50 Random Facts List #99

In 1999, a skydiver named Joan Murray survived a 14,500-foot fall without her parachute. While skydiving, her main parachute failed and she landed on a fire ant mound. Thousands of venomous stings from fire ants caused an adrenaline rush that kept her heart beating long enough for doctors to stabilize her and save her.

2. In 2001, a 7-foot bull shark bit off a boy’s arm in Florida. His uncle not only saved the boy (Jesse Arbogast) but dived in after the shark. He managed to wrestle it back to shore where it was shot and the boy’s arm was retrieved. The hand was then successfully sewn back on in the hospital.

3. Apple seeds do not produce the same apples as their parent. To keep the same flavor, apple trees must be grafted. Every Honeycrisp apple you have ever eaten has come from the same tree, just split apart.

4. Abraham Lincoln, prior to becoming President, was an avid boater and traveled on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers where his boat often got stuck on sandbars. In 1849, Lincoln invented a method for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals, making him the first and only U.S. President to receive a patent.

5. In 1977, Argentina flew a pregnant woman named Silvia Morella de Palma, to their military base in Antarctica so she could have the first baby (later named Emilio Palma) to ever be born on the continent. In doing so, the Argentine government believed this would give them an undisputable claim on the land, but the claim is not recognized internationally.

The most successful Bond movie ever made is 'Thunderball' which was released back in 1965. The movie made over $141 million back then which amounts to more than $1 billion today when inflation adjusted.

7. "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-lot was a call to see beauty in diversity. Sir Mix-a-lot used the song to blame the media for skewing the notion of beauty and hoped his music would empower women of all shapes and sizes.

8. International Women's Day was first celebrated in the Soviet Union. It used to be called International Working Women's Day until 1975.

9. Stoffel, the honey badger who is a resident of the South African wildlife center is one of the animal kingdom’s greatest escape artists. He has managed to escape his enclosure twice to fight the lions in the exhibit beside his, built towers out of rocks and sticks to climb over his wall, and when introduced with a mate, he stood on her head to unlock the gate and get out once again.

10. On the request from Sir Winston Churchill’s family, there is always a marmalade cat named Jock in residence at Chartwell house. The current marmalade cat who resides in it is named Jock VI.

Alexander the Great's army conquered the world while wearing armor made of linen that could stop any arrow made at the time.

12. Green Bay Packers’ wide receiver Max McGee didn't expect to play in the first Super Bowl in 1967. He showed up hungover and without his helmet. He ended up making a one-handed catch to score the game's first touchdown.

13. Quipos is the Andean writing system which didn't use ink, paper, tablets or skins. Information was encoded in an intricate system of strings of colored yarn tied in a variety of knots. This system survived until just after the Conquistadors.

14. In 2002, Microsoft forgot to renew one of their domains names and a random guy paid the bill just so that he could check his Hotmail.

15. The Night's Watch cloaks from Game Of Thrones are made of 79$ Ikea rugs.

In 2015, Costco sold more than 128 million hot dogs in their food courts. That's four times the amount of hot dogs sold in all MLB ballparks combined.

17. In a review of clinical drug trials, almost all negative studies were unpublished, leading to the false impression that 93% of antidepressant trials had positive results. When unpublished studies were included, 51% of all clinical trials were positive and 49% were negative.

18. Ian Fleming's last words were an apology to his ambulance drivers - "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days".

19. California does not allow you to name your child using anything other than the 26 English letters. This means that José is a banned name in California.

20. From over a million ancient Sumerian texts, which is the earliest human writing to have been discovered; only 30,000 have been translated. The rest of them have been sitting unread in museum warehouses for centuries.

Lottie Williams is the only person to have ever been hit by re-entering space debris. She was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 1997 at 3:30 am, when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She was hit by a piece from the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket that was launched in 1996. She was unhurt.

22. Despite producing over 38 billion ballpoint pens each year, China couldn’t acquire the technology to produce their own pen tips domestically until 2017.

23. Giraffe bread is the exact same thing as Tiger bread. Sainsbury’s renamed it to Giraffe bread after receiving a letter from a 3 year-old-girl saying it looked more like a giraffe.

24. Fucking Hell is a German Pilsner or pale lager with an alcohol content of 4.9%. It is named after the village of Fucking in Austria. Hell is the German word for 'pale' and a typical description of this kind of beer.

25. Mookie Betts of Boston Red Sox bowled a perfect 300 at the World Series of Bowling in the same week he was awarded an MLB Gold Glove.