26 BonziBUDDY’s Spyware Scandal
BonziBUDDY, a free virtual desktop assistant created in 1999, was called spyware after it was found to have collected users’ personal information before serving them pop-up ads. Because of this, it had to pay $75,000 in fines and was discontinued in 2004.
27. Thuy Trang, the actress who played the original Yellow Power Ranger, was one of the Vietnamese boat people who left Vietnam on a boat after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
28. Abraham Lincoln signed into law the act that established the IRS, which was the USA’s first income tax. The Civil War expenses necessitated its implementation.
29. Until 1976, the U.S. Army shared responsibility with the Marines for transporting the President by helicopter. The aircraft, when crewed by their personnel, was known as “Army One.”
30. A high school has its own train station. Only four trains a day stop at Caltrain’s College Park station in San Jose, California, near Bellarmine Prep School. Caltrain would like to close the station, but students and parents say that it is very busy during the stops.
31 Hillary Misses Fatal Flight
Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mt. Everest, was scheduled to serve as a guide for a flight over Antarctica on Air New Zealand Flight 901, but canceled to embark on a U.S. speaking tour instead. Flight 901 ended up crashing into Mt. Erebus, killing all onboard.
32. The Lost Apple Project is a nonprofit organization that searches abandoned farms in the Pacific Northwest to locate old apple varieties thought to be lost or extinct. There were approximately 17,000 varieties of apples in the U.S., but only about 4,500 are known to exist today.
33. The YMCA used to offer dormitory housing at most of its U.S. locations and boasted over 100,000 rooms in the 1940s, more than any hotel chain at the time.
34. Each night, the U.S. National Solar Observatory adds a swimming pool’s worth of ice to its tanks to distribute coolant throughout the observatory. The heat is intense enough to rapidly melt metal at the telescope mirror’s focal point.
35. Atalanta, a heroine from Greek mythology, offered to marry any suitor who could outrun her in a race. She could defeat any man in a race, but Hippomenes got help from Aphrodite to beat her.
36 National Diaper Bank Aid
The National Diaper Bank coordinates and facilitates diaper donations to families in need. One in two U.S. families cannot afford enough diapers to keep their infant or child clean, dry, and healthy.
37. Boxer Muhammad Ali was also an accomplished musician. He released the Grammy-nominated and American Dental Association-approved album “The Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay” in 1976.
38. A Glasgow art venue/nightclub uses specialized technology inside its dance floor to collect its dancers’ body heat and convert it into renewable energy to power itself.
39. Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American female physician, “adopted” and treated more than 1,500 soldiers throughout her lifetime. She treated them, cooked for them, and gifted them jade Buddha figurines to wear around their necks.
40. Someone once used snowballs to put out a train fire. After a collision in January 1882, rescuers ran out of water. They formed giant snowballs and rolled them onto the burning cars to extinguish the flames. Among the dead was Webster Wagner, crushed between two sleeping cars his company had built.
41 Birds Using Anti-Bird Spikes
Recently, researchers discovered that birds have started using spikes meant to keep them away from buildings to protect their own nests from predators.
42. A U.S. Air Force captain with security clearance named William Hughes vanished for 35 years. He was suspected of defecting to Russia before reappearing in the Bay Area in 2018, living under a new name.
43. Chuck Norris was an Air Force security policeman in 1958 and learned martial arts while stationed in South Korea. Returning to California, he tried to become a police officer but had great success opening karate schools and participating in competitions.
44. Hairdressers are at very high risk of developing lung disease because of bleaching agents and hairspray.
45. Apple designs and tests its product boxes so that they open at just the right speed.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Switzerland’s Monobloc Chair Ban
Switzerland once banned the “Monobloc” chair, a common plastic garden chair, for polluting the cityscape.
47. Dancer Isadora Duncan died in 1927 at the age of 50 because her long scarf caught in the rear wheel of the vehicle she was traveling in, a cause of death sometimes known as the “Isadora Duncan syndrome.”
48. According to Crayola’s Law, the number of crayon colors doubles every 28 years.
49. Several languages, including widely-spoken ones like Farsi, Tagalog, and even spoken Mandarin, do not have gendered pronouns (e.g., he or she).
50. The SS rune symbol’s designer only received about $2 for his work.
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