50 Random Facts List #104

In 1998, a professor named Dr. Theodore P. Hill at Georgia Institute of Technology asked his students to either flip a coin 200 times and record the results or give the fake results of 200 coin tosses. The students were amazed at how the professor easily identified the real results by seeing if they had six heads or tails in a row.

27. Lace monitors dig into a termite mound to lay their eggs, the termites then reseal the mound keeping the eggs at a constant temperature. The lizard returns 9 months later to dig the eggs out so they can hatch.

28. Genie is a feral child who was strapped to a potty chair for 13 years of her life, deprived of human interaction and never gained the proper ability to speak any language.

29. All Golden Hamsters in captivity today descend from a single brother-sister pairing, found in Syria in 1930. The captured litter began with eleven, but the rest either escaped or ate each other.

30. Soviet Union had a program to dig a hole (Kola Superdeep Borehole) through to the Earth's crust in the 1970's. They reached 40,318 feet deep before they had to stop due to higher-than-expected temperatures of 356 degree Fahrenheit, making the project infeasible.

Sylvester Stallone was so broke while developing Rocky that he had to sell his dog (Butkus) because he couldn't afford dog food.

32. In Russian, "vodka" basically means "lil water." The word for water is "voda," and "ka" is a diminutive ending.

33. Candace Newmaker, a child with "behavioral problems," was taken from her birth parents, adopted, and placed in controversial "rebirth therapy." She was suffocated for 70 minutes and declared brain-dead afterward.

34. A man named Victor Hugo Green published a series of travel guides named ‘The Green Book’ between 1936 and 1966, which was mainly aimed at African-Americans. It listed Black-friendly hotels and restaurants across North America.

35. Anna Swan at 7 feet 11 inches (2.41 m) and Martin Bates at 7 feet 9 inches (2.36 m) are not only the tallest couple ever to have ever lived, but also to have given birth to the largest baby ever in 1878. The baby at birth weighed 23 pounds 9 ounces (10.7 kg) and nearly 30 inches tall (75 cm) and each of his feet were six inches (152 mm) long, but he only lived for 11 hours.

Cocktails such as Rum and Coke and Jack and Coke, use Coke, not Pepsi, because of the popularity of a song called “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Pepsi offered to pay to rename the song but was outbid. It became the second-highest grossing song of the 1940s, behind "White Christmas."

37. Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame) after filming a segment on David Letterman, stopped by Eddie Murphy’s dressing room to give him his regards, and tell him how much he liked his portrayal.

38. Mummies are sometimes used in medicine to calibrate CAT scan machines.

39. Heath Ledger was the first choice for the major role of Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie that was released in 2002. He turned it down as he didn't want to take someone else's dream away from playing Spider-Man. The role then went to Tobey Maguire.

40. Despite his famous last name, before becoming president Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited most of his wealth from his grandfather Warren Delano Jr., who made his fortune as a drug smuggler in China.

Dennis Wilson recorded a song for ‘The Beach Boys’ which was originally written by Charles Manson. After finding out he wasn't credited, he showed Wilson a bullet and said: “Every time you look at it, I want you to think how nice it is your kids are still safe.” Wilson proceeded to “beat the sh*t out of him.”

42. When presumed meteorites turn out to just be a normal rock, they are called “Meteorwrongs."

43. Mr. Rogers was a vegetarian on ethical grounds, stating "I don't want to eat anything that has a mother."

44. The richest person in Hong Kong named Li Ka-Shing is a high school dropout who first started a plastic flower company in 1950.

45. A “wave of death” occurs when a driver stops and waves another car through an intersection. This “kindness” can often lead to tragedy.

There's a giant donut island named Orona atoll in the middle of the Pacific ocean that has feral cats and a "sizeable lagoon" in the middle.

47. In 1954, the Green Feather Movement was started by college students to protest the proposed banning of "Robin Hood" from Indiana schools. The books were to be banned for promoting communist ideals (robbing the rich to give to the poor).

48. There is a programmable, autonomous writing robot that is 240 years old, made by a Swiss clockmaker named Pierre Jaquet Droz.

49. Napoleon Dynamite was a pseudonym used by singer-songwriter Elvis Costello in the 80s.

50. After Dean Martin's "Everybody Loves Somebody" knocked the Beatles "A Hard Day's Night" for the #1 spot, he sent Elvis a telegram that read "If you can't handle the Beatles, I'll do it for you, pally."