Random #304 – 50 Fantastic Random Facts You Didn’t Hear About

It would take 375,000 Lego bricks stacked one on top of another to destroy the bottom brick. The tower would be nearly 12,000 feet tall.

2. The north star is 4000 times brighter than our sun. The light we see when we look at the north star was generated in the year 1587, and it has been traveling through space for 434 years to reach us.

3. When medieval monks would fast for religious reasons, they would sometimes drink lots of beer instead of eating food, since drinking did not count as “food.”

4. Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the East) was badly burned while filming The Wizard Of Oz. After being hospitalized she returned to set but refused to do any scenes with fire so her stunt double took her place in a scene riding a prop that spewed smoke which exploded injuring her as well.

5. The Boeing 787 needs to be rebooted every 51 days to stop rounding errors, which can cause it to crash.

Vermont passed a law in 1999 that the state pie is Apple and one must make a “good faith effort” to serve it with either a glass of cold milk, 1/2 oz. of cheddar cheese, or a large scoop of vanilla.

7. Steve Jobs had just been pruning apple trees in Oregon which led him to call his company Apple. “It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word computer, ” Jobs said. “Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.”

8. Brazil was a monarchy until Crown Princess Isabel signed a law emancipating all slaves in Brazil in 1888. This was unpopular among the rich plantation owners and the imperial family was deposed in a military coup.

9. “The road not taken” by Robert Frost was actually written to mock an indecisive friend and intended to inspire no one.

10. Apple purchased the iPhone.org domain name in 1999, 8 years before the official introduction of the iPhone.

In 1506, Louis II of Hungary was born prematurely and doctors kept him alive by slaying animals and wrapping him in their warm carcasses as a primitive incubator.

12. Curry has a long history of being served in Britain than fish and chips, with the first Indian restaurant opening in 1809 and fish and chips only being served from 1858 at the earliest.

13. When merging two lanes of traffic, a zipper merge is recommended because leaving a lane unoccupied as a result of early merging is inefficient. It only makes traffic heavier.

14. In 2004, there was an "election" for a new Chex flavor in South Korea. The green onion flavor won, but because Kellogg wasn't expecting this, they chose the chocolate flavor anyway. 16 years later, the South Koreans finally got it.

15. During World War 1, the MI5 used Girl Guides to deliver secret messages. They used Girl Guides instead of Boy Scouts because they found out that Boy Scouts weren't efficient enough, boisterous and talkative.

Jack Foley was so successful in the art of creating sounds for movies that his name was given to a whole new profession: a Foley artist. They specialize in creating sounds that are hard to record during filming.

17. The first documented gold found in the United States was discovered by 12-year-old John Reed, who pulled a 17-pound gold nugget from a North Carolina creek. Unsure of the substance, Reed's family used the nugget as a doorstop for several years before selling it to a jeweler for $3.50.

18. A company called Tweeter had its most active stock trading day in its history five years after it went out of business, after traders mistook their stock for that of Twitter, causing the price of the defunct company's shares to rise 1,000%.

19. In 2019, Pope Francis received a bottle of Oban malt whiskey while visiting Scottish priests, and declared it to be 'the real holy water'. The BBC captured the footage for a documentary, which was censored by the Vatican.

20. Sharks smell in "stereo," that is, they can detect the tiny delays in the time it takes for a scent to reach one nostril compared to the other and use it to determine the direction from where the scent is coming. This helps them in tracking their prey.

In 1939, a woman tried to assassinate the 11-year-old Shirley Temple while she was singing “Silent Night” on a live radio show, under the logic that the star had swiped her daughter's soul and shooting her would unleash it.

22. Large sections of Montana and Washington used to be covered by a massive lake held back by ice. When the ice broke it released 4,500 megatons of force, 90 times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, moving 50 cubic miles of land.

23. During the Golden Age of Piracy, women sometimes became pirates by disguising themselves as men in an effort to take advantage of freedom and rights that only men could enjoy. Anne and Mary were two famous female pirates of that time who fell in love with each other’s disguised manly appearance.

24. In 2017, the British Nutrition Foundation ran a survey that found that 18% of 5 to 7-year-olds thought fish fingers are made from chicken, and 29% thought cheese came from a plant.

25. In 1911, the Rigby family included their cat Tom in their census form. 'Tom Cat' was listed as being an 8-year old, married Mouse-Catcher, Soloist and Thief with 16 children. His birthplace was listed as Cheshire and he was described as being 'speechless' in the infirmity section of the form.