Random #344 – 50 Superb Random Facts

Prince Philip's 'affectionate' nickname for queen Elizabeth was 'cabbage.'

27. Upon finishing the sci-fi film "Devil Girls From Mars," a 12-year-old Octavia Butler concluded that she could write a better story. Butler went on to win multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and became the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

28. In 2008, Johnny Depp told Beavis & Butt-head creator Mike Judge he was interested in playing Beavis for a live-action film. Depp and Marlon Brando would riff on the B&B characters while filming Don Juan DeMarco. Mike judge said he considered the idea of a live-action B&B, but nothing came of it.

29. In 1969, American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans collided with an Australian aircraft carrier in the South China Sea at 3:00 am because the commanding officer was asleep and left two inexperienced lieutenants in charge. The ship turned the wrong way, collided, and sank, killing 74 people.

30. The song "Tubular Bells" which is famous for being the theme to "The Exorcist," was written and recorded by a 19-year-old Mike Oldfield in 1973. He played almost the entire instruments on the song. The full song is over twenty minutes long and is featured on an album of the same name.

Elephantine Colossus was a 200-foot-tall elephant-shaped hotel, which was built on Coney Island in 1885. It housed a concert hall, museum, observatory, and more. It later became a brothel but burnt down on September 27, 1896 following a mysterious incident.

32. During the American Civil War, the Union regularly cracked the Confederacy's coded messages because the Confederacy relied on a limited number of key phrases for encrypting their messages, one of which was "Complete Victory."

33. The Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, California, has the highest rodent density of any island in the world, with over a thousand mice per acre. Visitors to the islands can, at times, see the ground moving when the mice are burrowing in their underground tunnels.

34. Director Michael Mann directed Heat twice, once in 1989 as a low-budget TV movie and again in 1995 as a big-budget box office hit. Both have the same plot and scenes, but Robert De Niro and Al Pacino star in the remake. Today Heat is recognized as one of the best crime films of all time.

35. US Colonel John Stopp conducted a series of G-Force tests in the late '40s and early '50s. He holds the world record for most G's pulled on land, after traveling 632mph (1017 km/h) on a sled track in New Mexico on Dec 10, 1954. Stopping in 1.4 seconds, he experienced 46.2 Gs.

The world's longest golf course is in the scrubland of Australia. It is 848 miles long and has many unique hazards.

37. Leon Lederman, recipient of a Nobel Prize in Physics and author of 'The God Particle,' faced overwhelming medical debt near the end of his life and was forced to sell his Nobel Prize to pay it off.

38. In 1974, at a Canadian army training base in Quebec, cadets were being trained to handle discarded explosives. A cadet asked one of the instructors if he could pull the pin on the grenade, and the instructor told him it was safe. It exploded, killing 6 cadets and injuring 65 others.

39. Stored fresh vegetables have lower vitamin C content than frozen ones.

40. In 1793, a Spanish man named Diego Marín Aguilera flapped the wings of his man-powered glider, reached a height of about 5 m, and flew over 300 m before crashing because of a broken metal joint. The inhabitants of the town believed him to be a lunatic, heretic, fraud, and burned his "demonic" flapping-wing creation.

Gotham City’s location has never been set in DC canon. While its look and atmosphere was primarily influenced by New York City, it is traditionally depicted as being located in New Jersey.

42. NASA planned to send astronauts to Mars in 1981 using Nerva nuclear rockets but congress cut NASA's funding and Nixon canceled the Nerva project entirely in 1973, causing Nasa to focus on the development of the Space Shuttle instead.

43. Milk is sprayed on vineyards to prevent grapes from becoming mildewed.

44. Poverty Point is a prehistoric earthwork constructed by the Poverty Point culture located in present-day northeastern Louisiana between 1700 and 1100 BCE.

45. There is an activity called parahawking that combines paragliding with falconry in which Birds of prey are trained to fly with paragliders, guiding them to thermals. Parahawking was developed by British falconer Scott Mason in 2001.

The color of a US Coast Guard vessel’s hull identifies its function. White hulled vessels are patrol, lifesaving, and law enforcement vessels. Black hulled vessels maintain navigation buoys and construction. Red hulled vessels are ice breakers.

47. Brucellosis is a disease that spreads by eating or even just inhaling bacteria from infected animals or unpasteurized dairy products. It has many symptoms, from joint pain to liver damage to depression, and was the first disease ever weaponized by the United States for bio-warfare.

48. A snail's mouth is no larger than the head of a pin, but it can have over 25,000 teeth.

49. There was a brief mulberry tree bubble in the United States, in the hopes of producing silk domestically. Mulberry tree prices rose from $4 per 100 in 1834 to $30 per 100 in 1836, until blights and panic made the bubble burst by 1840.

50. Severe dehydration or dehydration of a long duration typically takes 2 to 3 days to resolve with proper treatment.