50 Random Facts List #55

Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon died at the age of 42 while showing a doctor how healthy she was feeling. She kicked up her leg, dislodging a blood clot which then traveled to her heart and killed her.

27. George Lucas made sure R2D2 saves the day at least once in every Star Wars movie (Episodes 1-6).

28. Prince was Prince's real name (Prince Rogers Nelson), but after a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., he changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol earning himself the name "The Artist Formally Know as Prince" and "forcing a mass mailing of floppy disks with custom font."

29. During their expedition Lewis and Clark brought packs of "thunderclappers," ridiculously strong laxatives made of 60 percent mercury. Due to the strength of the laxatives and the longevity of mercury, scientists can track the route of the expedition by following deposits.

30. Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn was a baseball pitcher and Hall of Famer who, in 1886, became the first person to be captured on camera giving the middle finger.

In Washington State, you can be charged $1025 for throwing a lit cigarette from your vehicle.

32. An unnamed Chinese man was constipated for 22 years and looked 9 months pregnant. Surgeons removed 13kg/29lbs of poop from his abdomen. He suffered from a rare congenital disease known as Hirschsprung, which causes constipation due to missing nerves inside the colon.

33. Sea shanties can be grouped into three types: short haul shanties, for tasks requiring quick pulls; halyard shanties, for heavier work requiring more setup time between pulls; and capstan shanties, for long, repetitive tasks.

34. 9th November is known as the ‘day of fate’ in German history- on the same day, Robert Blum was executed in 1848, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918, Hitler’s Munich Putsch occurred in 1923, Kristallnacht occurred in 1938, and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

35. Charlie Chaplin's youngest child, Christopher Chaplin, is only 55. By comparison, his oldest child, Norman Chaplin, would have been 98 this year.

President Jefferson and James Madison fought pirate wars in the 1800s against the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean Sea.

37. In 1903, Frank Nelson Cole received a standing ovation after an hour-long presentation during which he did not utter a single word and just did calculations on a chalkboard to prove that 2^67 - 1 is a composite number.

38. After Germany's openly-gay Foreign Minister called the president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko "Europe's last dictator", Lukashenko responded that it was "better to be a dictator than gay".

39. The original RoboCop received an X rating from the Motion Picture Association for extreme violence. The movie was recut and resubmitted 11 more times before it was granted an R rating.

40. A Russian man named Anatoly Moskvin dug up and mummified the dead bodies of 26 little girls, before dressing them up and placing them around his house. He gave all of them names, threw them birthday parties, and considered them his "children".

Davy Crockett (American folk hero and soldier) voted against the Indian Removal Act.

42. Nearly half of all Vietnamese people have the same last name (Nguyen), making it almost impossible to trace an individual's heritage further than one or two generations.

43. Paris has public sparkling water fountains throughout the city to encourage more people to drink water.

44. The producers of "The Big Short" took huge pains to get permission to use Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” -- especially from Jimmy Page, who had disappeared somewhere with a new girlfriend and was only located in a remote pub on the very last day before the trailer's premiere.

45. 61% of US soldiers killed in the Vietnam war were less than 20 years old. The average age of deaths being 23 years old.

Earth's moon is 20 times more massive than the entire contents of the asteroid belt.

47. Quentin Tarantino heard the "Woo Hoo" song by the 5, 6, 7, 8s (used in Kill Bill) in a clothing store in Japan and bought the CD from the store's manager.

48. In 1695, six pirate captains banded together to capture the Ganj-i-Sawai, a Mughal treasure ship. It is believed that they might have seized as much as £600,000 (approximately $121 million in today's currency), possibly the most from any single ship in history, as well as a relative of the Mughal Emperor.

49. Disney while making the movie Coco tried to trademark the phrase "Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead)", a Mexican holiday for a centuries-old sacred tradition. This trademark also included applications pertaining to toys, cereals, and jewelry.

50. In 1986, the death mask of the Mayan leader Pacal was stolen from a museum in Mexico. Museum officials believed the thieves to be international, professional criminals since security was so intense. A year later the mask was discovered, and the thieves revealed to be veterinary school dropouts.