50 Random Facts List #186

When foxes discovered fairy penguins on a small Australian island, they nearly wiped the colony out. A chicken farmer named Swampy Marsh then began sending Maremma dogs to protect the birds. Over the next 10 years, not a single penguin was killed by a fox.

27. Hitting a fruit tree can make it feel threatened, spurring it to produce more or larger fruit to distribute seeds before dying.

28. 150 people die each year from falling coconuts, compared to 5 a year from shark attacks. One newspaper in Australia dubbed coconuts "the killer fruit."

29. Stephen Hawking’s ashes are buried beneath a memorial stone inscribed with his equation for the Hawking temperature of black holes. To commemorate his death, Hawking’s own words were beamed towards the nearest known black hole to Earth, about 3,500 light years away, by the European Space Agency.

30. Fresh, sealed meat would be purple. So meat packagers add carbon monoxide to turn it bright red.

Leslie David Baker, who played Stanley Hudson on “The Office,” was a teacher for special needs children before he was an actor.

32. The average person will spend 4 months of their life just waiting for red lights to change to green.

33. In 1988, McDonald’s gave out flexi-disc records where a group of singers rapped the entire McDonalds menu. “The McDonald’s Menu Song” was an instant-win promotion. If you could memorize it and played it through to the end without making a mistake, you would win $1 million.

34. A boy named Lucas laconi Stewart spent 9 years building an incredibly detailed model of a Boeing jet from paper.

35. An ant wouldn't get killed if you microwave it. They don't have a high enough water content and because they are so small they can "dodge" the hot spots in the microwave just by walking around.

Around 1 in every 10,000 people have 'Perfect Pitch', an ability to tell notes and chords similar to being able to know every ingredient just by tasting a meal. If you don't develop it before the age of 6, you will never have it, but if you do, you can never lose it.

37. Seagulls stamp their feet to imitate rain, causing worms to surface.

38. In 2016, Facebook live-streamed a murder in Chicago but later refused to take the video down "because it doesn't violate the company's community standards."

39. Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath fame once got arrested for punching a Nazi in a bar.

40. The “Metabo law” requires all Japanese citizens over the age 40 to have their waist measurements taken once a year. Anyone deemed to be overweight is given 3 months to shape up, failing which they will be given necessary dieting guidance. If necessary, those people are steered toward further re-education after six more months.

Steve Jobs lied to Steve Wozniak. When they made Breakout for Atari, Wozniak and Jobs were going to split the pay 50-50. Atari gave Jobs $5000 to do the job. He told Wozniak he got $700 so Wozniak took home $350.

42. During the Blitz in World War 2, some British farmers painted their cows with white stripes in case they wondered onto roads in the dark during blackouts.

43. The original Volkswagen Beetle would temporarily float on water because of a sealed steel bottom with nothing exposed beneath it. Volkswagen even created a 1972 television commercial which demonstrated its ability to float. It sold for $1999 (roughly equivalent to $12,000 today).

44. English comedian Russell Brand was originally a host for MTV UK but was fired for arriving at work dressed as Osama bin Laden the day after 9/11 and taking his drug dealer to the studio.

45. Anatomist Antonio Valsalva sometimes tasted the fluids of cadavers he performed autopsies on. One of his quotes was, “Gangrenous pus does not taste good...leaving the tongue tingling unpleasantly for the better part of the day.”

In East Asia, 80-90% of children are myopic (nearsighted) and require glasses. Scientists theorize that their eyes aren't developing properly because eyes require exposure to natural sunlight to develop, and the kids spend all their time indoors, studying.

47. In 1989, a Danish audiologist named Ole Bentzen was watching the screening of the 1988 comedy film “A Fish Called Wanda” and laughed uncontrollably to the point that his heart rate rose to an estimated 250–500 beats per minute, leading to a fatal heart attack.

48. Vic Tandy who was a British lecturer for information technology at Coventry University in Warwickshire and he discovered the “fear frequency.” Tandy and his coworkers at the Warwick Laboratory experienced “ghost” sightings with feelings of fear and depression. He discovered that a new extractor fan was emitting sound waves at low frequencies known as infrasound, which was causing the disturbance.

49. Saint Patrick's color was blue, not green. St. Patrick's blue, can be seen on ancient Irish flags and was used on armbands and flags by the Irish Citizen Army up until the 1798 Irish Rebellion. This is when the clover and the color green taken from Irelands lush fields became symbols for Ireland.

50. Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lyrics of "Mack The Knife" during a live performance in Berlin. She improvised after the first stanza and won a Grammy for the recording in 1961.