50 Random Facts List #191

In ancient Hawai, men and women ate meals separately and women weren't allowed to eat certain foods. King Kamehameha II removed all religious laws and performed a symbolic act by eating with the women in 1819. This is when the lūʻau parties were first created.

2. Japan is giving its elderly population discounts on ramen if they give up their drivers' licenses.

3. Stephen King would do so much cocaine while writing his books that he had to stuff cotton up his nose to stop blood from dripping on his typewriter.

4. 50 Cent once bought 200 front row seats to a Ja Rule concert just to leave them empty.

5. In 1989, 96 people were killed at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England after they were crushed due to overcrowding. Although match attendees and hooliganism were first cited as the cause, a 2016 inquiry found the police to be at fault due to their mismanagement of the crowd.

Japanese vending machines are operated to dispense drinking water free of charge when the water supply gets cut off during a disaster.

7. Florida has the 'Sunshine Law' which gives media freedom of information including arrests, and this is why we hear about so many crazy people from Florida.

8. Dolly Parton has given away more than 100 million books to young children through her Imagination Library. This was inspired by her father, who couldn’t read, and she wanted to make sure all kids have early access to books.

9. The average British adult spends around 3 hours a week on the toilet, but only 1.5 hours a week exercising.

10. Two men from Indiana were wrongfully convicted in a 1996 armed robbery because of a false statement from an informant who had sex with the lead detective who set them up. 20 years later, they were found innocent and one of them received $4.9 million settlement.

BTS, a seven-member South Korean boy band, brings in more than $3.6 billion to South Korea's economy each year and were the reason one in every 13 foreign tourists visited the country in 2018.

12. Cassowary meat is so tough that Australian administrative officers stationed in New Guinea were told to cook it with a stone in the pot. “When the stone is ready to eat, so is the Cassowary.”

13. It took 87 years to build Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, from 1163-1250.

14. The desk in the Oval Office is called the Resolute Desk, named after the ship it was built out of in 1880. The HMS Resolute was found empty and adrift in pack-ice, then salvaged by the US and gifted back to the UK, which helped narrowly avoid a war. Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the addition of a door with the presidential seal to conceal his leg braces he had due to polio.

15. When Harry Wilson was 18 months old, his proud Grandfather bet £50 that he would one day represent Wales in football and was quoted 2500/1 at his local bookmaker. 16 years later he became the youngest ever Wales debutant, netting his grandfather £125,000.

During the civil war John T. Wilder, the commander of the Union “lightning brigade” personally took out a loan to buy his soldiers advanced new repeating rifles because the government would not supply them. Using the firepower advantage afforded by the new rifles, his brigade proved extremely effective in combat.

17. Roman senator Lucius Licinius Crassus held a funeral for his pet eel. When another senator ridiculed him for this, he replied: “did you not bury three wives and not shed a tear?”

18. If the Axis ever captured Gibraltar during World War 2, the British planned to seal 6 men in a secret cave overlooking the harbor to secretly monitor and radio back enemy movements. The cave had enough provisions for the men to stay for up to 7 years.

19. English's formal word for "you" was "you", while "thou" was used to express intimacy and familiarity.

20. In 2015, a woman named Ingeborg Rapoport, 74 years after being denied her Ph.D. by the Nazis for being Jewish, successfully defended her dissertation and received her doctorate from the University of Hamburg at the age of 102, making her the oldest person ever to receive one.

The US Navy used to forbid "obscene" tattoos, which led to a boom in tattoos of nude women among men who didn't want to serve. If they joined the Navy later, they had to have a tattoo artist "dress" the woman.

22. The German Army conducted a "Jewish Census" of their soldiers during World War 1, designed to prove that Jews were shirking military service. It ended up proving the opposite, so the results were never published.

23. A 'witch' named Zura Karuhimbi ended up saving over 100 people during the Rwandan genocide because the attackers believed she possessed magical powers.

24. The driest place on earth is McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica where it hasn't rained for 2 million years. Only anaerobic bacteria are able to survive in these extreme conditions. Scientists also consider the area terrestrially closest to Mars on earth.

25. In the 1920's, the Ford Motor Company produced so much factory wood waste that they manufactured it into charcoal and sold it under the name Ford Charcoal. The company was later renamed to Kingsford Charcoal.