47 Fast Fun Facts To Enhance Your Knowledge | Random List #244

In ancient Greece, throwing an apple to a woman was surprisingly normal and it meant a marriage proposal.

27. After World War 2, Rod Serling (the creator of The Twilight Zone) made money testing military parachutes. On one occasion, he made $1,000 testing a jet ejection seat that had killed the previous three testers.

28. A gold miner named Burro Schmidt started digging a tunnel through the Mojave Desert mountains to safely transport his ore to the smelter. He completed the tunnel in 38 years, moving 5,800 tons of granite with a pick. In the meantime, a road was built so he never used the tunnel.

29. The ‘Johnson Treatment’ was President Lyndon Johnson’s own particular brand of persuasion. He used to urinate or expose his penis during conversations to establish dominance.

30. The Indonesian flag is nearly the same as the Dutch flag, but with the bottom third and blue strip removed. After 138 years of Dutch rule, youths removed a Dutch flag tore off the blue strip and re-hoisted it as an Indonesian flag in 1945 (War of Independence 1945-1949).

In 2016, a forest service officer named Brad Treat took a blind turn while mountain biking at 30 mph. He crashed into a large grizzly bear that was sitting on the trail and was immediately mauled to death in response to the collision.

32. The first known use of "toast" as a metaphorical term for "you're dead" was in the film Ghostbusters (1984), in which Bill Murray's character declares, "This chick is toast", before attacking the villain. The earliest known printed account is from The St. Petersburg Times of Oct. 1, 1987.

33. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offers $100,000 grants to people trying to make better condoms.

34. Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas holds the record for most advertisements by one person in history, appearing in over 800 commercials.

35. Born-blind people actually dream of visual content. That's because auditory and tactile inputs can create virtual images in their brain, and that images can be revealed in their dreams.

The standard airline practice of pre-boarding (i.e., allowing passengers with small children and those who need extra assistance to board first) actually improves boarding efficiency by 28% and decreases time to takeoff.

37. Before 1954, stop signs used to be yellow with black lettering. This was because there was no red dye that would not fade over time. However, by 1954, sign makers began using a fade-resistant porcelain enamel, and it was declared that stop signs would be red with white lettering.

38. While filming the 2000 hit movie, Castaway, Tom Hanks received a skin cut and got a staph infection that nearly killed him. The cut gave him blood poisoning. He was in the hospital for 3 days and the production of the movie was shut down for 3 weeks.

39. There is a mass grave (Showmen's Rest) near Chicago containing about 60 circus performers. Some visitors report hearing ghostly elephant sounds at night.

40. Jack Nicholson's first job in Hollywood was an office worker for animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. They offered him an entry-level job as an animator, but he declined, citing his desire to become an actor.

When a bald eagle loses a feather on one wing, it will lose a feather on the other in order to keep its balance.

42. Deaf parents use special vibrating baby monitors or smartwatch applications to alert them when babies are crying during the night.

43. Princess Diana and her brothers had such a bad relationship with their stepmother (Raine Spencer) that two days after their father died, they threw her out of their house.

44. Russian cosmonauts were provided with a multi-barrel gun to be taken with them on missions. Featuring two shotgun barrels, a lower rifle barrel, and a built-in machete, the TP-82 was intended to be used as a survival tool if the cosmonauts landed back on earth in the wilderness.

45. Aramaic, the language spoken historically by Jesus is still being spoken as a mother tongue in a small village in Syria.

Luxembourg's version of Superman is Superjhemp, who unlike the American version has a sizeable belly and draws his powers from eating cheese and drinking beer. He also flies around with his hands in his pockets, "because every real Luxembourger has his hands in his pockets."

47. Cat mummies were so plentiful in Egypt that, in the 1800s, an English company bought a load of 180,000, pulverized them, and spread them on farm fields as fertilizer. Also, so many baboons and ibises were mummified for the trade it likely drove them to extinction in Egypt.