50 Random Facts List #197

NASA ground controllers were once shocked to hear a female voice from the space station, apparently interacting with them, which had an all-male crew. They had been pranked by an astronaut who used a recording of his wife.

2. In an episode of the Simpsons that aired in 2003, Homer gave his email address as [email protected]. The episode's writer, Matt Selman, signed up for the ChunkyLover53 email address beforehand and within minutes of the show's airing found his inbox packed to its 999-message limit.

3. Since 9/11 more than 37,000 first responders and people around ground zero have been diagnosed with cancer and illness, and the number of disease deaths is soon to outnumber the total victims in 2001.

4. Steam was originally created so that “Valve” didn't have to keep shutting off Counter-Strike servers to fix issues with the game.

5. Human Evolution solves the same problem in different ways. For example early natives adapted to high altitudes differently: In the Andes, their hearts got stronger and in Tibet their blood carries oxygen more efficiently.

Delia Bacon, the woman who first proposed the theory that Shakespeare wasn't the real author, didn't do any research for her book and was eventually sent to an insane asylum.

7. For the film Speed, Joss Whedon was brought in a week before shooting began, wrote "98.9% of the dialogue", added major plot points, and is credited with creating the "Pop quiz, hotshot" line.

8. Rob Lowe is uncredited in the film Tommy Boy because he was contractually obligated to another movie at the time, Steven King's The Stand. The reason he filmed Tommy Boy was due to his friendship with Chris Farley.

9. Peekaboo is universal to all cultures, and developmental psychologists believe it is important to infant development.

10. The Pixar film Coco, which features the spirits of dead family members, got past China's censors with 0 cuts. In China, superstition is taboo due to the belief spiritual forces could undermine people’s faith in the communist party. The censors were so moved by the film, they gave it a full pass.

During World War 2, the German army used a radar system called Wotan. The British scientist R.V. Jones figured out how the system worked by assuming that it used a single beam based on the fact that the Germanic god Wotan had only one eye.

12. When Dwayne Johnson split with his now ex-wife Dany Garcia, he made her his manager and she has remained in that role to this day.

13. Anthony Ervin, a swimmer who won a gold medal at the 2000 Olympics, retired at the age of 22, began abusing drugs and at one moment was hardly able to rise from a sofa for days on end. In 2011, he got back into swimming, and at the 2016 Olympics became the oldest swimmer to win a gold medal.

14. There are fake towns and roads (known as "paper towns") that mapmakers put in their maps so that if someone makes a map which has one of these paper towns, they could know it's a copy.

15. Nearly the entire world uses one of 2 forms to say tea, basically derived from the Chinese words 'te' (ie Spanish and English) and 'cha' (ie Hindi and Russian), because of the way tea spread around the world from China. 'Cha' is used in places where tea came by land and 'te' where it was imported over water.

Abraham Lincoln repeatedly warned that British recognition of the Confederacy was tantamount to a declaration of war. Knowing a war would cut off vital shipments of American food, wreak havoc on the British merchant fleet, and cause the immediate loss of Canada, Britain was unwilling to risk a conflict.

17. The FBI has an entire fake town named Hogan's Alley for training agents. Hogan's Alley has a bank, post office, hotel, laundromat, barber shop, pool hall, shops, and homes. The town is populated by actors who roleplay parts like bystanders, terrorists, bank robbers, and drug dealers so scenarios always change.

18. In 1855, Stephen Foster, the mayor of Los Angeles, convinced a mob to not kill an accused murderer, but to try him in a court of law. When the accused man was acquitted, the mayor resigned and led a lynch mob to kill the man. He was re-elected a year later.

19. Angelo Poffo, the father of Macho Man Randy Savage, destroyed the World Record for consecutive sit-ups with 6,033 in 4 hours and 10 minutes. This record is still unbroken.

20. Japan's most celebrated generals have been masters of Ikebana, the art of flower arranging, finding that it calmed their minds and helped them make clear decisions in the field of battle.

James Watt calculated the horsepower by measuring the output of an actual horse in order to quantify how many horses his steam engines could replace.

22. Your body odors changes when you’ve been successfully infected by Plasmodium (Malaria), thereby making you a better target for mosquitos and spreading the disease.

23. A professional wrestler named Kerry Von Erich had to have his foot amputated after a bad accident but continued wrestling while secretly wearing a prosthetic - even showering in his boots so no one would know. His injury wasn't public knowledge until his death from suicide 7 years later.

24. When the very famous mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (creator of the modern Pierrot) was accused of murder in 1836, hundreds of Parisians came to the courthouse, not for the trial itself but just to finally hear the voice of the mime.

25. Archeologists are using LiDAR to survey the South American rainforests. The results have helped reveal over 60,000 previously undiscovered ruins, part of a much greater civilization than previously thought.