Random #318 – 50 Undeniably Good Random Facts

Due to casino distributions, every Seminole Indian child born is a multi-millionaire when they turn 18 years old.

2. Singer and pioneer sound recording artist George W. Johnson, born in 1846, sold more than 25,000 wax cylinders. Since every recording was a "master" back then, he would record the same song over and over with several recording devices pointed at him, sometimes fifty or more times a day.

3. In July 2021, Lewis Hamilton pledged £20m ($27.5m) to set up the Hamilton Mission in an effort to improve groups who are underrepresented in motorsports due to its extremely high-cost entry barrier. Out of the 770 drivers in F1 history, he is the only black driver.

4. Procter & Gamble argued for years that Pringles were NOT potato chips, but Britain’s Supreme Court of Judicature ultimately determined in 2008 that they were, requiring Procter & Gamble to pay $160 million in taxes.

5. In 2013, the Disney company attempted to trademark the phrase "Dia De Los Muertos", the name of a holiday celebrated in Mexico.

The melon drop scam is a con that targets Japanese tourists. Scammers buy a watermelon for a low price and then bump into an Asian tourist and charge them about $100 for the broken melon. This is because melons are priced higher in Japan. These days the scam involves any broken item.

7. Cigarette filters were designed with color-changing chemicals to give the illusion that they filtered out toxins. In reality, the filters have little to no health benefits.

8. Tullimonstrum Gregarium, aka the Tully Monster is an animal so strange, that despite having thousands of fossils, we don’t know whether it was a vertebrate or an invertebrate. To add to the strangeness, fossils of this creature have only been found in one fossil site in the world.

9. In 1984, javelin thrower Uwe Hohn threw a distance of 104.8m and became the first and only athlete in history to break the 100m barrier. Shortly afterwards some changes in the design of javelins were implemented and the records had to be restarted, turning his mark into an "eternal world record".

10. By 1900, electric cars were so popular that New York City had a fleet of electric taxis, and electric cars accounted for a third of all vehicles on the road.

In the early 50s, before the national radar system and satellites, the US surveyed the skies with Operation Skywatch: a million civilian volunteers in rickety towers with binoculars and a telephone, watching for Soviet bombers.

12. Aristotle was Alexander the Great's private tutor and from his teachings developed a love of science, particularly of medicine and botany. Alexander included botanists and scientists in his army to study the many lands he conquered.

13. Professor John Mainstone ran a long-running study on a pitch drop but he missed every single drop. He missed it in 1977 because he went home tired, another in 1988 because he went to get a cup of tea, and in 2000 due to a malfunctioned webcam. When the next drop finally fell in 2014, he had died 8 month earlier.

14. Anime characters shout out their attacks because manga is black and white and it would be confusing for readers to tell what is going on.

15. Vampires were not inspired by bats. Bloodsucking bats were only discovered in Latin America in the 16th century, while the earliests vampires stories were from 12th century Europe.

One of the richest families in history was a German merchant dynasty, the Fuggers. One member, Jakob Fugger (d. 1525) ranks among the wealthiest men in modern history with $400 billion, 2% of Europe's GDP. The name Fugger was originally rendered as, F*cker.

17. US Navy Admiral Michael Boorda was the first person to rise from the enlisted ranks to become Chief of Naval Operations. He killed himself after being accused of wearing 2 unauthorized service ribbons.

18. In 1914, the first residential air conditioners cost between $10,000 and $50,000 (or $120,000 to $600,000 inflation-adjusted). By the 1960s, they were as low as $416 (or $4,000 inflation-adjusted). Since then, heat-related deaths in the U.S. have declined by 80 percent.

19. After studying every prediction that Spock made, it was discovered that the more confident he was in his predictions, the less likely they were to come true. When he described something as being "impossible," he ended up being wrong 83% of the time.

20. The anti-diabetic medication, metformin, is derived from French Lilacs. In medieval times, French lilac was used to treat the symptoms of a condition we now know today as diabetes mellitus.

In 1985, the French foreign intelligence service bombed and sank a Greenpeace vessel while the vessel was moored at Auckland, New Zealand.

22. Black stones in Go are manufactured to be slightly larger compared to the white ones, to compensate for the optical illusion of white objects looking bigger when placed adjacent to black objects.

23. The cruise line industry dumps 255,000 US gallons of greywater and 30,000 US gallons of blackwater into the sea every day.

24. In 1952, a neighborhood cat named Room 8 wandered into a classroom at an elementary school in California. He lived in the school during the school year and then disappeared for the summer, returning when classes started again. This pattern continued without interruption until the mid-'60s.

25. German Novelist Franz Kafka starved to death because tuberculosis in his throat would not allow him to eat.