50 Random Facts List #77

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1Prisencolinensinainciusol

Prisencolinensinainciusol

"Prisencolinensinainciusol" is an Italian pop song consisting of Gibberish and it was meant to sound like how English sounds to non-English speakers.


2. American mathematical scientist George Dantzig was once late to class when in college and solved two famously unsolved statistics problems because he thought they were homework.


3. The unconfirmed record for fastest moving manmade object is a manhole cover propelled by a nuclear detonation. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished which means it was moving at about 125,000 miles per hour.


4. In 1937, a man tried to find seats for himself and his wife on the Hindenburg, but there were none available next to each other. They took a plane home instead. Two years later, the man, Martin Goodman, went on to create Marvel Comics.


5. No one really knew who designed the "solo jazz cup" blue and purple design that had become famous on the internet until an AMA request for the designer led to an investigative reporter in Springfield, Montana discovering it was created by Gina Ekiss in 1989 as part of a design contest by the company.


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6Hippocrates

Hippocrates

We use the word cancer as a medical diagnosis because Hippocrates thought the tumors looked like crabs.


7. Doves were traditionally released during the opening ceremony of the Olympics games, until Seoul games of 1988. Several of the birds, instead of flying away, settled on the cauldron housing the Olympic flame and were subsequently incinerated in front of the crowd when it was lit.


8. North Korea still owes Sweden €300 million for 1000 stolen Volvos 40 years ago.


9. Daniel Day-Lewis, on receiving his 2008 Oscar presented by Helen Mirren (who won an Oscar for playing the Queen,) said: "That's the closest I'll come to ever getting a knighthood." He was knighted 6 years later.


10. James Watson (co-discoverer of DNA) decided to auction off his Nobel prize medal in view of his diminished income, for $4.1 million. The medal was subsequently returned to Watson by the purchaser, Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov.


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11Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The phrase "eat the rich" is attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Philosopher), who is reported to have once said, "When the people have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich."


12. A man named Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death in plain view of 30-45 people in a small town. No one called an ambulance. Elroy was such a bully that even 30 years later no one will say who did it.


13. When the stunt team tried to flip James Bond’s Aston Martin DBS in ‘Casino Royale,’ they found the car too stable to be overturned by an 18” ramp. In their last attempt, they fitted the DBS with a gas cannon and ended up rolling the car a total of 7 times, accidentally setting a new world record.


14. Scottish fold cats are banned from the UK's pedigree cat registry because a genetic mutation that makes their ears folded and their faces so cute also causes distortion of their limb bone shapes and severe painful arthritis.


15. Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder during the filming of an episode of Friends, where the audience was made up of Pepsi contest winners. The set was shut down meaning Warner Brothers had to fly the winners home and then back out for another episode.


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16Thunder Mountain roller coaster

Thunder Mountain roller coaster

A 2016 study found that the Thunder Mountain roller coaster at Disney World reliably makes people pass kidney stones.


17. After a group sued the CIA to release files related to El Salvadorian war crimes, its office was broken into and most of their data were stolen.


18. The 1992 Olympics US basketball team (the "Dream Team") won all of their games by an average of 44 points. They have been called "the most dominant squad ever assembled in any sport."


19. A contractor won a tender to rebuild part of the MacArthur Maze interchange in San Francisco with a bid of just over $876,000 - about a third of the projected cost. By completing the rebuild more than a month ahead of schedule, the contractor pocketed a $5 million bonus.


20. When the issue of witch trials arose at Charlemagne's Council of Frankfurt in 794 A.D., he had his bishops call the belief in witchcraft superstitious, ordering death penalties for anyone who burned witches. Incidentally, he had founded the first universities since the fall of Rome.


21Forrest Parry

Forrest Parry

In 1969 Forrest Parry, an IBM engineer had the idea to affix magnetic tape to a plastic card. Every adhesive failed. He went home frustrated. His wife was ironing when he walked in. She suggested he fuse the tape onto the card with the iron. It was a success, and the magstripe card was born.


22. The producers of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' rejected Tim Curry's audition for Judge Doom because he was "too terrifying."


23. Benjamin Franklin disliked the bald eagle as a symbol of America, calling it "a bird of bad moral character", and instead preferred the turkey, calling it "a Bird of Courage" who "would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards"


24. There was once a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave desert that was demolished because it became famous on the internet.


25. The Indian government commissioned a 2-hour Bollywood feature film called "Toilet - Ek Prem Katha", designed to help eradicate the practice of public defecation.

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6 COMMENTS

    • Bush Sr. was born on June 12, 1924, and President Carter was born on October 1, 1924. So Bush Sr. is three and half months older than Carter.

      3
  1. That one about the queen being the 43rd decendant of Prophet Muhammad is untrue and false
    The only living relatives of the Prophet Muhammad are in Makkah. Get your facts right

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  2. The Solo cup story is true, but the city is Springfield Missouri, not Montana. Solo Cup had a big factory here, and the Springfield News-Leader discovered who designed the cup.

    9
  3. The Queen is NOT related to Muhmmad. This rumor comes from British tabloids in the mid eighties. Even that assertion would make her a VERY distant cousin…by marriage.

    24

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