50 Random Facts List #58

6 masterpieces for solo piano were discovered with great excitement and confirmed by the leading experts to be genuine works by Joseph Haydn. They were later proved not to be by him, and are now largely ignored; despite them being genuinely original music which had the aficionados enthralled.

27. The NHS in the UK had only one man registered as a rectal teaching assistant, offering his anus to be examined by trainee doctors. He has lost his job to a robot anus.

28. King Gustav III of Sweden commuted the death sentences of a set of twins to life imprisonment if one drank 3 pots of coffee and the other drank 3 pots of tea to test the effects of the newly introduced coffee.

29. The Unfinished Portrait is a forever incomplete painting of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It captured his last waking moments before he collapsed from a sudden stroke. He never regained consciousness and died later that day.

30. Peter Weller, the actor most famous for playing RoboCop earned Ph.D. in Art History, writing a dissertation on the Italian Renaissance in 2014.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara nicknamed as "The Great Imposter" successfully impersonated a career as a ship's doctor, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher.

32. The Italian painter Raphael was often accompanied by fifty scholars daily. When Michangelo greeted him one day, he said "You walk surrounded by an entourage like a general," and Raphael responded, "And you, you walk alone like an executioner."

33. It is possible to coat droplets of water with silica, resulting in a dry powder known as "dry water".

34. Potato plants can grow fruit. They look like tiny green tomatoes and are poisonous.

35. English actor John Cleese once defaced his school's grounds "as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet"

Despite US denial for 26 years, eight members of the Alabama Air National Guard volunteered to pose as Cuban rebel pilots during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Of these 8, 4 were killed when promised air cover never arrived, with two of the pilots dying in a firefight after being shot down.

37. The Class the Stars Fell On (An expression used to describe the United States Military Academy Class): Of the 1915 West Point Class 36% attained the rank of General. Members included Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar N. Bradley.

38. Spiders (Gossamer spider) can fly for miles and have been found 2.5 miles above the earth surface.

39. The military of San Marino still has an active crossbow corps which has existed uninterrupted since 1295.

40. Butterscotch is made with butter and brown sugar. Toffee is made with the same ingredients, but cooked longer.

The Holy Roman state of Hesse-Kessel became a "mercenary state" renting out its army to other major powers. The state maintained strict neutrality, to the point that it would rent out soldiers to both sides of a conflict and the Hessian soldiers would end up fighting each other.

42. The U.S state of Texas is roughly 10% larger than France and almost twice as large as Germany.

43. Babe Ruth was one of the first cancer patients to receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment simultaneously.

44. Rio residents rely on an app called "Fogo Cruzado" (Crossfire) to keep track of all gun battles happening in the city any given day in order to avoid them.

45. Operation Looking Glass was a 24-hour a day, continuously airborne command center capable of directing all of the United States' nuclear assets as a backup, should SAC's ground facilities be destroyed. Taking turns, the airplanes stayed continuously staffed for 29 years.

Granny Smiths, Fujis, and Pink Ladies (Types of apples) can all be traced back to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the ancestor apples still grow wild there in the Tian Shan mountains.

47. A bog is acidic and a fen is alkaline; a swamp has trees and woody plants and a marsh has other types of plants.

48. There's a surgery that claims to change the color of your eyes. The surgery involves taking a laser and burning away the melanin layer of your iris. Over the course of a few weeks, your eyes naturally turn from brown to blue as the damaged melanin is removed from your body.

49. In 1964 paintings by a chimpanzee were displayed in a Swedish art gallery, under the pseudonym "Pierre Brasau", supposedly an unknown French artist. The paintings were praised by critics, one of which went as far as to say "Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

50. The inventor (William A. Mitchell) of Tang, also invented Pop Rocks, Cool Whip, a form of instant-set Jell-O, and other convenience foods.