1 Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman took a pay cut to ensure “Logan” would be rated R. Since ‘R-rated’ films typically limit the overall audience that can attend, Jackman’s reduced salary brought the budget down to an acceptable place to warrant an R rating.
2. Chadwick Boseman was accepted into a prestigious summer theater program at Oxford University, but couldn’t afford to go. He secured funding through a private benefactor, who turned out to be Denzel Washington. Over 20 years later Chadwick thanked him in person at the premiere of “Black Panther.”
3. While in Sharon Springs, Theodore Roosevelt was approached by a 12-year-old girl named Pearl Gorsuch who asked if he would like to have a badger. Expecting to humor her, he agreed, and the girl came back with a 2-week-old badger. President Roosevelt named him Josiah and he became one of the presidential pets.
4. After Nicole van den Hurk’s death, her stepbrother falsely confessed to the killing in order to get her body exhumed for DNA tests, leading to the arrest and prosecution of her real attacker.
5. It took Ryan Reynolds 11 years to get his vision of “Deadpool” made. The project overcame the failing of “X-Men: Origins” and persevered to become the highest grossing R-rated film of all time.
6 Dwight D. Eisenhower
President Dwight D. Eisenhower said “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants…It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals…We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
7. The 8-hour workday was devised so that workers could evenly divide 24 hours between: “Eight hours’ of labor, Eight hours’ of recreation and Eight hours’ of rest.”
8. Manoj Bhargava, the creator of 5-Hour Energy created the formula in 30 days. He has a net worth of $4 billion and plans to donate 99% of his wealth by creating a series of inventions to help 3rd world countries receive basic functions like water, electricity, and health.
9. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but hid the invention because they feared it would jeopardize photographic film sales.
10. Dalai Lama is almost a vegetarian. He alternates. While he advocates vegetarianism, if he is in the company of meat-eaters, he is happy to eat meat. The White House once offered him a vegetarian menu and he declined.
11 TGI Fridays
The restaurant chain TGI Fridays stopped its waiters from wearing “flair” a few years after the movie ‘Office Space’, came out because people wouldn’t stop making ‘Office Space’ references about it.
12. Personality has a larger effect on success than IQ.
13. The Hobbit crew used up all of the gold paint in Australasia for creating Smaug’s lair. They used up so much paint that they had to actually pick more up from Germany.
14. The Snake Detection theory states that humans are remarkably good at noticing snakes, even when camouflaged or when we only get a brief glimpse of them.
15. Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry’s wife (Billie Paulette Montgomery) didn’t know who he or Aerosmith was when they met. He didn’t ever talk about it and she only discovered it a few years later after finding gold records in some old boxes. This was after songs like Walk This Way, Dream On, and Back in the Saddle.
16 John Steele
During the initial airborne landings on D-Day, paratrooper John Steele got stuck on a church tower. He played dead for 2 hours dangling on the side of the church, was later captured and promptly escaped, fought for the entire day and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.
17. On September 11, 2001, Officer John Perry of the NYPD went to headquarters to file retirement paperwork. When he heard the explosion at the world trade center, he immediately responded and was later killed when one of the towers collapsed. He was the only off-duty officer killed on 9/11.
18. When Fidel Castro learned of a CIA plot to kill him involving his lover (Marita Lorenz) giving him poison pills, he gave her a gun and told her to kill him, but her nerves failed her.
19. The Nirvana drummer / Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl once filled in for a sick drummer of the band ‘Cage The Elephant’. He had one day to learn the songs after only hearing them a few times and played them perfectly.
20. The 1994 box office bomb ‘Baby’s Day Out’ was a huge hit in South Asia, beating Star Wars as the most successful American film. It was played for over a year at the largest theater in Calcutta and spawned two remakes.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 David Bowie
David Bowie ripped into MTV for not embracing black artists in 1983 but Michael Jackson’s Thriller likely saved the network.
22. George Lucas tried to be an officer in the US Airforce but was rejected because he had too many speeding tickets.
23. In figure drawing, a normal person is 7-and-a-half heads tall, but heroic figures like Gods and superheroes are drawn 8-and-a-half heads tall, adding a bigger chest and longer legs.
24. During the Tehran Conference, Stalin proposed over a dinner the execution of 50,000 to 100,000 German officers to prevent Germany from starting another war. Roosevelt, thinking Stalin was joking, said: “49,000 would be enough.” Churchill, however, was outraged and denounced “the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country”. He said that only war criminals should be put on trial in accordance with the Moscow Document, which he himself had written. He stormed out of the room.
25. According to Jon Taffer from American tv series Bar Rescue, if you have a bar with a gang problem they’ll be gone within three weeks if every third song played is from a female vocalist.