39 Obscure Random Facts To Make You Smarter – Part 32

Billionaire pastor Edir Macedo is accused of using $2 billion in donations intended for charity overseas from his poor followers to buy jewelry, TV stations, and other businesses for himself.

2. A crowd funding campaign raised over £20,000 to replace all advertisements in a London Underground station with pictures of cats.

3. 85% of bikinis sold never touch the water.

4. HP Lovecraft wrote nearly 100,000 letters in his lifetime, the second most number of letters written by anyone in recorded history; the first was French writer Voltaire. Lovecraft said, "I write [letters] exactly as easily and as rapidly as I would utter the same topics in conversation."

5. There have been suggestions to teach the NATO phonetic alphabet to all medical professionals, in order to avoid accidental deaths due to miscommunication.

The difference between hardwood and softwood has to do with how they reproduce, not the hardness of the wood, and that balsa wood - one of the softest woods - is a hardwood.

7. The family of 110-year-old Reg Dean attributed his long life to someone in India, who before World War 1 gave him a muddy Elixir and told him "drink this and you'll live till at least 100".

8. Benjamin Lay was an 18th century Quaker vegetarian abolitionist who once kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily, to show them how Africans felt when their relatives were sold overseas.

9. In order to explore and exploit economic benefits from The Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand's government appointed a "Minister of Lord of the Rings" to their cabinet.

10. Ernst Leitz, the founder of Leica camera, smuggled Jews out of Germany by giving them jobs overseas and he gave each one a camera as a symbol of freedom.

The classic peace symbol is based on the semaphore signal for N and D, which stands for Nuclear Disarmament.

12. Dogs have slits on the outside of each nostril, which allows them to exhale without disturbing the scent particles in front of his nose. Breathing out the side slits helps release air while holding scent particles in the nostrils so that a dog isn't as likely to lose a scent.

13. Timothy the tortoise served as a mascot on HMS Queen during the bombardment of Sevastopol in 1854. She was, until her death in 2004, the last surviving witness to the Crimean war.

14. All life on the Earth currently is descended from the 4% that survived the Permian mass extinction.

15. A disgruntled former 7-Eleven owner named Abu Musa in South Boston opened a new convenience store across the street from his old location. He named it 6-Twelve.

Leslie Nielsen used to carry a fart noise maker everywhere he went.

17. The Pledge of Allegiance was a marketing tool to sell flags to US schools.

18. The Foo Fighters once canceled a tour so they could play for David Letterman on his first show back from heart surgery.

19. Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, 9 months prior to Rosa Parks. She was not promoted because she was a teenager who was impregnated by a married man.

20. The word "dude" was 19th-century slang for a dandy and was likely shortened from "doodle" as in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

When Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, returned to university at Harvard, he wrote in his diary that kids wearing Weezer T-Shirts would never recognize him.

22. During the 1912 Olympics, one of the Japanese athletes named Kanakuri Shizō abandoned the race and didn't notify race officials. He later completed it when he was notified of this in 1967, making his official finish time 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes, 20.3 seconds.

23. When communicating about floral resources bees on cocaine like to talk more and also tend to exaggerate how much was actually there in the first place.

24. Pocahontas and Shakespeare were alive at the same time and died only a year apart.

25. In 2015, Spanish workers destroyed a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb, mistaking it for a broken picnic table. They replaced it with a ‘better' picnic table.