36 Quirky Random Facts That’ll Sound Ridiculous At First – Part 264

Canada's Northwest Territories launched a process in 1996 to find a new name. They dropped the matter when "Bob" emerged as a frontrunner.

2. Roman busts sometimes had removable "hair" so that you could update it later on with the current fashionable hairstyle.

3. During the Warlord Era (1916-1928) in China there was a woman named Shi Jianqiao whose father was a warlord. He was defeated and executed by his rival, Sun Chuanfang when she was 19. Shi spent her 20s tracking Sun down, killing him in 1935. The Chinese society was so moved by her act of revenge that the court pardoned her.

4. The 1959 film "The Tingler" was about a parasite that causes tingling sensations in victims. The film's producers rigged surplus World War 2 aircraft motors to random theater seats, so viewers would "feel the tingler" when it attacked. Some viewers were also paid to pretend to scream and faint.

5. In 1906, a man named Joe Munch in Seattle was sentenced to one minute in jail for drunkenness and disorder. The original sentence was 30 days, but after an appeal and 6 months of litigation, it was shortened to one minute. He was kept in jail until the second hand of the jailer’s watch completed a circle.

A top-level Dutch football club signed up an 18-month old named Baerke van der Meij for a ten-year contract after his father posted a video of the boy kicking a ball into his toy chest 3 times in a row. After scribbling his signature for the club, the toddler celebrated with a glass of orange juice.

7. In 2003, the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, illegally bulldozed the runway of a downtown airport in the middle of the night to create a park. This stranded 16 planes on the ground and required an inbound flight to be diverted. The FAA fined the city $33,000, the maximum allowed at that time.

8. Erotomania is a delusional disorder in which a person believes another person, often famous or important, is in love with them. The person suffering from this delusion might think the person of interest is sending them subliminal messages. This disorder is most often seen in women.

9. Whitesnake’s 1987 no. 1 hit song, ‘Here I Go Again’, was actually a re-recording of their 1982 version that never charted. There is only one-word difference in the lyrics between the songs. They changed “hobo” to “drifter” to ensure it was no longer mistakenly heard as homo.

10. President Andrew Jackson once held an open house party at the White House at which he served a 1,400 lb block of Cheddar cheese. The White House is said to have smelled of cheese for weeks.

New Zealand author Janet Frame was scheduled for a frontal lobotomy when it was announced that she had won a national literary prize. The procedure was canceled.

12. In 2007, a Chinese company sold a sofa model with an inappropriate label after their translation software translated the Chinese characters for “dark brown” as “nig*er brown.”

13. Golden Age movie star Grace Kelly's film career as a leading lady lasted four years ('52 - '56), during which she made 4 all-time classic movies. She retired at the age of 26 and never made another movie despite Hitchcock begging her to.

14. Cristina Zenato is a professional diver in the Bahamas, who is known as the “Shark Whisperer”. She likes to nuzzle sharks as if they were dogs or cats. She has so far removed over 300 hooks from sharks’ mouths.

15. If farmers don't properly dry the hay they are baling, the hay bales can spontaneously combust.

Mitchell Kriegman, the creator of “Clarissa Explains It All” had a strict rule about not allowing the color purple onset, requiring parts of the set to be repainted. When asked about this rule, he revealed that it was completely arbitrary, only existing to make him seem more assertive as someone new in the business.

17. The early versions of the Easy-Bake Oven, a child's toy that allows children to bake small treats, used incandescent lightbulbs as their heat source. That's because these bulbs were so inefficient that only 5% of the electricity they used produced light. The rest produced heat.

18. Children commonly develop an accent closer to that of their peers than their parents’ native accent. There have been no recorded cases of children speaking with a foreign accent that they have not been exposed to.

19. Barbie has parents, 8 siblings (2 of which are now discontinued), and chose never to have children.

20. It takes approximately 7 minutes for a raindrop to fall from the cloud to the ground.

Nurses have a rate of depression double that of the general public. They often might choose not to get treated since they believe it can affect their job and because of the stigma, they might face.

22. In USA, more than 90% of the defendants in criminal cases plead guilty rather than go to trial.

23. The word "Walkman" became so popular in the German language as a generic term for a personal stereo that in 2002 the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that any brand, not just Sony, could use that word to describe such a device.

24. Falling asleep during summer or in hot environments is harder because our body temperature lowers 1 to 2 degrees when we sleep. The optimal room temperature for falling asleep is around 18.3°C or 65°F.

25. Orangutans are very gentle and solitary animals. Males live 90% of their long lifespans alone, only spending a few days with a female to mate before going back into seclusion.