50 Random Facts List #101

Flexitarianism / Semi-Vegetarianism is a new movement that is trying to encourage people to eat more plant-based diets without going strict anti-meat.

2. In a study of 640 dream journals conducted by Harvard, psychologists determined that the dreams of prisoners of war in World War 2 POW camps were less aggressive than the standard male population. Rather than visions of extreme violence, the majority of the soldiers dreamed about escape, family, loneliness, and home.

3. In 2017, a dog named Frida in Mexico identified and saved the lives of 12 people trapped under the rubble after earthquakes shook the city. She has identified a total of 52 bodies during her career. She is now considered a national heroine in Mexico.

4. Norman Greenbaum, who originally wrote and recorded “Spirit In The Sky”, is actually Jewish. He was watching TV one night when he came across a country gospel star singing a gospel, which he thought looked easy and wrote this one-hit wonder in under 15 minutes. This Jewish artist’s song about Jesus sold 2 million copies in a year.

5. Brad Pitt believes he has Prosopagnosia or “face blindness”, a condition due to which he has trouble recognizing and remembering faces, including his own.

Tom Hanks’ younger brother Jim Hanks sounds so similar to him that he often does substitute voice-over work for computer games when Tom doesn’t have the time.

7. Disney does not own the rights to show “big” Marvel characters like Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, etc., in theme parks east of the Mississippi, due to a contract, Marvel signed with Universal Studios in the 1990s.

8. Keith Richards went to court expecting a multi-year jail sentence but ordered to give a benefit concert for the blind instead.

9. Swingline didn't make red staplers until Mike Judge made them famous in the movie Office Space.

10. In Kenya, elephant dung is being used to make paper. Elephants excrete up to 50 kg of dung a day which can produce 125 sheets of paper. This helps save the indigenous tree population and forest from being destroyed, along with creating a need for the 7000 elephants left in Kenya.

Cesar Millan, also known as “Dog Whisperer,” had Jada Smith, wife of Will Smith, as one of his first clients. She was satisfied so much from his work that she paid for one-year of English tutoring so that he could be aired on the U.S. television.

12. United States of America has technically been a nation which follows metric system of measurement since 1975 but just hasn’t enforced the system onto private companies and people.

13. Charles Bronson, the tough guy actor of classic films like ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘Death Wish’, grew up in abject poverty. He was the 11th kid among 15 siblings. His family was so poor that he once had to wear his sister’s dress to school. When he was 16, he mined coal for $1 per ton.

14. Buzz Lightyear's original name was Lunar Larry, before being changed to honor astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.

15. Tongue twister ‘she sells seashells by the seashore’ is about a real girl named Mary Anning. She also happens to be one of the very first people to discover a massive dinosaur fossil. She found it at the age of 12 while looking for seashells to sell by the seashore.

Tatooine from Star Wars is a real town in Tunisia that is spelled Tataouine and it is famous for its cave dwellings.

17. In 1936, after being thrown from his horse, a jockey named Ralph Neves was pronounced dead, brought to the morgue, injected with adrenaline to the heart, jumped up, returned to the racetrack, and demanded to be allowed to ride the rest of his mounts that day.

18. Osama bin Laden left a will that he had written shortly after 9/11. In it, he urged his children not to join al-Qaeda and not to continue the Jihad.

19. After cutting off his ear, Vincent van Gogh painted a portrait of the doctor who treated him, then gave it to the doctor. The doctor hated it and used it to repair a chicken coop before giving it away. It's now worth $50 million.

20. In 2015, a team of architects in U.K. led by a man named Jonathan Wilson started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise $2.9 billion to build Minas Tirith, the beautiful city that was built into a mountainside in ‘Lord of the Rings.’

Trench coat was invented by Thomas Burberry during World War 1 to help crawl and walk through the trenches.

22. Conus geographus, a species of predatory cone snail is one of the most venomous animals on the earth. Its venom is a mix of hundreds of toxins which it delivers through a harpoon-like tooth and there is no known anti-venom.

23. Ronald Reagan’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s got so bad that he once took a mini ceramic White House model out of his fish tank and when asked what he thought it was, he answered, “I don’t know, but it’s something to do with me.”

24. During World War 2, if a US submarine sank all the targets it engaged, it was considered a "clean sweep" and a broom was attached to the periscope to celebrate their accomplishment.

25. Tokyo has a huge modern arcade named ‘Anata No Warehouse’ which is made to look like a dystopian cyberpunk city.