44 Unusual Random Facts You Didn’t Know You Needed To Know | Random List #91

As a child, Jack Black (real name Thomas Jacob Black) appeared in a commercial for the 1982 Atari video game "Pitfall!"

2. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, began life in a mud hut.

3. A bald eagle somehow made its way to Ireland in 1987 and was so tired that it had to be returned via airplane.

4. Soft-shelled crabs are just regular crabs removed from the water after molting to prevent their shells from hardening and not a species of crab with soft shells.

5. All potatoes used to make fries from Five Guys restaurants are required to be grown north of the 42nd parallel.

Schizophrenia has been linked to maternal exposure to influenza.

7. Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the odor of farts smell good so that farting in public will become socially acceptable. Ben wanted flatulence to be "as agreeable as perfumes".

8. In 1998, a group of cattle ranchers sued Oprah Winfrey after she made disparaging comments about beef. 13 states have food libel laws which allow companies to sue people who speak badly about their food.

9. American journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought against efforts to drain the Florida Everglades and reclaim land for development when she was 79 years old. Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades.” She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

10. All of those warring states near the beginning of the Old Testament were actually very small and only encompass what is now modern Israel.

Brian Spencer, a former NHL hockey player whose father, upon hearing his son was starting in his first game, held a Canadian TV station hostage and forced them to broadcast it, before being shot and killed. After his career, Brian too was shot and killed during a robbery after buying crack.

12. There is a true heavy metal band (Compressorhead), weighing about 1 1/2 tons, consisting of only robots. The guitar player has 78 fingers.

13. In the 1936 Olympic games, boxer Thomas Hamilton-Brown was eliminated in the first round of the lightweight class after losing his fight to Carlos Lillo. An error was soon discovered and it turned out he had won it but due to a scoring miscalculation he did not find this out until several days later, when he had gone on an eating binge and was too heavy for his weight class.

14. Hundreds of hip-hop songs can be traced back to Slick Rick's and Doug E. Fresh's La Di Da Di (1985).

15. In 2014, a man named Denver Lee St. Clair died after being subjected to an atomic wedgie by his 33-year-old stepson named Brad Davis.

The Whopper Jr. was created by accident in 1963 by the manager of the first Burger King restaurant in Puerto Rico. The molds for the standard Whopper buns didn't arrive so he used a much smaller local bun. The result was such a success that Burger King adopted it worldwide and called it the Whopper Jr.

17. Walt Disney World is 40 square miles, making it the same size as San Francisco and 2 times the size of Manhattan.

18. In 1971, American astronaut David Scott smuggled a 'Fallen Astronaut' sculpture onto the Apollo 15 lunar mission and placed it on the Moon's surface to "commemorate the astronauts and cosmonauts who have died in the advancement of space exploration."

19. Hans Zimmer's "Spider Pig", from The Simpsons Movie soundtrack, entered the UK singles chart at #24. The running time for the song is a mere 1:04, making it the second shortest single to ever chart.

20. The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire deliberately employed deaf servants because silence played a key role in expressing majesty to subjects and visitors.

The largest surviving relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex is the common Ostrich.

22. Earthworms have even been ranked the number one most influential species in the history of the planet above dinosaurs and humans.

23. To become an astronaut in Japan you are tested in your ability to fold a thousand paper cranes.

24. Medical students in 18th-century Scotland could pay their tuition fees in corpses. The financial prospects encouraged a group of people to exhume corpses to sell to the medical schools, and they became known as resurrectionists.

25. There is a special minimally-fermented wine (Sacramental wine) used at masses where the priest is a current or recovering alcoholic.