50 Random Facts List #34

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1Ben & Jerry

Ben & Jerry

Ben & Jerry’s was originally going to be a bagel company, but Ben and Jerry found the bagel-making equipment to be too pricey. Their plan was to deliver bagels, lox, cream cheese, and the New York Times on Sunday mornings.


2. The first woman millionaire in the US was an African-American named Sarah Breedlove. In the 1890's she made her fortune by selling hair products designed and marketed for black women.


3. The owner of Ray's Sausages spent $30,000 to combat the foul smell said to be coming from his sausage shop. It was then discovered that the smell was coming from next door, where a serial killer had stored the rotting corpses of his victims.


4. Eminem's mother (Debbie Mathers) filed an $11million defamation lawsuit against him because of his lyrics about her, settled for $25,000 and $23,354.25 of that went to her lawyer.


5. The cesium test is used to test if an old bottle of wine is genuine. It is tested for cesium 137. If there is none present, the bottle predates 1945 and the nuclear age.


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6Rodney Alcala

Rodney Alcala

In the midst of a three-year killing spree, over which he is believed to have murdered up to 130 people, serial killer Rodney Alcala was featured a contestant on The Dating Game and was picked by the bachelorette. She never followed up on the date because she found him "creepy".


7. 20/20 vision isn't actually "perfect", and professional baseball players average around 20/12 vision; greater acuity than conventional eye charts test for.


8. Queen Elizabeth has reigned for so long, that 4 out of 5 UK residents weren't alive when she ascended the throne in 1953.


9. An Amsterdam anti-litter campaign hired alcoholics to pick up trash and paid them in beer.


10. Up until the 1960′s, the only reliable pregnancy test was to inject a woman’s urine into a female African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant, the Frog would ovulate within 12 hours.


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11Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

President Thomas Jefferson delayed a state dinner for the Tunisian ambassador until after sunset to accommodate the ambassador's observance of the Ramadan fast, in 1805.


12. Instead of signing their name on official documents, Japanese people carry around a unique stamp called a Hanko which serves as their signature.


13. Between 200-1200s AD, Inuit and Vikings colonized Greenland multiple times, but they often missed the other and found the ruins of the other's attempt. First contact finally happened in the 1200s, with Inuits colonizing the Vikings.


14. Ants make up 15% of all terrestrial animal biomass, and there are 10 thousand trillion ants on the planet.


15. Elvis Presley once handed Alice Cooper one of his guns and asked him to point it at him to show off his karate skills. Cooper later said that he genuinely wanted to pull the trigger to do something legendary with his life, but Elvis knocked the gun out of his hand and pinned him before he could fire.


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16Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi

Due to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, the Nobel Committee refused to give the Nobel Peace Prize that year because there was “no suitable living candidate.” The Prize cannot be given to deceased candidates. That way Gandhi's place on the list was silently but respectfully left open.


17. In 2012, Walmart held a contest, in which the rapper Pitbull would perform in a Walmart with the most likes on its FB page. After the #ExilePitbull Twitter campaign, the shop in the remote island town of Kodiak, Alaska, ended up winning.


18. When the Nazis forced Jews to wear yellow stars during World War 2, it backfired. Doing so increased sympathy for the Jews, who were (contrary to Nazi propaganda) obviously not responsible for how badly the war was going. People began tipping hats to Jews as a symbol of anti-German resistance.


19. When 20th-century archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated the temple at Ur (Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum), he found rows of neatly arranged artifacts of varying ages accompanied by inscriptions describing them: a 2500-year-old archaeological museum.


20. Forensic lip readers have analyzed silent footage from World War 1 and were able to reconstruct conversations that were previously thought to be lost in time.


21Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing

Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 13% of the US people were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese people. And after Japan surrendered, 22.7% of Americans wished more atomic bombs had been dropped.


22. A man named Christopher Knight probably holds the record for the most burglaries committed. He was a hermit who lived in the Maine woods and avoided human contact for almost 30 years.


23. A one pound onion has 191 calories, a blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse has 1954 calories.


24. Sesame Street has an Incarceration Tool Kit which assists parents and family with explaining prison to children.


25. In the early 20th Century, a surgical antiseptic was distilled and sold as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. It was then re-marketed as what we now know as Listerine.

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