50 Random Facts List #76

Gerald Blanchard, a sophisticated criminal mastermind, was facing a sentence of 164 years but reduced it to 8 by revealing where he kept the Star of Empress Sisi, a priceless ornament worn by Elisabeth of Bavaria which he stole a decade before from Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria.

27. Registered pets on the Blizzard Entertainment (Video game company) campus have to sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) by placing their pawprint to refrain them from passing any secret games Blizzard is working on.

28. While chewing gum, you can make it disappear by eating some chocolate. The oils in chocolate reacts with the gum and dissolves it.

29. A royal footman was once fired from Buckingham Palace for performing a "party trick" that involved pouring alcohol into the royal corgis' food and watching them stagger about.

30. Men who receive blood from women that have been pregnant are more likely to have a shorter lifespan.

In 1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari with an investment of $250. Within five years, the company was worth $28 million.

32. When Newfoundland agreed to be annexed by Canada in 1949, one of the conditions was that the islanders continued to be allowed to produce and sell margarine.

33. The New York City owns an abandoned 22-acre island (North Border Island) less than one mile from Manhattan. It has been abandoned since 1963 with no current plans for development.

34. Alex Lifeson, the guitarist of Rush, was featured in a documentary when he was 17. It even has a part where he argues with his parents about playing music instead of going to school.

35. Until the 1980s all freight trains in the USA and Canada were required to have a caboose with a crew. They were replaced by the "end-of-train device" which detects and reports any problems to the engineer, ending an era in railway history.

In 2005, someone stole Judy Garland's ruby red slippers from the Wizard of Oz film, while they were on display in Minnesota. They have never been found and there is currently a $1 million reward for their return.

37. Dogs appear to prefer reggae and soft rock over other genres of music, according to researchers.

38. All vanilla beans in the world originated in Mexico, though very few vanilla beans are grown there today.

39. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., some people hid in Herculaneum's boathouses for shelter. When pyroclastic flows reached them, they were hit with a heatwave so intense that it instantly boiled and vaporized their brains, making their skulls explode.

40. Edward Eagan from Denver, Colorado is the only Olympian to receive gold in both the winter and summer Olympics, for bobsled and boxing.

There is a mushroom (Candy cap mushrooms) that tastes exactly like maple syrup.

42. Sneha Anne Philip is officially considered to be one of the victims of 9/11. Being a doctor who lived nearby, it's believed that she died trying to help the injured at Ground Zero. There's just one problem: no one saw her there or indeed, anywhere at all. She went missing on 9/10.

43. Randy Bachman (of Bachman Turner Overdrive) wrote the stammering parts in their hit ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ to tease his brother Garry, who had a speech impediment when he was younger.

44. End of the world predictions have been part of the whole of modern human civilization. There are predictions about the end of the world going back to the time of Jesus Christ and it hasn't stopped.

45. Jordache, the company famous for skinny jeans in the 70s and 80s, now makes most of its money in real estate, hotel and restaurant chains and airlines.

Anish Kapoor owns the exclusive rights to the blackest black and another artist called Stuart Semple created the pinkest pink for everyone to use apart from Anish.

47. There's an online cruise ship tracker that shows the current positions of all the ships around the world.

48. When the deadliest tornado touched down in 1925 in Missouri, people were taken by surprise. This was because the word 'tornado' was banned from US weather forecasts since the late 19th century due to hysteria. This mentality shifted after the tornado killed 675 ill-prepared residents.

49. The estate of Jimi Hendrix no longer permits the use of his music in films involving the abuse of drugs or alcohol. The last film to do so was ‘Withnail and I’ (1987).

50. Sean Bean's screen appearance-to-death ratio is only slightly lower than Kenny from South Park (0.32 deaths/film vs 0.38 deaths/episode).