50 Random Facts List #204

During Prohibition in the USA, prohibition agent Izzy Einstein bragged that he could find liquor in any city in under 30 minutes. In Chicago, it took him 21 minutes, in Atlanta 17 and Pittsburgh it took him just 11 minutes. But he set the record in New Orleans at just 35 seconds. Einstein asked his taxi driver where to get a drink, and the driver handed him one.

2. Fireworks are totally illegal in Florida but are sold to ordinary people in huge quantities via hundreds of stores across the state to anyone who signs a waiver saying they are for agricultural use to scare birds away from crops.

3. Danny DeVito used to be a beautician. He went to New York to learn makeup but the lady he sought after to teach him only accepted students from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. So he enrolled for a semester and that's how he got into acting.

4. A teenager named Rebecca Townsend from Connecticut completed her bucket list right before she was hit by a car. She had one goal left: save a life and before the car hit her she pushed her friend to get him out of the way.

5. Lewis Fry Richardson derived many of the complex equations needed for weather prediction in the 1920s. However, the math to predict the weather six hours in advance was so difficult that it would take him six weeks to do the calculations.

Leonardo Da Vinci once conducted an experiment to understand the flow of blood through the valves of the heart, by pouring hot wax into one, making a mold of thin glass from the cast and then pumping water mixed with seeds through it. He saw how a heart actually regulates itself.

7. A woman named Angela adopted a cat and named her Missy. Missy pawed at Angela's chest and Angela felt that was not right and went to the doctor only to reveal that Angela had breast cancer. A year later Missy pawed Angela's chest again and tests revealed breast cancer again.

8. Redheads have a 25% higher pain threshold, can make their own supply of vitamin D (they need less UV exposure to synthesize larger amounts of vitamin D) and feel temperature changes better than the rest of us due to their 'redhead gene' MC1R.

9. Seinfeld, Mad About You, and Friends all exist in the same universe. Kramer is subletting his apartment from Paul; Jamie appeared in an episode of Friends and mistook Phoebe for Ursula; Ursula works as a waitress in Mad About You.

10. Judge Doom's scheme to dismantle the streetcars in favor of freeways in Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based on a real-life conspiracy from General Motors.

The American flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission was inserted only 7 inches deep and was placed about 27 feet from the Eagle landing craft. As a result, it was blown over by the blast of the rocket exhaust during the takeoff back to Earth.

12. J.R.R.Tolkien had a peculiar sense of humor. Along with his friend C.S. Lewis, he once dressed as a polar bear for a non-costume party and would chase neighbors away dressed as an Anglo-Saxon warrior.

13. The Catholic Church has a zero-tolerance policy on revealing confessions. If a Catholic priest reveals anything someone confessed to him, he is automatically excommunicated and can only be forgiven by the Pope.

14. Queen Elizabeth stopped breeding corgis in 2015. She doesn’t want to leave any young dogs behind when she dies.

15. "The War of the Worlds" plot arose from H.G. Wells wondering "if Martians did to Britain what the British had done to the [indigenous] Tasmanians?", which most modern scholars characterize as a genocide.

While touring in Australia, Frank Sinatra insulted the media, especially female media. The stagehands union refused to work his show until he apologized. Sinatra threatened to cancel his shows. The transport union refused to prepare his airplane for departure.

17. Cambodian dictator Pol Pot killed people who were wearing glasses or if they spoke a foreign language, just because he thought they were smart.

18. Adolf Hitler was Walt Disney' biggest fan. He thought Snow White was the best movie ever made and would draw characters near perfectly. The director of a war museum in northern Norway said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany.

19. The Bank of Canada once had to urge Canadian citizens to stop “Spocking” their five dollar bills.

20. SUVs, with their higher front-end profile, are at least twice as likely as other cars to kill pedestrians. Higher SUV sales have led to a huge increase in pedestrian fatalities in the US during the past decade.

At the age of 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell was jailed for "breach of peace" for anti-nuclear demonstration. They offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good behavior", to which Russell replied: "No, I won't."

22. The capacity to lie has also been claimed to be possessed by non-humans in language studies with great apes. In one instance, gorilla Koko, when asked who tore a sink from the wall, pointed to one of her handlers and then laughed.

23. Dr. Gisella Perl was an inmate and female doctor at Auschwitz. She was instructed to tell Joseph Mengele of any pregnant women so that he could experiment on them. Instead, she tried to save as many lives as possible by terminating pregnancies, and doing late stage births, without any drugs.

24. The term ‘antisocial’ is very commonly misused and actually means to be violently against society and the rules imposed upon it, whereas the term for just being shut off/introverted is ‘asocial’.

25. David “Carbine” Williams, who helped invent the M1 Carbine, was a convicted murderer and created innovative gun ideas while in jail. He was convicted of the shooting of a sheriff who busted his illegal moonshine still. He was released after his family argued his inventions could help America.