced cheese in Britain until World War 2, when cheese factories were forced to produce Cheddar due to its high yield per liter of milk. This was necessary due to the introduction of rationing.
11Indian girls
The number of girls in India who drop out of school due to menstruation is 1 in 5 (20%).
12. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote letters with illustrations to his kids for Christmas, every year until his youngest was 14 years old.
13. A region (Rio Omerê Indigenous Territory) in Brazil is home to the remnants of two native tribes, consisting of four and five people, respectively, who “speak mutually unintelligible languages, but are linked by marriage,” as well as “an unknown man who lives alone and is thought the be the last survivor of a different tribe.”
14. When a child actor is cast in California, a trust fund, or Coogan account, is set up to store at least 15% of their earnings. This was after the parents of Jackie Coogan, a child star from some early Charlie Chaplin movies, squandered nearly all of his fortune before he reached adulthood.
15. During the Watergate investigation, the Nixon team offered to let a Democratic Senator listen to the 'Nixon tapes'. The Senator was hard of hearing and on pain medication.
16WHO
The WHO has some very specific disease code classifications, such as "hurt at opera", "bitten by orca", "burn due to water skis on fire", and "unspecified spacecraft accident injuring occupant".
17. The last claim under the 1866 Homestead Act, which entitled a person to free frontier land if they lived on it for 5 years and built a farm, was made on 80 acres near the Stony River in Alaska in 1979.
18. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has had the longest-running theatrical release in film history (Since 1975).
19. In 1999, NASA spacecraft (Mars Climate Orbiter) burned up in Mars' atmosphere because all the units were in the metric system except for one contractors' (Lockheed Martin) numbers, which were in US Industrial units.
20. Schools in Philadelphia went on lockdown in 2013 after a teacher misheard The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song lyrics as "shooting some people outside of school," instead of "shooting some b-ball."
21Uncontacted tribes
In 2013, it was estimated there were more than 100 uncontacted tribes around the world, mostly in the densely forested areas of South America, Central Africa, Asia and New Guinea. Knowledge of the existence of these groups comes from infrequent and sometimes violent encounters and aerial footage.
22. Korean is a language isolate having developed independently of all other languages. It is the largest language isolate by a wide margin.
23. The 1964 Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer TV special is in a grey area of copyright due to the fact that the studio mistakenly spelled out the copyright date as 1164 in roman numerals and haven't corrected it since.
24. After South Park premiered in 1997, the number of households with Comedy Central jumped from 9.1 million to a staggering 50 million by 1998.
25. Those who see Earth from space experience “The Overview Effect:” A remarkable sense of connection with the rest of the human race, and a desire for world peace.
