50 Random Facts List #232

Godwin's law asserts that if an online discussion (regardless of topic) goes on for long enough, someone will inevitably compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds, at which point the discussion often ends.

27. Once the Civil War began, Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s plantation outside Washington DC was repurposed by the Lincoln administration to house a camp for escaped slaves. It contained a school, hospital, and cemetery, and it is now the site of Arlington National Cemetery.

28. Warner Bros canceled Home Alone because they didn’t want to spend $14.7 million on it. 21st Century Fox then continued its production and the film grossed $476 million worldwide.

29. As a joke, the Apple II release of “Karateka” had a full version of the game on the reverse side of the disk that rendered the game upside down prompting users to call support and ask why the game was upside down. They were told to “take the disk out, insert it right-side up, and reboot.”

30. The boots worn by the actors portraying American soldiers in Saving Private Ryan were made by the same company that supplied boots for American soldiers during the Second World War.

In 1979, a woman became ill on Space Mountain and couldn’t exit the rollercoaster. While waiting for help, she was accidentally sent on the ride a second time by a different set of employees. She slipped into a coma and died one week later.

32. During the “Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy” of 1801, 1 of the 2 men manning the lighthouse died in a freak accident. The other one went crazy watching the rotting corpse of his friend wave in a “beckoning” motion. As a result, lighthouse teams were changed to rosters of three men, which continued until the automation of British lighthouses in the 1980s.

33. About 70,000 years ago, a Red Dwarf star passed very close (in astronomical terms) to our Solar System. So close in fact, that it passed through the Solar System’s outer shell known as the Oort Cloud and nudged some Comets out of their orbits. It may have been visible to early Humans and Neanderthals.

34. Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the daughter of Pakistan’s ex-Prime Minister used Typeface Calibri Font to forge documents about illegal offshore companies. The documents were purportedly created in 2006. However, the font wasn’t publicly available to computer users worldwide until 2007.

35. During the filming of Quigley, actor Gary Busey demanded that Heaven be changed to reflect what he saw when he was there during his near-death experience. He then came to blows with another actor who had also had a near-death experience, over what Heaven actually looks like.

Yakuzas amputated pinkies for transgressions. There is a woman in Japan that handcrafts new pinkies for former members. They help reformed criminals regain a normal life. The fake tip, which lasts 5-10 years slides on to the existing stub like a lid on to a pen.

37. In the Middle Ages, a nun in a French convent inexplicably began to meow like a cat, shortly leading to the other nuns in the convent also meowing. Eventually, all the nuns would meow together for a certain period every day. This did not stop until the police threatened to whip the nuns.

38. A parrot named ‘Freddy Krueger’ was once caught in the crossfire during a drug raid and was blinded and burned, thus his namesake. Freddy recovered at a zoo where he was bitten by a snake yet survived. Later he was stolen by armed thieves. He came back to the zoo later but no one knows how.

39. In 2016, an Australian woman named Maria Strydom who was trying to prove that she could scale Mount Everest while on a vegan diet died of altitude sickness.

40. The rabbits used on the set of “Teletubbies” are a special breed of rabbits called “Flemish Giant”. This species of rabbit was used to not give away the scale of the filming site.

In Michael Jackson's ‘Beat it’, most of the extras on the set were Bloods and Crips members who put aside their differences for the music video.

42. Actor John Bradley (who portrayed Samwell Tarley in the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones) had only graduated from drama school three months before landing his GOT role, which was also his first audition.

43. In 1849, Sarah Thomas aged 17 became the last teenage girl to be hanged in Britain. Found guilty of killing her employer, Sarah was dragged screaming and crying to the gallows pleading for her life. So distressing was the scene that the prison governor even fainted.

44. Theodore Streleski was a Stanford Math Ph.D. student. After being unable to get his Ph.D. after 19 years of study, he proceeded to murder his advisor.

45. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which gave $20,000 reparations to every Japanese-American (and their descendants) who got sent to internment camps in World War 2.

Every evening at 10 p.m. students in the town of Uppsala, Sweden, let out a collective scream as a response to the stress of university life. They call it the ‘Flogsta Scream’.

47. The Great Sioux Nation, consisting of nine tribes, lost the Black Hills in South Dakota when the USA violated a treaty. In 1980, the Supreme Court agreed and set $105 million in funds aside as compensation. The Sioux did not accept it, preferring the land instead. There is now ~$2 billion in that fund as of 2019.

48. The final words of Venezuelan President Antonio José de Sucre were: “F*ck, a bullet wound!” He’d been shot while riding in a jungle in Colombia. He was said to have been an educated gentleman who had never cursed until that day.

49. A Japanese doctor named Tetsu Nakamura has devoted his life by revitalizing deserts in Afghanistan, making forests and wheat farmland and contributing to peace. Nakamura was decorated with the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun and Afghan National Medal. His Afghan community nicknamed him “Uncle Nakamura.”

50. In 1920, an Australian dog trainer died from laughter after reading how certain commodities had changed in price from 1915. A doctor was called in and he said the death was due to heart failure, brought on by excessive laughter.