50 Random Facts List #211

We call people with red hair "redheads" as opposed to "orange heads" because the phrase has been around longer than the color orange. The color orange was described as red up until the 1500s when the first reference of orange in the English language can be found.

27. The concept of a soulmate was originally put forth by Plato. According to his story, humans originally had 4 arms, 4 legs, and 2 faces. The Gods feared humans were too powerful and so Zeus split them in two, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half of their soul.

28. Charles B. McVay III, the captain of the USS Indianapolis was court-martialed for its' sinking in 1945. In 1996, a history project by a sixth-grader named Hunter Scott cleared his name.

29. In 1974, a lawyer wrote to the Cleveland Browns threatening to sue if their fans kept throwing paper airplanes at games, and got the reply “Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some as*hole is signing your name to stupid letters.”

30. The practice of playing music for callers on hold began with a faulty phone line connection. A loose wire touching the steel frame of an office building caused it to act as a giant radio receiver, allowing callers to hear music from local radio stations while they waited on hold.

Wallabies in Australia have been observed eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite.”

32. To promote “The Room”, Tommy Wiseau personally spent $5,000 a month on a highway billboard advertisement for 5 years. This is in spite of the fact that the film only played for 2 weeks in the summer of 2003. Wiseau kept promoting it for years after it closed.

33. The London Underground is getting hotter because the clay that the tunnels are dug into spent decades absorbing heat and has now reached maximum capacity, so it is now insulating the tunnels. So essentially London underground clay is no longer cold enough to absorb local heat, so the heat generated by tunnel usage just stays in the environment. When the tube was first built it was much cooler than the city above.

34. The day Jimi Hendrix died, Eric Clapton had bought a left-handed Fender Stratocaster as a gift for him. He intended on presenting it during a Sly Stone concert at the Lyceum that night, but Hendrix never showed up. The next day, Clapton learned why.

35. The common chicken does not exist on the wild, they are the result of the domestication of another species of bird called the "Red Junglefowl" that lives in South Asia. They look like chickens except they live on trees and can actually fly.

The only Mexican to die on the Titanic was a politician named Manuel Uruchurtu Ramírez. He gave up his seat on a rescue boat to a woman who wanted to see her child and husband. She had lied to him about her family and survived.

37. POCD, or pedophilia OCD is a condition in which a person gets high anxiety from being around or thinking of children for fear of being sexually attracted to them, despite having no actual attraction or urges.

38. The CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, changed the workplace dress code from a complicated 10-page document to two words: "Dress appropriately."

39. In 2012, a civilian named Casey J. Fury working on the submarine USS Miami wanted to get off work early so he started a fire that soon spread out of control and ultimately resulted in the boat being decommissioned. He was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution.

40. In 1998, Clarence Elkins was wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his mother-in-law and assault of his 6-year-old niece. His wife worked hard to exonerate him and found a likely suspect who was in the same jail as him. Clarence collected a cigarette the other guy had used and the DNA matched.

Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle were friends for many years but grew apart due to a bitter feud over spiritualism. Doyle believed fervently in life after death due to the passing of his son, but when Houdini started a public campaign to expose fake mediums, they broke up.

42. Fatboy Slim sampled so many songs to create "The Rockafeller Skank" (also known as "Funk Soul Brother") that he had to give up 100% of the song's royalties to pay the original artists.

43. For 10 years, a man named Emerich Juettner printed poorly made counterfeit $1 bills (Washington was spelled Wasihgton). He never used more than $1 at a time and never in the same place twice. He was caught only after a fire at his apartment. He was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, and a $1 fine.

44. Darwin's finches, a classic example of evolution, are being rapidly killed due to an infectious parasite that damages their beaks, preventing them from producing mating calls and as a result, reproducing. Larvae also infest the nests and feed on the blood and tissue of the nestlings.

45. Words such as disgust, disheveled, inept and inert are known as “Lonely negatives.” These are words that, due to a prefix or suffix, appear as though they should have a positive root but none exists or it has vanished from usage.

Avatar The Last Airbender received a Genesis Award from HSUS in the category Outstanding Children's Programming for "Appa's Lost Days" (S02E16). It was described as "a mythical tale about animals held captive for human entertainment that resonates with the way animals are used in circuses today."

47. It is estimated that up to 90% of the wildlife found on Madagascar is found nowhere else on Earth.

48. In 1900, the Chinatown in Honolulu was intentionally burned down to prevent the further spread of the plague. Four months later, Honolulu was plague-free.

49. Christian "Flake" Lorenz, Keyboardist for Rammstein, was initially reluctant to join the band because he thought they would be "Too Boring."

50. Adolf Wölfli was a psychotic mental patient who spontaneously took up drawing to calm himself. His work included a monumental and epic illustrated book of 45 volumes, 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages in which he narrated his own imaginary life story.