45 Incredibly Random Facts To Simply Astonish You – Part 23

Over half of the names of companies on the Fortune 500 list have disappeared since the year 2000.

2. The Japanese term for a Shotgun Wedding is "Dekichatta kekkon", which literally translates to "oops-we-did-it-marriage."

3. There is a 230-foot long sea organ on the coast of Croatia. The organ, designed by architect Nikola Basic has 35 tubes that make music whenever the waves crash into them.

4. Until 2014, police in Hawaii were allowed to legally have sex with prostitutes as part of their investigations.

5. In 1997, a killer whale held a great white shark upside down for 15 minutes, causing it to suffocate, after which it ate only its liver.

The 1908 Olympics was hosted in London after being relocated from Rome after Mount Vesuvius erupted. It was also the longest Olympics lasting for 6 months and 4 days.

7. In the 90s, the CIA tried to discredit the US Ambassador (Marilyn Mcafee) to Guatemala after they bugged her room and heard her talking lovingly to a woman named Murphy, and accused her of having a lesbian affair with the woman to Washington. There was no affair she was talking to her poodle named Murphy.

8. An online gamer mortgaged his irl home to purchase a virtual property in the Entropia Universe for $100,000. He later sold the same property called "Club Neverdie" for roughly $635,000.00.

9. Hitler's Third Reich awarded a gold, diamond-engraved Cross of the German Mother to women upon the birth of their thirteenth child.

10. The U.S provides GPS service worldwide for free, while U.S taxpayers pay $2 million a day to keep it operating.

Clothes are exempt from sales tax in New York if it's under $110.

12. An estimated 50% of all gold ever mined on Earth came from a single plateau in Witwatersrand, South Africa.

13. In 2007, Scotland spent £125,000 devising a new national slogan. The winning entry was: ‘Welcome to Scotland.’

14. Plants of the Fenestraria genus produce optical fibers made from crystalline oxalic acid to transmit light to subterranean photosynthetic sites.

15. The historical Buddha was not obese, and the image we commonly associate with Buddha is actually a completely different person.

In addition, Fire Department red and Police red and blue, some states reserve purple lights expressly for funeral procession escort vehicles.

17. In 1998, Nestle trademarked the tubular packaging of Smarties. It later sued Masterfoods Denmark which marketed M&Ms in a similar package. The Supreme Court of Denmark later ruled that a basic geometrical shape couldn't be trademarked, and ordered the trademark to be removed.

18. In 1842, Queen Victoria had a pistol aimed at her while she was riding a carriage, but the gun misfired and the assassin escaped. The next day she deliberately took the same route to bait the assassin, who subsequently caught.

19. A 2004 marketing study described Generation X as “the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.”

20. All of the chainmail in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was made by hand, link by link.

Iran's Air Force Flies American made F-14 Tomcats.

22. Mexico has succeeded in eliminating trachoma, a disease which is the leading cause of blindness worldwide.

23. Bruce Willis was forced to sign a three picture deal with Disney after he pulled out of 'The Broadway Brawler', a romantic comedy about a hockey player. The three movies he made were 'Armageddon', 'The Sixth Sense', and 'The Kid.' The movies combined to gross an estimated 1.3 billion worldwide.

24. The USSR sent so many scientists and engineers to the gulag prisons that the government set up labs for them. While workers in the 'Sharashka' facilities did not have to perform hard labor like other inmates, their work was published under the names of more famous Soviet scientists.

25. Edith Head has won 8 Oscars for best costume design and was the inspiration for Edna Mode in The Incredibles.