1 P.T. Barnum’s Clever Trick

19th-century American showman P.T. Barnum noticed that people lingered too long at his exhibits, so he posted signs that read, “This Way to the Egress.” Unaware that “Egress” meant “Exit,” visitors followed the signs, expecting another fascinating exhibit, but ended up outside instead.
2. In 2012, a California high school student was instructed to urinate in a bucket in a supply room closet after a teacher mistakenly believed bathroom breaks were prohibited. In 2017, a court ordered the school district to compensate the student $1.25 million.
3. The Notre Dame fire of 2019 worsened when a guard was sent to investigate the alarm but was mistakenly directed to the wrong location, where he found no fire. The alarm system also failed to automatically notify the fire brigade.
4. Actor Peter Dante, known for his roles in Adam Sandler films, has not appeared in one since 2013. The incident that led to this involved Dante calling a hotel worker the N-word for not recognizing him.
5. In 2018, Japan welcomed its first female fighter pilot, inspired as a child by “Top Gun.” However, she could not pursue this career until 2015, when the Japan Self-Defense Forces started accepting female candidates for combat roles.
6 Hippos Polluting African Rivers

Hippos can pollute rivers by defecating so much that their feces deplete the water’s oxygen levels, killing fish through hypoxia. In the Mara River in Africa, around 4,000 hippos release more than 900 tons of dung each day, which also leaves harmful chemicals like ammonium and sulfide in the water.
7. Since its invention in 1959, the MOSFET transistor has become the most produced artificial object in history, with over 13 sextillion units manufactured.
8. A senior citizen named Emerich Juettner, also known as “Mister 880” within the Secret Service due to his case file number, eluded capture for ten years from 1938 to 1948. He used poorly made counterfeit $1 bills, including one that misspelled “Washington,” to support himself. He used the fake bills sparingly, only one at a time, and never at the same location twice. Eventually, authorities caught him and sentenced him to 4 months in prison.
9. Medieval peasants typically received anywhere from eight weeks to half a year off from work. At the time, the Church enforced frequent mandatory holidays to prevent the working population from revolting.
10. When Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died, his widow had his body shipped from New York to Wales. During the voyage, she discovered that the sailors were unknowingly using his coffin as a card table. She chose not to object, believing her husband would have appreciated the gesture.
11 Adopted Girls for Marriage

In pre-modern China, poor families often adopted girls to ensure their sons would have a future bride, while other poor families gave away their unwanted daughters.
12. Albert Einstein held a patent for a refrigerator, which he invented after learning that a faulty fridge seal had caused the death of a family in Berlin. However, the invention became obsolete with the development of CFC refrigerants a few years later.
13. American singer Selena Gomez named her kidney “Fred” after Fred Armisen, who created and starred in her favorite show, Portlandia. Gomez had received this kidney as a transplant from her friend, Francia Raisa, in 2017.
14. A metal shortage during World War II forced the Academy to make Oscar statuettes out of painted plaster for three years. After the war, the Academy invited recipients to exchange the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones.
15. During breastfeeding, a baby’s saliva can flow back into the mother’s breast, triggering her body to adjust the milk’s immune components to meet the baby’s specific needs. This process is known as “retrograde milk flow.”
16 Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder

Tiny ear crystals, when dislodged, can cause a condition known as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), which will cause severe dizziness and vertigo. However, a coordinated series of head movements known as Epley maneuvers can easily restore normal order and return the tiny ear crystals to their proper position.
17. Elephants in Kenya’s Kitum Cave venture into the darkness to mine salt by breaking off rocks, adapting to their mineral-deficient environment.
18. General Average was a 19th-century maritime law that required all stakeholders (cargo owners, shippers, etc.) to share losses if part of the ship or cargo was sacrificed to save the whole in an emergency.
19. Carbon black is the chemical material that’s added to tires not only to give them their black color but also to increase their durability. It also conducts heat away from the tire’s tread and belts, extending the lifespan of the wheels.
20. The “Tiffany Problem” refers to situations where a historical or realistic fact is considered unrealistic due to modern associations. For instance, despite its medieval origins, people often perceive the name “Tiffany” as modern.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown

In 1942, a man standing nearby holding an axe tied a control rod to a rope, creating the first Scram button on a nuclear reactor. Cutting the rope would cause the rod to fall into the reactor core by gravity, thereby shutting down the reactor.
22. According to legend, Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, killed more than 600 young girls in order to drink their blood and bathe in it in the belief that it would prolong her youth. She was arrested in 1610, and though never tried, she was confined to a room in her castle until her death in 1614.
23. Lise Meitner, the co-discoverer of nuclear fission, was nominated 48 times for the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry but never won.
24. During the Falklands War in 1982, the British mistakenly killed three whales, believing them to be enemy submarines.
25. In April 1980, a family accused Robert Hill, a Disneyland actor portraying Winnie the Pooh, of striking their child in 1974, resulting in bruising and headaches. Hill testified in costume, only able to communicate through gestures like head nods and tummy swings, in accordance with Disney’s strict rules for character actors.
RE: Fact #9 (Medieval Peasants’ Extended Holidays) – This is pretty interesting if you’re curious about how much time medieval people actually spent working.
Basically, medieval peasants and craftsmen were their own bosses, so they weren’t forced to “go to work” like we are. They had more control over what they did and how much money they made. But unlike us, they spent a ton of time on things we don’t have to do anymore, or that we just take for granted.
Think about it: we work to make money to buy everything. In medieval times, farming was usually done in seasons, so it wasn’t a constant grind. But everything else – keeping their houses clean, getting food, that kind of stuff – took way more time and effort than farming did. So yeah, you could say medieval peasants were actually busier than us, even though they didn’t have regular jobs.
Thought so.
Need to clean your floor? Just grab a branch and make yourself a broom.
Need to wash your bed blankets? Go down to the well and pull up a bunch of buckets of water, then use your homemade soap to wash them by hand.
It’s funny how people forget about that, right? Like, if I want a drink, I just grab a glass and fill it up. But imagine if you were a peasant back in the day – you’d have to lug a bucket all the way to the well, which could be miles away. And then you gotta carry that heavy bucket all the way back!
Cold? Just turn up the thermostat. But if you were a peasant, you’d be shivering your butt off and hoping you had enough firewood. If not, you’d have to chop down a tree, cut it up, carry it home, and then finally build a fire.
Seriously, think about it – those people didn’t have any of our modern conveniences. They didn’t have plumbing, AC, or even Netflix. They just had to survive, and that was a full-time job.
Yeah, you can’t just chop down any tree and expect it to burn right away. That wood’s too green, it’s all wet and wouldn’t catch fire. You gotta let it dry out first, like for weeks, in a place where the air’s dry.
And that’s not even thinking about how most people back then were basically tied to the land and couldn’t just chop down whatever trees they wanted. So they’d be out all fall gathering wood from branches that had fallen down. And they weren’t just keeping it for themselves either, they had to give some to the lord of the land – like, 10% of their firewood. Crazy, right?
RE: Fact #26 (Drapetomania: A Racist Fabrication) – Olmsted, this famous landscape guy, wrote about his travels in the South. He noticed that white servants sometimes ran away, so he joked that maybe the disease they were talking about actually came from white Europeans and got brought to Africa by traders.
Wow, he gave us Central Park, Prospect Park, the grounds of the US Capitol, the campuses of UC Berkeley, Stanford, U of Chicago, and the Buffalo Parks System…. and then there’s this too!
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – 13×10^21. This is ridiculous. If you produce 1bilion of transistors every second, you would need more than 400k years to make 13 sextilion.
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – Digital integrated circuits such as microprocessors and memory devices contain thousands to billions of integrated MOSFET transistors on each device, providing the basic switching functions required to implement logic gates and data storage. Now think. How many are used in today’s electronics? There are way more than a billion produced each year by multiple different companies.
RE: Fact #3 (Notre Dame Fire Confusion) – That poor guy! He was brand new, working his second shift because his replacement was late. And to make things worse, the fire alarm system was labeled all wonky. It was like trying to find a fire in a maze!
RE: Fact #6 (Hippos Polluting African Rivers) – A bigwig asked me for a fun fact yesterday. I totally blanked and went with something about star-nosed moles instead. Should’ve come up with something cooler!
You could tell them Bluetooth tech is named after Harald Bluetooth, a Danish king, and the logo is a bind rune with his initials, Hand B.
RE: Fact #40 (3100 Mile Ultramarathon Around Block) – I thought people wouldn’t be into this, but after digging a bit deeper, I think it’s totally a Vince Vaughn movie.
By day 10, it’s like everyone’s either dropped out or way ahead, and you only see the stragglers running by every now and then.
RE: Fact #49 (Course Helps Overcome Flight Fear) – I mean, if it’s just about not being in control, people would be scared of taxis, buses, trains, boats, even being in a car. It’s got to be the size of the potential problem, right? Like, it’s a “everything’s going to go wrong” thing, I guess?
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – It’s funny to me that people argue about how much work Einstein actually did. I love the idea that he was mostly in it for the patent stuff, because it’s just hilarious to imagine someone looking at how much a lawyer would charge and thinking “Forget that, I know Einstein, he used to do this.”
He was broke and needed money to get the physicist Leo Szilard over to America. He was tired of waiting for things to happen the normal way. He figured that since he used to work as a patent clerk, he could license a useful patent and get some cash.
And by the way, Albert Einstein helped fix the navy’s torpedo problems at the start of World War II.
That’s wild! Einstein helped fix the problems with the Mark 14 torpedo. The Navy didn’t test them properly during the Depression to save money, which caused a ton of issues.
Think about Einstein hustling for OnlyFans in today’s world.
RE: Fact #14 (Oscar Statuettes Made of Plaster) – Shiny metal is cool, but the history behind it is way more interesting. I’ll keep the plaster, Bob. Thanks!
It’s like those people who got the original ground mounts in vanilla WoW, before they got updated. Remember how they offered new armored versions, and you could trade in your old ones for the shiny new ones? Problem is, the new ones weren’t the same as the old ones and now you can’t get them anymore. Sad about that Ivory Raptor, though.
Man, I had the jet black panther. What a bummer!
RE: Fact #23 (Lise Meitner’s Overlooked Nominations) – Lise Meitner and Arnold Sommerfeld both got nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937. They didn’t win though, Clinton Joseph Davisson and George Paget Thomson did, because of their work on electron diffraction. Sommerfeld, like Meitner, had been nominated for a Nobel Prize a ton of times, like 84 times between 1917 and 1951. But he never won either.
RE: Fact #13 (Selena Gomez’s Kidney Named) – Forget about the friend who donated the kidney. That’s pretty cool!
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – It’s the Tree That Kills You Instantly. Burning it releases toxins that wreck your lungs and eyes. You could probably nuke it from orbit and it would still find a way to kill you.
RE: Fact #50 (Whale Farts Create Large Bubbles) – I’m going to use “It smells like a whale farted here” anytime someone lets one rip in my house!
RE: Fact #18 (Shared Losses Under Maritime Law) – That source isn’t very helpful for Georgia. The Wikipedia article is much better.
It’s weird to see a legal principle that’s been around for ages described as being from 1890.
So, from what I’ve read, the modern version is basically a whole new thing.
I read this book called “Venice: A New History” by Thomas Madden, and it talks about how the Venetians and Genoans were big on making shipping investments more accessible. They came up with the idea of shares, which let all kinds of people get in on the action. This led to some pretty modern banking ideas, like double-entry bookkeeping and that fractional reserve banking stuff.
Before that, it was all about one person owning the ship and the cargo. They’d load it up, sail to a trading place, trade their stuff, and try to come back with even more. But then shares came along and things changed. You could pay someone to ship your goods and sell them for you, even if it was in a different country. Before shares, that was crazy because the ship owner would be selling their own stuff, and that’s competition. Once the ship became like a company thing, it wasn’t such a big deal anymore. That whole company idea also gave birth to consignment selling.
That whole “general average” thing in maritime law, I think it probably came about because of the shares system.
I might be off base, but that’s how I understand it from what I read about shipping in Renaissance Italy.
RE: Fact #43 (French Town Hallucinations From Bread) – Ergot, a fungus, has this thing called ergotamine in it. Ergotamine has lysergic acid, which is what they use to make LSD. Imagine 250 people tripping out without realizing why. That must have been a real mess!
RE: Fact #16 (Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder) – Vertigo is the absolute worst. I woke up in the middle of the night, turned over, and bam! My whole world started spinning like crazy. I can’t even describe how bad it was. I stumbled out of bed, fell on the floor, and crawled to the bathroom, throwing up for hours. I was practically crying because it wouldn’t stop. I had no clue what was happening—never felt anything like it before. Then I thought I was having a heart attack!
My wife finally woke up and found me in the bathroom. She took me to the ER. Turns out it was my first panic attack, triggered by the vertigo. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Wow, that’s exactly what happened to me. I couldn’t believe how perfectly you put it. It took over two months for mine to go away, and even now I have to take Valium when it comes back. Seriously a lifesaver.
RE: Fact #43 (French Town Hallucinations From Bread) – Mushrooms are crazy, you never know what’ll happen if you try one – you could die, go on a wild adventure, or maybe find something super tasty!
RE: Fact #27 (PlayStation Hack Exposes Millions) – That whole Sony password thing in 2014 was hilarious, a folder named “Password” with thousands of passwords in it?
RE: Fact #15 (Breastfeeding’s Immune Adjustment) – It’s not 100% certain, but studies seem to show that saliva can go back from the baby’s mouth to the breast during breastfeeding. This might trigger a response in the mom, making her breast milk have more white blood cells and antibodies. That’s another piece of evidence showing that breast milk changes depending on what the baby needs and helps protect them from getting sick.
RE: Fact #11 (Adopted Girls for Marriage) – They both look like they’re thinking, “This is the worst.”
RE: Fact #13 (Selena Gomez’s Kidney Named) – That’s actually a thing transplant patients do! My buddy just got a new kidney and named it John F. Kidney.
That’s a pretty harsh way to talk about his old car!
You forgot “Junior” in there!
RE: Fact #24 (Whales Mistaken for Submarines) – My dad’s coworker, a WW2 Corsair pilot, once mistook a whale for a Japanese submarine and fired on it.
Someone in my family, way back during World War II, did something similar. His friends gave him a funny nickname because of it, but I can’t remember what it was.
Ahab?
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – It’s funny how people think everyone talked fancy in the past, like they were all Shakespeare or something. But really, people back then were just as goofy and crude as we are. I mean, think about it, they were writing bad jokes on walls and having insult competitions! It’s like comparing a group of mechanics hanging out to a bunch of fancy scientists, you know?
RE: Fact #1 (P.T. Barnum’s Clever Trick) – Instead of getting mad, people just laughed it off and told their friends who hadn’t seen it yet.
I ran into a wild egret a couple of years ago. It was beautiful, with amazing feathers. I saw it while playing Ingress with some friends.
Man, I totally forgot about Ingress. I played it all summer on campus when it first came out and there was nobody else around, so I took over everything. Then it got boring since I was the only one playing.
RE: Fact #5 (Japan’s First Female Pilot) – I wonder how many they have now. They had three more in training. I never knew Japan had F-15s.
Their F-15s have some awesome paint jobs on them! You should check out their air show and the special liveries they’ve done.
RE: Fact #19 (Carbon Black Extends Tire Lifespan) – Isn’t that the stuff that’s causing microplastics and is a big sign of cars polluting the air?
Yep, it’s soot, so obviously tiny particles.
RE: Fact #17 (Elephants Mining Salt Underground) – It’s wild, those elephants remember the way to the salt cave in the dark, takes them hours! And they pass that knowledge down to their babies, too.
RE: Fact #29 (Sailors Drinking Torpedo Alcohol) – So, they tucked the imports stuff away. Apparently, torpedo juice is made with two parts alcohol and three parts pineapple juice.
RE: Fact #34 (Circles of 24-Hour Sunlight) – 24 hours of sun sounds awesome, but then you remember your sleep schedule is going to be totally messed up!
Those days aren’t too bad. It’s much worse when it’s dark for months and you barely see the sun. Some people even get depressed from it.
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – I’d think a death tree would be from Australia.
Australia has this tree called the Gympie Gympie, and it’s so painful to touch, people say they wish they were dead!
RE: Fact #32 (James Webb’s Unique Orbit Point) – They’re planning to put a space station at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Moon. It’ll be like a gateway for lunar missions, so they don’t have to lug all the supplies with the astronauts.
That’s how we get Gundams!
RE: Fact #29 (Sailors Drinking Torpedo Alcohol) – I saw on Factrepublic yesterday that those German V1 or V2 rockets had a fuel issue. Apparently, they had to delay launches because the staff drank all the fuel!
The MiG-25 used an alcohol blend for its brakes and electronics. The Soviets struggled to make a mix that was nasty enough to keep people from drinking it, but not deadly if someone was dumb enough to try.
RE: Fact #4 (Peter Dante’s Career Decline) – Dude could have just cruised on that Sandler movie money forever, but he had to go and be a jerk. Turns out, being a jerk is kinda his thing – he got arrested in 2020 for threatening his neighbor.
Someone I can’t remember said it best: Being Adam Sandler’s friend is the easiest job in Hollywood and he messed it up.
Schneider’s just stuck bragging about being famous for being a clown back in the 90s, but he messed it up by being a jerk.
Comedians who don’t make it just blame whatever’s trendy this week.
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – The manchineel tree is pretty cool, it can be a big shrub or a tree that grows up to 50 feet tall. It even has little apple-like fruits that look super tempting, but don’t be fooled, they’re actually poisonous!
RE: Fact #27 (PlayStation Hack Exposes Millions) – Crazy, right? The bin Laden assassination happened while the internet was down.
RE: Fact #50 (Whale Farts Create Large Bubbles) – Farts smell different in the bathtub than they do out in the open, don’t you think?
RE: Fact #36 (The Great Nottingham Cheese Riot) – I’ve had days where I’d fight tooth and nail for a good cheese board!
RE: Fact #5 (Japan’s First Female Pilot) – There’s only one female commercial airline pilot in Japan, and she had to learn to fly in the US.
I lived there for a while and it really gets to me. Some of the fancy Japanese universities were totally playing favorites with medicine, really unfair to women applying. It’s so bad, you could even argue that the worst male doctor is still better than the worst female doctor. That’s messed up, right?
I still love a lot about Japan though, don’t get me wrong. It’s a great place, just not perfect.
I lived in Japan for two years. Loved it, thought I’d stay forever. But the racism really got to me after a while. Every foreigner I knew was stuck in a dead-end job, never getting promoted because of who they were.
The worst part was seeing friends marry Japanese people, have kids, then get divorced. The courts always sided with the Japanese spouse, basically cutting the other parent off from their kids.
That’s when I knew I’d never marry a Japanese person. It’s just too risky. I loved my everyday life there, but what’s the point if you can’t work at a Japanese company and you can’t be with someone Japanese? It was heartbreaking, but I’m much happier back home, with a family and a good job.
Honestly, the way women are treated in Japan is messed up. There are tons of stories about how bad it is to be a working mom.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – You wouldn’t believe it, but it happens more than you think. My social studies teacher in middle school had this crazy rule where no one could go to the bathroom during class. So, someone just peed in the corner. Now, looking back, it seems so messed up.
I once had a teacher who wouldn’t let me use the bathroom, so I said I’d pee in the corner, and she finally let me go.
I gotta use the bathroom, so I’m gonna head out for a sec. If you wanna write me up, go ahead, I don’t really care. My parents would probably be happy about it too, haha.
We had a bomb threat and my teacher wouldn’t let me use the bathroom, even though there was a tree way further away that was safer. So I had to pee my pants in front of everyone while we lined up against the fence. They said the grass could catch fire and burn the whole field, but we were closer and if the fire was that bad, we’d all be toast anyway.
RE: Fact #21 (First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown) – I heard somewhere that “Scram” stands for “Super-Critical Reactor Axe Man”.
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – You know how Gladiator was all about ancient Rome? They actually thought about showing how Romans had billboards and stuff like that, but they decided that people wouldn’t buy it.
RE: Fact #42 (Comet Hyakutake’s Record Tail) – It was violet, a huge stretch of sky that went on for over 60 degrees.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – So the teacher thought the school had a super strict, no-bathroom break policy, but that wasn’t actually the case. Her lawyer said she thought she couldn’t let kids go to the bathroom during a short class period, so she got a bucket just in case! It’s kind of funny that she even used it herself.
It’s crazy that it’s happening in advisory. You know, that 25-minute “free time” where you can do homework, hang out, or whatever. They usually do announcements during that time too. So, basically, it’s a free period to do your thing, like going to the bathroom, haha.
The new Danielson rubric says you’re in big trouble if you say “free period.” They’ll make you stand in front of everyone during a test pep rally and… well, let’s just say it’s not pretty.
The schools’ favorite term, like always, was probably no exceptions.
RE: Fact #44 (Chefs Serving World Leaders Group) – Let’s take over the world by poisoning all the leaders at once.
RE: Fact #17 (Elephants Mining Salt Underground) – This cave is where two people got Marburg virus back in the 80s. Scientists tried to figure out what animal carried it. They tested tons of bugs and animals, but nothing came back positive. It was a big mystery. It’s in that book, The Hot Zone.
In 2007, researchers found Marburg in fruit bats in Gabon and Uganda. These were the same kind of bats that go to Kitum Cave, so they’re probably the ones that spread it.
So watch out for bats if you go there, and be careful where you step. They think breathing in bat poop dust can give you the virus.
Bats are a real pain, seriously. They’re like the virus carriers of the world. It’s always bats that start these outbreaks – either they bite someone, or someone bites them.
RE: Fact #18 (Shared Losses Under Maritime Law) – That’s pretty wild, right? It’s basically the same idea as how insurance works.
So, back in the 17th century in the Netherlands, financing a trip to the East Indies was a huge deal. If a ship went down, which was pretty common back then, you could lose everything. So, merchants started sharing the cost and the profits to spread the risk across different voyages. That’s how shares got started!
RE: Fact #31 (Madame Tussaud Spared Execution) – Her life was super interesting, you know? It must have been scary to be so close to death and then saved at the last minute. I don’t know, I’d probably find making death masks of those French aristocrats pretty intense.
Especially since she was friends with them.
RE: Fact #21 (First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown) – A guy standing next to a nuclear reactor, holding an axe in one hand, shielding his junk with the other from the radiation.
It’s so old school, it makes me picture a bunch of guys on a sailing ship, shouting “Drop anchor, and don’t forget the control rod for the nuclear reactor! We don’t want it melting down while we’re out drinking rum!”
RE: Fact #9 (Medieval Peasants’ Extended Holidays) – “Time off” probably meant something totally different back in the medieval days, right?
Time to take a break from the lord’s land, right? Even then, peasants had to work their own fields to have something to eat, not to mention all the other chores around the house. Having a wife and kids was essential back then, you needed all the help you could get.
I seriously doubt they were getting paid.
RE: Fact #40 (3100 Mile Ultramarathon Around Block) – That’s kind of like a race in New York where drivers are always hunting for parking.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – So you can’t use the bathroom, but you can pee in the closet? That’s weird.
RE: Fact #8 (Counterfeiter Eluded Capture Decade) – That Flintstones episode with the old lady counterfeiter, was that the inspiration?
Wikipedia says the Flintstones episode was based on the movie, which was based on his story. Apparently he made more selling the rights to his story than he ever made as a counterfeiter.
And the judge fined him a dollar! He also got a year and a day in prison.
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – Me too, I watched Jeopardy tonight.
RE: Fact #39 (Gaddafi Sponsored German Hockey) – That’s my local team! They were basically broke and about to go under, so this local guy who had some weird connection to Gaddafi managed to get him to sponsor them. For one game, they wore jerseys with a giant picture of the green book on them. They’re called the Iserlohn Roosters now, back then they were the ECD Iserlohn. Weird seeing them on factrepublic, huh?
RE: Fact #22 (Elizabeth Báthory’s Grisly Legend) – Actual historians say the real number of people killed was probably somewhere between 30 and 300, with the lower number being more likely.
RE: Fact #38 (Soyuz Rocket’s Matchstick Ignition) – You know, some of that old Soviet stuff, even if it’s a bit rough around the edges, just keeps on going. The last war we’ll fight will probably be with tanks and rifles that are older than your grandpa.
The next big war is gonna be fought with AK-47s for sure. But T-55s? They’re getting wrecked too fast, so I’m not so sure about those.
RE: Fact #19 (Carbon Black Extends Tire Lifespan) – Back in the day, having all-black tires on your car was like, “Look at me, I’m rolling in dough!” Before that, everyone just had plain white tires. Then, when carbon tires became the norm, fancy cars started putting white stripes on the sidewalls while keeping the black tread. White walls got really popular, so companies started selling fake whitewall covers that you could just snap onto your tires – like, a quick way to make your car look fancier. My dad told me he used to hear those old, loose covers flapping in the wind on the highway.
RE: Fact #32 (James Webb’s Unique Orbit Point) – JWT hangs out at L2 because it’s super sensitive to heat and likes to use the Earth’s shadow for cover.
Staying put could mean picking up some space junk though, just like Jupiter’s Trojans. I’m sure the engineers thought of that.
RE: Fact #16 (Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder) – I was cuddling with my wife, and suddenly I felt like I was on a crazy spinning ride. I was about to puke on her!
Then I turned the other way, and it was like the ride instantly reversed, still going super fast.
I fell out of bed, face-first onto the floor, and threw up until the room stopped spinning.
BPPV is the worst.
The Epley Maneuver is a lifesaver! I’m always rushing to my physiotherapist at the first sign of dizziness. Vestibular therapy is the real deal. Turns out dehydration and vibrations are my worst enemies. I get super dizzy in the dentist’s chair because of the head tilt and that vibrating cleaning tool. Pressure is also a trigger. Sometimes I hold my breath while stretching, which increases air pressure in my ears. I’m really careful to breathe while stretching now.
You nailed it.
It was seriously scary, right?
Seriously, I can’t believe I just pulled off that YouTube trick in ten minutes and my vertigo is gone! It had been happening a bunch during my crazy senior year, then it hit while I was driving and it was seriously scary. I still don’t know how I managed to pull into a parking lot when everything was spinning like crazy.
RE: Fact #28 (Quantum Computers Require Extreme Cold) – We’re still a long way off from getting our hands on quantum computers for everyday use.
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – Albert Einstein was a genius, but his brother, Frank, was a real jerk.
I was about to Google it, then it hit me. Pretty clever.
RE: Fact #35 (Real Scientist Featured in Song) – I was a total nerd when I was a kid, and one of my favorite shows was Don’t Ask Me, where scientists answered questions from people watching. One of the scientists, Magnus Pyke, was kind of a hero to me.
RE: Fact #41 (Ulysses S. Grant Sold Firewood) – If you’re young, try working a super crappy job for a bit.
Then, if you end up rich and famous, you can say you came from nothing.
“I had to sell used matchboxes to make ends meet! In a cave!”
RE: Fact #23 (Lise Meitner’s Overlooked Nominations) – What’s she been up to lately?
She’s got an element named after her, that’s pretty cool!
RE: Fact #39 (Gaddafi Sponsored German Hockey) – Turns out, Gaddafi paid for that fancy cricket stadium in Pakistan. The story is that he was pretending to help Pakistan build a nuclear bomb for the whole Muslim world, back when that country’s president was in charge.
RE: Fact #33 (Boris Karloff’s Chosen Identity) – He was mixed race, and back then, people really tried to keep that quiet. You know, like Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh, they pretended they weren’t from non-white backgrounds. Oberon even said her grandma, who was darker skinned, was her maid. Mr Karloff-Pratt was related to Anna from the movie “Anna and the King of Siam.” She was mixed race too. It’s a real shame that people had to hide who they were back then just to get a job.
RE: Fact #8 (Counterfeiter Eluded Capture Decade) – Juettner got the nickname “Mister 880” from the Secret Service because of the file number they gave his case. They were on his tail from 1938 to 1948.
In January 1948, some kids found fake dollar bills and some printing plates in a trashy empty lot near Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street. They didn’t think much of it, but ten days later, one of their dads saw them playing poker with the fake money and told the cops. A detective called the Secret Service, and they were really surprised.
A bunch of Secret Service agents showed up right away to check the bills. They figured out that they were “Eight Eighty’s” work and went to talk to the guy who turned in the fake money. He and his son helped them find the other kids, who had the plates.
Another group of agents tried to figure out how the plates and money ended up in that empty lot. People who lived nearby said there was a fire in a building that overlooked the lot a few weeks before. The firefighters threw a lot of stuff out the window of an apartment on the top floor to put out the fire. The guy who lived in the apartment wasn’t home, but his old dog died from smoke.
The Secret Service went to the apartment and found everything. They found the printing press, a bunch of “Eight Eighty’s” fake dollars, and even some mistakes he’d made while printing. And guess who they found? Mr. Eight Eighty!
Did he pass away?
He was old back then. People don’t usually live to be that old.
That’s a sad story. Poor pup.
RE: Fact #37 (Giant Pandas’ Odd Defecation Habits) – Many animals eat their mom’s poop, it helps them get the good bacteria in their gut that they need to digest the same food their mom does.
Let’s not do it like that, you know?
RE: Fact #4 (Peter Dante’s Career Decline) – He was seriously hilarious in Grandma’s Boy.
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – Same here with Greek mythology. You know, Orpheus, Heracles, and then all of a sudden “Jason”!
RE: Fact #3 (Notre Dame Fire Confusion) – What caused the fire?
RE: Fact #22 (Elizabeth Báthory’s Grisly Legend) – Recently a lot of podcasters have said that she was innocent.