40 Absurd Random Facts That (Believe It or Not) Are True! – Part 210

In the movie "Home Alone" the producers thought it would be too mean to use a real girl for the pic of Buzz’s unattractive girlfriend so they used the art director’s son.

27. As part of the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” of 1956, China allowed and encouraged people to speak freely and openly express their opinions about the communist regime. A year later the campaign was withdrawn and the Chinese government imprisoned those who spoke critically about them.

28. Diphenhydramine is marketed as both Benadryl (an allergy pill with a side of effect of making on sleepy) and also Sominex (a sleeping pill with the side effect of helping one's allergies).

29. In 2011, billionaire Oprah Winfrey found out she has a sister she never knew existed and now takes care of her financially because Oprah was so impressed by her sister's loyalty. She spent 4 years trying to contact Oprah with no luck and never once tried to sell the story to the press.

30. Hockey goalie Clint Malarchuk’s throat got slashed by a skate during a live NHL game. The injury was so bad that 11 fans fainted, two people got heart attack and at least 3 players vomited on the ice. The wound was so bad that it needed 300 stitches. Clint was back on the ice just a week later.

In 1930, a lawyer named TM Zink tried to leave $50,000 in trust to build a Womanless library. “No Woman Admitted” signs were to be posted at each entrance and no works by women were to be allowed on the premises. His family successfully challenged his will after his death, and the plans were scrapped.

32. The first recorded use of Forensic Entomology was by Chinese detective in 1200s AD. In a murder investigation in a village, detective Song Ci put every scythe in the village for inspection and found the culprit when flies - attracted to trace amounts of blood- kept landing on his scythe.

33. The VLC media player uses a traffic cone for its icon because the students who created it drunkenly started a traffic cone collection.

34. The reason Phoenix can exist in the middle of the desert is because in 1868, Jack Swilling discovered the ruins of a 27,000 square miles canal system built by the Hohokam. He restarted the canals and today that infrastructure, with modern expansions, waters the city of over a million in the hot desert.

35. The dragonfly is one of the most skilled predators on the planet, being absolutely lethal to other insects, missing only one prey in twenty.

When it snowed for the first recorded time in Miami in 1977, a meteorologist initially thought it was a coke-drop that had gone wrong, until realizing that the flakes were snow.

37. 70% of the world’s Macadamia Nuts came from one tree in Australia. All of Hawaii’s macadamias share distinctive markers with a tiny wild grouping of trees in Gympie, suggesting that all of the state’s modern crops were likely cloned out of a single Australian tree.

38. Frank Sinatra regularly tipped waiters, busboys, and chefs $100-200 each. However, he had a fearsome temper in restaurants. He would throw food against the wall if he didn’t like how it was prepared and would throw drinks if he didn’t like how he was treated.

39. Mad honey which is cultivated in Turkey is made from the nectar of rhododendron flowers. Small doses cause hallucinations, large doses bring seizures and death. It is used as medicine by Turkish villagers, who drink it in milk with breakfast and believe it increases sexual potency.

40. When Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of the RADAR was caught speeding with a RADAR gun, he reportedly said “My God, if I’d known what they were going to do with it, I’d have never have invented it!”