50 Random Facts List #207

A professional wrestler named Sputnik Monroe, refused to wrestle unless blacks were allowed to sit in the Whites-only sections.

27. Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She observed that cases of blindness were more prevalent in lower classes, citing blindness from industrial accidents and contraction of syphilis via prostitution, and thus felt that blindness was a result of social injustice.

28. Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist, attempted a citizen's arrest on Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 1999. Tatchell walked up to Mugabe's motorcade, grabbed the stunned dictator by the arm, and stated calmly, "President Mugabe, you are under arrest for torture."

29. The Russian chemist behind the periodic table of elements, Dimity Mendeleev is also credited as the creator of the Russian standard for vodka and was a prolific economist.

30. The Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis stated that his LSD use greatly helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a commonly used technique in molecular biology.

Peachtree City in Georgia has a golf cart path infrastructure over the whole town, where the large majority of the population own golf carts and the kids grow up driving them instead of cars.

32. In 2004, a black bear was found passed out on the lawn at a resort after consuming 36 cans of Rainier Beer, sampling but not drinking any of the Busch. A Fish and Wildlife agent was quoted as saying, "it definitely had a preference."

33. A filmmaker, in order to expose "the general absurdity of what we all believe," became a fake spiritual guru and ended up with a real group of followers who called him "the living embodiment of the divine."

34. From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people.

35. During the excavation of a third-century Viking settlement in Sweden, archaeologists discovered a Buddha statue from India, an Egyptian ladle, a Byzantine bowl, and an Irish crozier.

Raiders of the Lost Ark grossed $384 million in worldwide ticket sales, but it only had a budget of $18 million, giving it a profit ratio of over 2000%.

37. Steven Spielberg committed to directing Raiders while building a sandcastle with George Lucas in Hawaii.

38. After winning the 1994 World Cup, Brazil's goalie Claudio Taffarel left his medal and $60,000 in cash in a cab. Juan Blanco, the cab driver returned all of it and received $1000 in reward.

39. Scotland Yard, one of the world's best-known police agencies, is built on top of an unsolved crime scene.

40. A man was once so displeased with the treatment he received from his bank that he legally changed his name by deed to "Mr. Yorkshire Bank PLC are Fascist Bastards" so that every check he made out would have that message on it.

Twin popsicles were created during the Great Depression so that two children could share a treat for just a nickel.

42. In 2005, Dean Karnazes, an endurance athlete, ran 350 miles (560 km) in 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep.

43. Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi born man living in the USA installed a remote-controlled paintball gun in his room in Chicago and connected it to the Internet. He was shot 60,000 times in 30 days and got a severe case of PTSD.

44. Neil Flynn, the janitor from "Scrubs" was meant to be part of JD's imagination in the first season, as a finale twist if the show was canceled, which is why he does not interact with any other cast members in that season.

45. The croissant, due to a legend that it was created to celebrate Christian victory over Islam, has been banned by some Islamic fundamentalists.

The most accepted theory on how AIDS was first transmitted to humans is that a Bantu hunter named Gaëtan Dugas while processing a newly killed, and infected, chimpanzee got cut himself and got the animal's blood into his body.

47. The Soviet Union had signed a treaty banning bio-weapons, but ignored the treaty and continued developing them. They even built ICBMs that could be loaded with weaponized smallpox, anthrax, typhus, and rabies. However, after the fall of the USSR, most of the bioweapons were lost. Their locations even now remain unknown.

48. Someone has written a full more than 300-page thesis on Michael Bay's Transformers trilogy, going into detail on how Optimus Prime is a murderer and Megatron is a tragic hero.

49. Early 60s American astronauts had groupies as there were "plenty of pretty women who would give anything to sleep with an astronaut."

50. Sweden has almost zero child fatalities in car crashes because most parents keep their children rear-facing until the age of 4.