38 Essential Random Facts Everyone Needs to Hear | Random List #104

A man was actually set on fire for the cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" album. An unexpected change in wind direction during the shoot caused stuntman Ronnie Rondell's mustache to catch on fire and burn off.

2. In 1941, the crew of submarine HMS Trident was given a reindeer as a gift by the USSR navy and it spent 6 weeks aboard the submarine with them until they reached home.

3. The Cagots were a group of people that did not differ in race, language, or culture from the people around them despite this, they were hated and persecuted for centuries, and historians still aren't sure why.

4. The original Bozo the Clown (Bob Bell), who died in 1997, had vision loss in one eye but fooled doctors by memorizing the eye chart so he could serve in World War 2.

5. The Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers had a prank war during a tour in 1999, which finally culminated into Dave Grohl dumping 500 lbs of spaghetti on drummer Chad Smith.

Nazi Germany spent 50% more on the V2 rocket program than the U.S. did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.

7. The Roman Emperor Nero did not play the fiddle as he watched the Great Fire burn Rome. When the fire broke out he was at his villa in Antium, 35 miles away. When he received news of the fire, he immediately rushed back to Rome to begin relief efforts.

8. Howard Hughes gave Orville Wright his last flight on a Lockheed Constellation (Airliner). Orville said the wingspan on the Constellation was longer than their first flight.

9. There's a special font for people with dyslexia which makes it easier for them to read.

10. 1920s Bootlegger George Remus had one of the worst breakups in history. His wife, owning all his assets, divorced him, tried to have him deported, hired a hitman to kill him, and left him with $100 from a Multi-Million dollar empire.

There is a reason behind Super Saiyan’s golden hair transformation in Dragon Ball. Its creator Akira Toriyama said he “Wanted to eliminate the time spent coloring in black [hair].”

12. In 1980, Punk Rock band Dead Kennedys was invited to play at an awards show to give the event “new wave credibility.” Seconds into their set, they stopped to perform “Pull My Strings”, a song that was written specifically to take the piss out of the music executives in the room. They never played it again.

13. The word "nightmare" is derived from the Old English "mare", a mythological demon that rides on people's chests while they sleep, causing bad dreams.

14. Tuberculosis has killed some of the most influential people in history. Popular names include Pocahontas, George Orwell, Andrew Jackson, Franz Kafka, Jane Austin, John Smith, Frederic Chopin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

15. In 1998, a professor named Dr. Theodore P. Hill at Georgia Institute of Technology asked his students to either flip a coin 200 times and record the results or give the fake results of 200 coin tosses. The students were amazed at how the professor easily identified the real results by seeing if they had six heads or tails in a row.

Lace monitors dig into a termite mound to lay their eggs, the termites then reseal the mound keeping the eggs at a constant temperature. The lizard returns 9 months later to dig the eggs out so they can hatch.

17. Genie is a feral child who was strapped to a potty chair for 13 years of her life, deprived of human interaction and never gained the proper ability to speak any language.

18. All Golden Hamsters in captivity today descend from a single brother-sister pairing, found in Syria in 1930. The captured litter began with eleven, but the rest either escaped or ate each other.

19. Soviet Union had a program to dig a hole (Kola Superdeep Borehole) through to the Earth's crust in the 1970's. They reached 40,318 feet deep before they had to stop due to higher-than-expected temperatures of 356 degree Fahrenheit, making the project infeasible.

20. Sylvester Stallone was so broke while developing Rocky that he had to sell his dog (Butkus) because he couldn't afford dog food.

In Russian, "vodka" basically means "lil water." The word for water is "voda," and "ka" is a diminutive ending.

22. Candace Newmaker, a child with "behavioral problems," was taken from her birth parents, adopted, and placed in controversial "rebirth therapy." She was suffocated for 70 minutes and declared brain-dead afterward.

23. A man named Victor Hugo Green published a series of travel guides named ‘The Green Book’ between 1936 and 1966, which was mainly aimed at African-Americans. It listed Black-friendly hotels and restaurants across North America.

24. Anna Swan at 7 feet 11 inches (2.41 m) and Martin Bates at 7 feet 9 inches (2.36 m) are not only the tallest couple ever to have ever lived, but also to have given birth to the largest baby ever in 1878. The baby at birth weighed 23 pounds 9 ounces (10.7 kg) and nearly 30 inches tall (75 cm) and each of his feet were six inches (152 mm) long, but he only lived for 11 hours.

25. Cocktails such as Rum and Coke and Jack and Coke, use Coke, not Pepsi, because of the popularity of a song called “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Pepsi offered to pay to rename the song but was outbid. It became the second-highest grossing song of the 1940s, behind "White Christmas."