50 Random Facts List #220

In 1995, Mr. T was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma. He said, “Can you imagine that? Cancer with my name on it—personalized cancer.” Fortunately, he was able to beat it and is cancer-free.

2. In 2016, a legally blind hoarder named Rita Wolfensohn whose son had not been seen for 20 years was found to have been living with his corpse. His fully clothed skeleton was found in a room filled with cobwebs and garbage. She said she thought he had simply moved out.

3. During the Watergate scandal, Martha Mitchell (then-wife of Nixon's Attorney General) was kidnapped, beaten and forcibly sedated by her husband's security detail to keep her from speaking to reporters.

4. Finland is the strictest country in the world in terms of driving lessons. There are lessons required regarding car maintenance and driving in icy conditions, with learners requiring a test in the summer and another one in the winter.

5. Albert Göring was the brother of Hermann Göring (Hitler’s second in command). Unlike his brother, Albert was opposed to Nazism and helped many Jews and other persecuted minorities throughout the war. He was shunned in postwar Germany due to his name and died without any public recognition for his humanitarian efforts.

Gravity moves at the speed of light and is not Instantaneous. If the Sun were to disappear, we would continue our elliptical orbit for an additional 8 minutes and 20 seconds, at the same time it would take us to stop seeing the light (according to General Relativity).

7. The wait calculation states that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all as it will be overtaken by more efficient and faster later missions.

8. An artist named Francis Tsai who worked for Marvel was later diagnosed with ALS. When the disease paralyzed his arms, he learned to draw using his right foot on an iPhone. When he was no longer able to use his feet, he used eye-gaze technology in order to keep drawing. He died on April 23, 2015.

9. Tom Dickson, the "Will it Blend?" guy, had his blender jar design ripped off by Vita-Mix. He took them to Federal court, won, and was eventually awarded $24 million.

10. Scientists have studied the ‘ice cores’ from Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the mountain which supplies the Nile with its water. The study has revealed that a drought did take place around 3600 years ago - around the same time the Bible sets Joseph’s story in Egypt.

After Warner Bros. executives suggested adding a third character to "Pinky And The Brain," writers responded to the unwanted input with the episode "Pinky & The Brain And...Larry" which featured a third, superfluous mouse named Larry that added nothing to the plot but repeatedly saying "I'm Larry."

12. "Daughter from California syndrome" is a phrase used in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a long-absent family member arrives while a patient is dying to demand inappropriately aggressive care.

13. When two subatomic particles called “bottom quarks” fuse, they release more than 7 times the energy of individual fusion reactions in hydrogen bombs. The physicists who made this discovery kept it a secret until they were certain the discovery cannot be weaponized.

14. In 1999, 40 million people suddenly lost power in the Philippines, igniting fears of a possible military coup, only to find out that the cooling pipes of one power grid had sucked up 50 dump truck’s worth of jellyfish which caused the outage.

15. Tivadar Kosztka, an early twentieth-century Hungarian painter, made an oddly asymmetrical artwork called The Old Fisherman. It was recently discovered that the painting contains two hidden images by mirroring just the left or the right side, which creates a symmetrical image of God or the Devil.

Elysis is a new smelting process for aluminum that releases oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. This new production process cuts operating costs by 15% and increases production by 15%. Apple has invested $11 million in the venture behind it and is offering technical support.

17. Primatology pioneer Dian Fossey determined to save the nearly-extinct Mountain Gorillas waged a war against poachers. She led armed patrols, burned their huts, arrested and placed bounties on poachers and convinced the locals that she practiced black magic, in order to scare them away.

18. Jack Black's older half brother, Neil Siegel, is a prolific computer scientist and engineer who has developed key systems for the US military and inventions that make GPS possible in our phones.

19. Only one commercial entity in America can import coca leaves with approval from the DEA, The Stepan Company. After extracting the Cocaine, the leaves are then shipped to Coca Cola to be used as an ingredient in the secret recipe thus making an imitation recipe near impossible.

20. Plastic and petroleum were originally environmental saviors because they eliminated the need to kill whales, elephants, turtles, and many other creatures for their materials.

Female psychopaths appear to be more prone to promiscuity than male psychopaths, and while they.prefer to date non-psychopathic men in the short-term, for long-term relationships they tend to look for a fellow psychopath.

22. A long-lost Rembrandt painting was found in a basement in New Jersey. It was initially valued by a local auction house at $800, who was unaware of its true value. But numerous art buffs recognized its true value, resulting in it selling for $870,000 ($1.1 million with the sale premium).

23. Draconian laws are named after the first Greek legislator, Draco, who meted out severe punishment for very minor offenses. These included enforced slavery for any debtor whose status was lower than that of his creditor and the death sentence for stealing a cabbage.

24. As a kid in D.C., American composer Duke Ellington loved to play baseball. Sometimes Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time, would ride by on his horse and stop to watch Duke and his friends play.

25. An 8 months Pregnant Mary Turner protested the lynching of her innocent husband Hayes Turner by a white mob in 1918 and threatened to have them arrested. In order to “teach her a lesson”, she and her unborn child were brutally murdered. No one was charged.