43 Brisk Random Facts That’ll Wake You Up From Morning Slumber | Random List #262

Hoxne Hoard is the largest treasure hoard in Britain that was accidentally found by a man when he set out with a metal detector to find a hammer he had lost on a farm. It was a 1500-year-old treasure hoard hidden by the Romans. The British government rewarded him with £1.75 million. He found his hammer afterward.

2. Trees have a maximum height of 426 feet and cannot grow taller due to the opposing force of gravity.

3. Before Edward I was king of England, he was a prisoner of Simon de Montfort. One day, he asked if he could ride the guard's horses and raced them one by one. When he got to the last horse, he rode off to freedom, and all the other horses were too tired to give chase. 

4. Japan had no intention of surrendering after the nukes were dropped until Emperor Hirohito stepped in. This made some generals so mad that they tried to stage a coup to overthrow the emperor to keep the war going.

5. Jason Weaver, the singer who voiced Simba in the original 'Lion King' turned down $2 million upfront to take royalties instead.

American singer Andrew W.K. was named the Person of the Year in 2018 by the American Association Of Suicidology "due to his consistent and powerful use of positivity to improve the lives of those who hear his music." 

7. Prince had an underground bank vault that held enough unreleased music to put out an album every year for a century.

8. The term "Caucasian" was first used for skull traits, not skin color. Caucasian populations were thus not exclusively "white," but ranged in complexion from white-skinned to dark brown.

9. When T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’), one of the most enigmatic and romantic figures of the World War 1 was killed in a motorcycle accident in May 1935, his doctor, Hugh Cairns, realized that his life might have been saved had Lawrence been wearing a helmet. Cairns introduced crash helmets for military dispatch riders, thereby reducing fatalities by 50%.

10. Hemp was commonly used to make sail canvas. The word “canvas” is thus derived from the word cannabis.

A few months into the Flint Water Crisis, General Motor's truck assembly plant stopped using municipal tap water for production because it was corroding engine components.

12. A sperm whale can click at about 236 decibels, making it the loudest animal on Earth. Some researchers believe they can contact each other in the ocean even from opposite sides of the planet. For comparison, a jet engine takeoff registers 150 dB. NASA's Saturn V rocket launch registered 204 dB.

13. The Navajo language was once in danger of losing a lot of speakers, but the Navajo nation set up programs to teach the language as well as many bilingual schools. Now there are institutes, community colleges, and even technical universities with classes in the Navajo language.

14. The U.S. Supreme Court has only tried one criminal case in its history, a 1906 contempt of court case against a Tennessee sheriff who ignored court rulings for the rights of a black man and allowed a mob to lynch him.

15. After laying eggs, octopus moms’ only function is to protect and tend to their eggs because their brain shuts down except for the optic glands. They remain stationary for anywhere from months to years depending on the species of octopus, uninterested in food even when its offered to them.

Rodney Dangerfield suffered a mild heart attack while performing his act on The Tonight Show. While Dangerfield was doing his standup, Jay Leno noticed something was off with Dangerfield’s movements and asked his producer to call the paramedics.

17. One Canadian tank, nicknamed "Bomb," never missed a day of service from when it landed in Normandy on D-Day until the surrender of Germany, firing over 6,000 rounds and taking two enemy hits across France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

18. Squirrels don’t take “fall damage” because their terminal velocity is too low for it to do any damage on impact. It’s the same with ants.

19. When Sean Lennon, the son of John Lennon, was little, he didn't know about The Beatles because his parents never played Beatles records at home. When Sean saw Yellow Submarine at his friend's house, his dad had to explain why there was a cartoon version of him in the movie.

20. The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain was founded in 1977 for people proud of their incompetence. The club was forced to closed when the founder sold a book named The Book of Heroic Failures which became a bestseller and the club receiving thousands of applications "Even as failures, we failed."

California is named after a fictitious island described in a series of 16th-century Spanish romance novels. The island was described as being inhabited by beautiful black women who wore gold armor and fought alongside Muslims.

22. There is no evidence that depression is caused by low levels of serotonin. This has been known for decades, and neuroscientists have been trying to debunk this myth to the public for years. The actual mechanism of antidepressants is unknown.

23. Jenga blocks aren’t all the same size. Some are almost imperceptibly smaller than others, meaning they will side out of the stack more easily.

24. False surrender is a war crime under Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.

25. Pixie dust in Peter Pan was added later on because children reading the story would think they too could fly like Peter Pan. Apparently there was a rash of young children hurting themselves by trying to fly like a pan.