50 Random Facts List #127

There is a passenger train in Alaska called the Hurricane Turn. Rather than making scheduled station stops, it operates as flag-stop train meaning passengers in remote areas can simply wave a white cloth anywhere along its route and the train will stop to pick them up. It's one of the last true flag-stop trains in the United States.

2. Driving licenses issued in Arizona are good until the age of 60. Starting at the age of 65, drivers must renew it every 5 years, with an accompanied vision test each time.

3. The falling dominoes scene in 'V for Vendetta' involved 22,000 dominoes that were assembled by 4 professional domino assemblers for the two-day shoot.

4. The original Bohemian Rhapsody video took only 4 hours for them to film. The band arrived at the studio at 7.30 in the morning and by 11.30 they were finished and were relaxing in a local pub. The entire thing cost them just $2025.

5. There is a Japanese sweet snack called “English toast”, which is neither English nor toast. It consists of two slices of white bread, covered with a layer of margarine, sprinkled with sugar and put together.

American singer Tom Petty was so popular that his record label wanted to charge $1 more for his 1981 album “Hard Promises” than the standard $8.98, but they backed down after he considered naming the album “$8.98.”

7. Marshmallows were originally made from from the mallow plant, which grows in marshes.

8. After Charlotte Corday was executed by guillotine, a man named Legros lifted her head and slapped it on the cheeks. An expression of “unequivocal indignation” then appeared on her face suggesting that victims of the guillotine may retain consciousness for a short while.

9. In 1998, some people paid full price for a movie ticket just to see the trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace’ and left without watching the movie they had actually paid for.

10. WWE’s ‘The Undertaker’ is terrified of cucumbers. Paul Bearer once watched him, “throw up all over a Waffle House because there was a cucumber floating in his iced tea.” Bearer used to prank him by placing cucumber slices in his hat and gloves.

Madagascar’s wildlife is so unique that over 90% of the species found there are endemic species that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth. It is speculated that the reason behind this phenomenon is that the island has remained isolated for 88 million years from other land masses.

12. Neither American singer John Denver, nor the writers of "Take Me Home, Country Road", had ever been to West Virginia. The road that inspired the song is actually in Maryland, and the landmarks mentioned in the lyrics more aptly describe the western region of Virginia.

13. Food Network's 'Chopped' was originally supposed to be set in a mansion with the host being a butler. The butler was also to be holding a Chihuahua and when a chef was chopped, the Chihuahua was supposed to be fed the dish made by the losing contestant.

14. For every pound/kilogram of weight that someone loses, 86% of it is breathed out of the body in the form of CO2. Human body literally exhales the majority of its weight loss.

15. Before "A Hard Day's Night" was released in America, a United Artists executive requested to dub the voices of the Beatles with mid-Atlantic accents. McCartney angrily replied, "Look, if we can understand a f*cking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool."

Stan Lee had a contract awarding him 10% of the net profits of anything based on his characters. The first Spider-Man made more than $800 million in revenue, but the producers claimed it did not make any profit and Lee received nothing.

17. In 1917, you could order a belt-fed machine gun from a Sears catalog that said: "Machine guns are used largely by police organizations, home guards and municipalities in case of riots."

18. Evidence suggests that 'Brainstorming' is counter-productive, and produces fewer original ideas than when individuals work alone.

19. Japan's largest Yakuza group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, holds an annual Halloween party for neighborhood children in Kobe. "Not only were the decorations great and the gift bags full of tasty stuff, there were two big lines for cotton candy. And the gangsters were super nice."

20. A popular form of software debugging aptly named ‘rubber duck debugging’ exists. The name is in reference to the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, where a programmer would debug code by explaining it, word by word, to his rubber duck.

Pronoia, the opposite of paranoia, is the delusion that everyone is secretly plotting your success.

22. There are certain rare train services running in United Kingdom that have been nicknamed ghost trains, which only see a couple of passengers every day. They only exist and serve because closing lines and stations is difficult and costly, so rail companies would rather run infrequent services than go through the cumbersome process.

23. English singer Robert Plant once donated $10,000 to KBOO, a non-profit community radio station in Portland Oregon, to never play "Stairway to Heaven" ever again.

24. A British ex-POW named Eric Lomax was captured in 1942 by Japanese forces. Many years after the war, he tracked down the Japanese man who had tortured him, and forgave him.

25. In 1985, a private party sold about 1.5 million Apple shares which caused the Apple stock to hit a 12-year low. This helped Steve Jobs in a proposal in which Apple ousted its CEO Gil Amelio and Jobs become his replacement. It was later revealed that it was Steve Jobs who sold the 1.5 million shares (valued at over $60 billion today).