Random #272 – 50 Awesome Facts You Got To Know

Costco’s hot dog has remained $1.50 since it was first introduced in 1984. After the company president complained they were losing money on it, CEO Jim Sinegal put his foot down. “If you raise [the price of] the effing hot dog, I will kill you,” Sinegal said.

2. Persian King Agha Mohammad Khan ordered the execution of two servants for being too loud. Since it was a holy day, he postponed their execution by a day and made the servants return to their duties. They murdered the king in his sleep that night.

3. In Japan, if a working day falls between two public holidays, that working day becomes an additional holiday by law, also known as a “Citizen’s Holiday.”

4. The reason why Tenet features a real Boeing 747 crash is that when the numbers were crunched, it turned out that it was more efficient to wreck a real plane rather than use miniatures or CGI.

5. 61% of the Americans dread the holidays due to increased spending. 75% of parents with children under the age of 18 fear disappointing their children during the holidays.

Spiral staircases were installed in fire stations in the 1800s to stop the horses that pulled the engines going up the stairs when they smelled food cooking.

7. A Song dynasty princess named Liu Chuyu complained to her brother that it was unfair he was allowed to have as many concubines as he wanted while she was limited to a single husband. He agreed and gave her a harem of 30 young men.

8. As many as three US Presidents, and also Abraham Lincoln's son, may have died at the hands of a secret killer in the White House, which was contaminated water supply. Until 1850 there was no sewage system and a field of human excrement called “night soil” flowed freely into the water supply.

9. Mark Ruffalo had brain cancer when his wife was pregnant with their first child, and he had to fight through facial paralysis and balance problems for months.

10. In 1964, Bell Labs built a large space antenna. Upon testing, two of their scientists encountered ‘interference’, which could not be isolated. After multiple attempts to fix the bug, they determined that the “noise” was in fact, a remnant ‘hum’ from the Big Bang. They went on to win The Nobel Prize.

In 1989, a man placed a £30 bet that as of January 1, 2000: U2 would still be active; Cliff Richard would be knighted; EastEnders would still be a weekly BBC show; and Neighbours and Home and Away would still be on British TV. He was given odds of 6,479-1, and in January 2000 collected £194,400.

12. Three hunters found two 6-inch tall cylinders in the woods that emitted enough heat to melt snow a full yard away. They used them to warm themselves overnight. The cylinders were nuclear soviet Strontium-90 sources used in electrical generators to power a communication station that was manned during the construction of a nearby dam, and the nuclear sources were left behind after the project was completed. The hunters suffered severe radiation sickness and long term injuries.

13. In 2004, the father of Professional Golfer Rory McIlroy placed a £200 ($341) bet, at 500-1 odds, that his son would win the British Open within the next 10 years when his son was just 15 years old. In 2014 McIlroy won the tournament earning his father $171,000 from the wager.

14. Before playing Drago in Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering and won a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT.

15. The first public call made from an iPhone was made by Steve Jobs. He called a Starbucks and ordered 4,000 lattes; then said ‘just kidding’ and hung up.

The “color bars” we see used on TVs are called SMPTE bars. These bars, which were created in 1951 and became widespread in 1978 were used to calibrate color and audio levels for taped recordings.

17. About 2 million Americans can trace their lineage to a Mayflower passenger who fell overboard and survived by grabbing a trailing rope.

18. Spanish porn star Nacho Vidal was born into a very wealthy family. However, most of the family's wealth was lost on Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987. In 2005, using his porn star income, Vidal bought back the mansion his family used to own.

19. The first-ever Cell Phone call was in 1973 and it was made by a Motorola researcher. He called his rival at Bell Labs who had also been working on creating a working cell phone.

20. The Black Tom explosion was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions to have ever occurred. German agents set off an explosion in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916, that killed four people, destroyed $20,000,000 worth of military goods and damaged the Statue of Liberty.

Comedian Steve Allen once got into a minor car accident when another driver backed into him. Allen joked, “What some people will do to get my autograph” and went about his day, taking a nap at his son’s home. Allen never woke up because the accident had broken his ribs and pierced blood vessels.

22. Peter Jackson shot “The Hobbit” in such a high frame rate, some people experienced nausea watching it in movie theaters.

23. In 2004, a tennis fan went into a coma. 11 years later, he woke up and was shocked to learn that Roger Federer was still among the best in the world.

24. The people who own the house Breaking Bad was filmed in had to construct 6 feet wrought iron fence to stop people from constantly throwing pizzas on their garage roof.

25. There’s a 460 square miles area in France called the ‘Zone Rouge’ containing so much human and animal remains and millions of items of unexploded classic and chemical ordnance from World War 1 that it’s been legally defined as Impossible to clean and human life impossible.