1 When Anyone Could Roam Airports
Before September 11, 2001, U.S. airports functioned as public social hubs where anyone could walk to the gate, eat at food courts, and watch planes without a ticket or ID. Families and friends routinely accompanied travelers through the terminal, lingering at the windows to see planes take off and land.
2. In 2020, over a five-month period, a nurse at Yale’s fertility center stole the fentanyl in 175 vials that were meant to relieve pain for women undergoing egg retrieval procedures. The nurse secretly replaced the powerful opioid with saline solution, so the vials looked normal but contained no effective pain medication. As a result, women went through the invasive procedure without real pain relief.
3. The Rice Hypothesis posits that cultures that engaged in wet rice farming, which requires coordinated irrigation and synchronized planting, tend to be collectivist, while wheat farming cultures evolved to be more individualistic. In rice-growing regions, farmers must share water, maintain canals, and time their planting together, so they rely heavily on their neighbors. Wheat farmers can usually work their fields alone with less need for complex shared systems.
4. Bruce Lee spent only about three years as a leading man after leaving Hollywood broke and frustrated at being limited to small roles. He returned to Hong Kong, where he finally starred in his own films and became a major action star. That success led to his first Hollywood starring role in Enter the Dragon. He died three weeks before the film’s release, so he never saw how it cemented his global legacy.
5. At age 7, a girl named Bonnie Lohman went to the store with her stepdad and saw her own face printed on a milk carton. She asked to keep the image, and he agreed on the condition that she keep it a secret. Later, her neighbors saw the picture and reported what they saw. After that, Bonnie learned that her mother had kidnapped her when she was 3 years old.
6 Child Labor That Haunted Dickens
As a child, Charles Dickens worked 10-hour days in a London boot-blacking factory, a trauma he later called the deepest shame of his life. That harsh routine pushed him to impose a strict 9-2, five-hour writing discipline on himself as an adult. He also carried the memory into his family life and refused to let his own children work.
7. Dr Pepper is not a cola, root beer, or fruit-flavored soft drink, but instead belongs to its own category called “pepper sodas,” named after the brand itself.
8. In 2025, Apple paid $95 million after Siri was caught eavesdropping on private conversations, including doctor visits and drug deals, and sending those recordings for human contractors to review. The issue arose because Siri did not only respond to the phrase “Hey Siri” but also to similar-sounding phrases like “seriously.” Those accidental triggers captured sensitive audio that users never meant to share.
9. In the 1960s, Dan Burros rose to become the third-highest-ranked member of the American Nazi Party and the grand dragon of the New York Ku Klux Klan. The New York Times then revealed that he was in fact a Jewish man who had attended Hebrew school and even had a bar mitzvah. After exposing his background, Burros killed himself.
10. Pedialyte is officially marketed as a hydration drink for children. In practice, though, over a third of its sales come from adults who use it to recover from hangovers.
11 Forty-Four Percent Never Drink
About 44 percent of the world’s adult population has never consumed alcohol. This group includes people who avoid drinking for religious, cultural, health, or personal reasons.
12. Magnus Carlsen, one of the greatest chess players of all time, has never lost three or more classical chess games in a row in his adult professional career (as of February 2025). The last time he lost three classical games in a row was in 2003, when he was 12 years old.
13. In 1982, workers in the UK found a mummified carrier pigeon in a chimney, still carrying an encrypted D-Day message dated from 1944. The bird had never completed its mission, so the coded note remained hidden for decades inside the house. When experts examined the message, they realized that the cipher did not match any known wartime codebooks. Britain’s intelligence agency has asked the public for help, and the D-Day message still has not been decoded (as of February 2026).
14. Kidney and other organ donations typically do not last the rest of the patient’s life, and about 50% of transplanted organs fail within 10 years. After the initial surgery, patients may live for years with a functioning donated organ, but over time its performance can gradually decline until it no longer keeps them healthy.
15. In June 2025, the British Film Institute screened the first released version of Star Wars using a perfectly preserved original 1977 print that archivists had recovered from storage. This was the exact theatrical cut that George Lucas had kept off public big screens for 47 years after replacing it with altered editions.
16 Traci Lords’ Porn Career
In the 1980s, adult film actress Traci Lords starred in 75 adult movies before leaving the industry. It was later revealed that she had faked her age during that period. That revelation showed that all but her final movie had been filmed while she was still a minor.
17. In 1960, a B-52 on a night training mission out of Westover Air Force Base flew near the Canadian border when it slowly banked left and began descending toward Vermont. Thinking the aircraft was breaking up, the navigator ejected without orders, and the pilot heard the violent ejection and assumed the plane was coming apart. He ordered the rest of the crew to bail out, and eight men escaped, although one crew member later died from the attempt. The now crewless bomber kept flying in large spirals for about 50 miles before finally crashing in an open field near Vermont.
18. In April 2024, contractors working on the roof of a Family Fare grocery store in Midland, Michigan, followed an extension cord into the rooftop sign and discovered a 34-year-old woman secretly living inside. Police, who did not release her name, later nicknamed her the “Rooftop Ninja.” She told officers she had lived in the roughly 40-square-foot space for about a year, with a computer, printer, desk, coffee maker, and stored food. After police asked her to leave, the store agreed to help her retrieve her belongings and chose not to press charges.
19. In Austria, every McDonald’s restaurant acts as a “McEmbassy,” with a 24-hour hotline to the U.S. Embassy to help American travelers who are in distress or have lost their passports. Under this 2019 arrangement, Americans who need consular assistance can walk into any McDonald’s, where staff will help them contact embassy officials.
20. In 1999, the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” was on track for an NC-17 rating because of excessive profanity, including 146 uses of the word “fuck.” The MPAA told creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker that 400 or more swear words would trigger the NC-17 label. To dodge that rating, they cut the script down so the final count landed at 399 swear words.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Dioxin Dusting Destroys Times Beach
Between 1970 and 1976, the town of Times Beach, Missouri hired waste oil hauler Russell Bliss to spray its unpaved gravel roads for dust control, not knowing he had mixed in highly toxic dioxin. He tried to dispose of the chemical waste by adding it to engine oil and spreading it across about 23 miles of town roads. The EPA confirmed the dangerous TCDD contamination in December 1982, prompting health officials to order the evacuation and demolition of the town. The state disincorporated Times Beach in 1985, and after cleanup, the land reopened in 1999 as Route 66 State Park.
22. During World War II, General George S. Patton was relieved of command after two separate incidents in which he slapped shell-shocked soldiers in a field hospital. News of his behavior sparked a massive public outcry in the United States. In response, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Patton to apologize to the men he had assaulted. Eisenhower then reassigned him to help lead a “phantom” decoy unit equipped with inflatable tanks.
23. Studies have shown that secondhand marijuana smoke can make children test positive for THC even when the smoker is not in the same room.
24. Christopher Columbus made significant errors when he estimated the distance from Europe to Asia, assuming the voyage would be far shorter than it actually was. He set out expecting to reach Japan with the food and supplies he carried, but his calculations ignored how vast the ocean really is. If the Americas had not been in his path, his ships would have run out of provisions long before reaching Asia and doomed the expedition.
25. Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels in a bid to secure an audience with Hitler and ask for Norwegian prisoners to be released. He offered the medal as a personal gesture, hoping that this sacrifice would persuade Hitler to free his countrymen. Instead, the meeting only angered Hitler.
RE: Fact #35 (Why Black Boxes Are Orange) – basically, this way they’re super easy to spot.
Imagine if they crashed straight into a Cheeto factory.
Sure, but you get why saying something is a “black box” makes folks picture an actual black box.
Nerds just don’t get it – the whole point is that black box stuff holds all the good bits inside. In science, computing, and engineering a black box is any system you can look at only by its inputs and outputs, without knowing how it actually works inside. That makes the implementation “opaque.” The idea applies to things like transistors, engines, algorithms, even the human brain or governments. Basically, the observer ignores what’s happening inside and just watches what comes in and what comes out. They look for patterns between input and output, then use those patterns to predict how the system will behave without ever peeking at its inner workings.
I went ahead and chose “orange juice box.”
Valve already snagged “The Orange Box.”
RE: Fact #23 (Secondhand Weed Smoke Tags Kids) – I’m a mental‑health pro and I actually have the full PubMed article, not just the institution’s press release that got linked on factrepublic. TL;DR – only 11 % of the kids in the study tested positive for THC itself, at ridiculously low levels. That means 89 % came back negative overall, barely clearing the margin of error. Even more striking: none of them had THC at any level that could be considered residual from psychoactive doses. This is what we call a “junk study” – basically built to prove its hypothesis by design.
A lot of people already nailed the flaw: “detectable” levels were so low they’re comparable to acceptable arsenic or mercury thresholds in blood. The test even looked for a THC metabolite, which only shows indirect exposure, and half the kids had nothing detectable there either. And the study’s pretty old now, with no follow‑up—usually that signals it’s not worth paying attention to.
RE: Fact #28 (Berry Amendment And All-American Uniforms) – It totally adds up when you think about military readiness. You don’t want to end up in the middle of an armed conflict and not have enough gear to keep your troops supplied.
Plus, there are tons of knock‑off camo sellers with patterns that don’t actually work, even though they look similar at first glance. Watching the two get field tested side by side was nuts—seeing a real difference instead of just marketing hype.
Partly true. I think the amount of multicam knockoffs other nations are adopting shows there’s a general style that works, and in Ukraine we’re seeing camo getting messed up by bright ID tape anyway. Where the knockoffs really fall short is usually because they’re not NIR compliant, so they effectively “glow” when you look at them with night vision.
This is basically the logic Trump’s using with his tariff‑heavy foreign policy, by the way. He’s doing it in the worst possible way, but the concern makes sense if you think about how Covid wrecked global supply chains. So if a war breaks out between, say, China and Taiwan, that could probably crash the world economy.
kind of like, global interdependence feels like an economic MAD that’s probably been keeping the world stable. if our economies become too insular, war might start to seem more economically viable.
RE: Fact #17 (Ghost B-52 Circles Vermont Sky) – I read one of the references that Wikipedia links to, and it actually has some pretty detailed info about what went down. I heard it straight from my uncle, Henry “Hank” Luscomb, who was the instructor on that flight. He was sitting in the jump seat right behind the two pilots.
The plane rolled over because the pilot blacked out. With no one giving a control input, the aircraft started a gentle slow roll that none of the crew noticed at first—they were all busy with their own tasks. As the bank angle increased, the descent rate shot up to more than 2,000 feet per minute. The navigator had his own set of instruments but wasn’t in the cockpit. He saw the high descent rate on the VSI and misread his altimeter as 9,000 instead of 19,000 feet, so he thought they were going to hit something and ejected without talking.
The aircraft suddenly exploded from decompression, which woke up the pilot. The pilot didn’t realize he’d lost consciousness and thought the plane had been badly damaged, so he ordered an all‑out evacuation. Major Luscomb tried to stop him but couldn’t. Everyone got out except for Luscomb. After a chat with Otis AFB’s Major Luscomb, he was told to bail out the bomb bay doors because all the ejection seats were gone. The plane was basically unflyable with no seats in the cockpit.
Luscomb trimmed the aircraft for a gentle descent and then bailed out of the belly bomb bay. He blacked out as soon as he hit the violent slipstream. When he came to, his canopy was deployed; he was descending at night over woods and landed in trees with only minor injuries. By daylight most of the crew walked out of the woods and started making phone calls from the first house they found. Jeff Miller, nephew, ATP.
I also heard an extra comment that sounds a lot like the SAC party line denying there was an incompetent pilot on a B‑52. The navigator on board told me the pilot knew the aircraft was “rolling over” as they tried to make an entry turn into the low‑level route. The pilot didn’t actually pass out… and the bail‑out light did come on before the NAV ejected. I knew this crew from Castle during Combat Crew Training, and the NAV was very afraid to fly with that pilot. That’s why there was an IP on board. SAC tried to ground the NAV, but HQ USAF didn’t let it happen. The NAV went on to a successful USAF career and retired as a full Colonel.
It feels like the official answer is straight out of a slapstick comedy—what a ridiculous series of events. At least everyone seems to have come out okay, which is good.
At 19,000 feet an explosive decompression will fill the whole plane with mist as water vapor shoots out of the air. Picture a huge bang, a roaring noise, then the cabin turns into “smoke”—actually just steam but it looks chaotic! By the way, this was early in the jet age; planes breaking up, even B‑52s, were real concerns.
So if I’m getting this right, Major Luscomb is literally right behind the two pilots. The pilot passes out, and neither Luscomb nor the copilot notice because they’re so close to him. The plane starts rolling because nobody’s giving input. Both awake folks in the cabin—the copilot with his duplicate panel and the instructor who’s probably there to keep an eye on both—just keep doing nothing wrong. They end up losing 2,000 feet per minute and still don’t notice anything. Then the navigator finally spots it. He thinks they’re at 9,000 feet, so he only has four‑and‑a‑half minutes to figure out what’s up. Instead of taking ten seconds to double‑check or see if the issue can be fixed, he just bails. Sounds like a whole bunch of people absolutely screwing their jobs.
You should definitely check out *Airframe* by Michael Crichton. It’s basically a pretty spot-on after‑crash investigation wrapped in some corporate drama. Most airplane crashes are a chain of things going wrong, and planes are built to handle one failure—most folks outside the cockpit never even see it happen. Figuring out exactly what went wrong and why is key for preventing future accidents. The times when a pilot passes out and the co‑pilot notices and takes over don’t make headlines because nothing dramatic happens. Even when a navigator nudges a pilot awake or asks the co‑pilot what’s up, there’s no drama. And those moments where the navigator freaks out and the pilots just shrug “okay, let’s keep flying” add a bit of tension but still aren’t headline material. It’s only when all these mishaps stack up that the plane actually crashes—and that’s when you get to read about it.
Sounds like a bunch of people just messing up their jobs. When you look at airplane disasters, this is one of the biggest reasons by a long shot.
If anyone’s still not sure what a bailout seat is, I did a quick lookup on the B‑52 and here’s the gist—feel free to point out anything I got wrong. Think of a normal commercial cockpit but two stories high: a top deck and a bottom deck. Both pilot seats are bailout seats, plus there are two more on the lower deck and two extra in the back for support crew. These aren’t like fighter jet ejection seats with a dome canopy that pops open; they’re just seats with parachutes.
When you fire one of them, a hatch in the canopy opens violently and the seat shoots out—upward if it’s on the top deck or straight down off the bottom deck. That moment causes the whole plane to decompress, basically the same as puncturing an airliner’s side panel. You’ve seen those movie scenes where a hole appears and people are sucked out; that’s exactly what happens when you activate even one seat.
The tricky part is that these seats are also the ones you use to fly the aircraft. Trying to climb into the cockpit and pilot the plane without your seat or seatbelt while it’s actively pulling you out of the airframe is a suicide mission—you just can’t do it.
RE: Fact #48 (Do Farts Contaminate Operating Theatres) – I keep telling my surgeon to put on pants every time he performs surgery on me.
Who knows what’s going on when you’re out of it?
RE: Fact #49 (Blood Petitions For Assassins’ Leniency) – There are probably plenty of better reads on this mindset out there, but Captain Tameichi Hara’s book *Japanese Destroyer Captain* touches on it a bit. He doesn’t condone the way things work, but he tries to explain why that’s the case and how he dealt with it as an officer in the Navy.
Really good read. He seemed to have a lot of doubts about the war and definitely didn’t think it was worth throwing your life away for nothing. Near the end he was in command of a light cruiser that got sunk by an air attack. When it went down he swam away, grabbed onto a floating log, and then a seaman paddled up and roughly told him to move so the other sailor could grab it. When the man realized it was his captain, he apologized profusely and let go of the log. In that navy a low‑rank enlisted guy could be physically beaten by even lower‑ranking NCOs for minor infractions or just because. Instead the captain said “don’t be ridiculous, there’s room for two,” and sent him back aboard.
RE: Fact #19 (Austria’s McEmbassy Lifeline For Americans) – Isn’t a “24‑hour hotline” just a phone number? It feels like saying every American already has a round‑the‑clock line to the police because we all know 911.
Exactly. Plus most McDonald’s don’t stay open all night, so even if there were a Batman‑style red phone, it would be useless if no one’s inside at three in the morning.
They’re not. Vienna has a few 24‑hour McDonald’s, but everywhere else they shut down overnight just like the rest of the city.
RE: Fact #15 (BFI Screens Original 1977 StarWars) – A long‑lost original print of 1977’s Star Wars just popped up from an archive and got shown to a crowd of cinema lovers and hardcore fans. For the first time, people actually saw the very first version of the film – almost spot on, no fading – that George Lucas famously kept off the big screen for 47 years. The British Film Institute set it up, with Kathleen Kennedy from Lucasfilm kicking things off by joking that the screening was “not illegal.” She said, “What you’re going to see is in fact the first print, and I’m not even sure there’s another one quite like it. It’s that rare.” Back in 1989, the original release of Star Wars was picked for preservation in the National Film Registry. By 2014 it still didn’t have a “working copy” of the 1977 film; Lucas wouldn’t submit the original because he didn’t want the theatrical version released again. Lucasfilm offered the 1997 Special Edition, but the NFR turned that down since the first published version has to be used. The U.S. Library of Congress then took a 35‑mm print from 1978 that was part of the copyright deposit and made a digital copy, which in 2015 was available for people to watch in person at the LC…
He famously told Congress that we should keep old black‑and‑white films untouched because they’re a window into history. Then he flipped his stance, rewrote the very film he’d defended, and now refuses to let anyone see it.
From his point of view, it was just different artists coming along and colorizing old movies. He probably saw those projects as being even further back in time. To him, the jump from the original Star Wars to his own version felt like only a 20‑year gap in his adult life, so he just thought of himself as an author tweaking his own stuff. I don’t share that view, but I can kinda imagine why he’d see those two issues separately.
It’s just because he’s a total twat.
I’m honestly baffled. All the stuff he tossed in feels pointless, out of place, or just makes things worse—like that whole “Han shot first” thing.
I watched this old special‑effects show a while back where they broke down how the Death Star blew up and made it look like it was in zero‑gravity. They filmed a tiny blast with a high‑speed camera pointed straight up, then slowed it down to get that gorgeous spread of sparks shooting out evenly from the explosion. For its time, that was an amazing SFX trick. But when Lucas updated the film, they added CGI and put a shockwave moving out on one flat plane – something that just didn’t fit a zero‑gravity scene at all.
RE: Fact #47 (Are We Inside Cosmic Void) – What you’re getting at is that humans are just so awful the whole universe keeps its distance, right?
RE: Fact #12 (Magnus Carlsen’s No-Streak Record) – Three really is a magic number, way better than two or four.
RE: Fact #42 (Telephone Wire Decapitates Truck Passenger) – Wow, didn’t happen in ‘Hereditary’ movie too?
That scene was inspired from this event.
Exactly that crossed my mind first – just swap “mom” for “neighbor.”
Toni Collette totally deserves way more awards and recognition for her absolutely amazing performance.
I’m more worried about how this is the younger sibling in a family of inherited traits.
RE: Fact #31 (J. Cole’s Honor Roll Records) – I get why he was clever enough to walk away from that whole Kendrick‑vs‑Drake feud.
At first he just saw it as a competition to prove who’s the best. He didn’t get that they actually despised each other, and he kept getting called out by both sides.
He carried that same vibe into the 7 Minute Drill, then pulled the track and said sorry right there on stage.
RE: Fact #1 (When Anyone Could Roam Airports) – every old sitcom had that scene where someone runs to the gate to stop their loved one from getting on the plane
RE: Fact #33 (Charles Barkley Flies In Heckler) – That’s the second most trollish thing I’ve ever heard. The first time was when 50 Cent bought the first four rows—about 200 seats—at a Ja Rule concert just so they’d be empty.
50 Cent’s got major flaws, but he’s damn good at being petty. Love the music and the pro‑level trolling, Fiddy.
I think the first track of 50 Cent I remember is him name‑checking every single rapper in existence. He basically blew up just for being petty.
You could say 50 Cent is like the Charles Barkley to Michael Jordan.
He said he grabbed them on Groupon for a bargain 🤣
RE: Fact #46 (AK-47 Samples Chernobyl’s Elephant’s Foot) – Honestly, blasting a huge chunk of nuclear waste with an AK‑47 is way more fun than trying to drill into it.
RE: Fact #1 (When Anyone Could Roam Airports) – as someone who remembers the old days, i dont think airports were ever really a place to hang out, but it was nice to be able to meet people at the gate, maybe that’ll come back someday
i guess theyre trying to catch terrorists who are too poor to buy a plane ticket, so they can only blow up the lobby
calling an airport a social hub is kinda weird, i dont think people usually went there to walk around
when i was a kid my parents would take me to watch planes take off, we were pretty poor so maybe that wasnt a normal thing to do
RE: Fact #44 (Jennifer Lopez Serenades Turkmenistan Dictator) – I get the sense that every story I read about JLo—especially from people who’ve met her in person—is super negative.
She’s just not genuine. She wants so badly to be a working‑class hero. She showed off her childhood home in the Bronx and I’m like… “Oh, you grew up in a house? A five‑bedroom house? And went to private school? You’re not like us.”
But she’s actually Jenny from the block—don’t let those rocks fool you.
RE: Fact #44 (Jennifer Lopez Serenades Turkmenistan Dictator) – Not only repressive but their dictator is crazy too.
They literally banned any car that wasn’t white. Every book starts with the president’s face on it. And they even have a whole lesson about tea in school.
Wasn’t that the guy who renamed bread after his mom?
That whole little patch of former Soviet republics gets totally ignored on the global stage, but they’re all pretty awful and oppressive places. They just keep to themselves so nobody really thinks about them. Maybe it’s because their neighbors are countries like Iran and Afghanistan, so the bar is already low in that area.
Even by Central Asian standards Turkmenistan is a brutal dictatorship; there are only six, maybe five now, countries that are more totalitarian than it.
I’ve heard Kazakhstan isn’t that bad, but I met this guy from Turkmenistan once and asked him how life was there. He said it’s pretty good because his dad knows the president so business is smooth. I laughed and said “yeah? That doesn’t sound like a great thing.”
RE: Fact #2 (Yale Fertility Center Fentanyl Swap) – She likely figured she could get away with stealing women’s pain medication because no one would really bother to take their suffering seriously. Everyone involved, especially the medical staff who just brushed off those pain complaints, really should have faced some serious consequences.
Yeah, that’s what really got to me. Fentanyl is seriously powerful stuff, so for the doctors to just totally ignore the pain reports is absolutely insane. I mean, I get that sometimes this kind of thing happens, but you’d think even they’d reach a point where they’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, we gave them a super strong painkiller, what the fu*k is actually happening here?’
The fines they had to pay were also pretty pathetic. It seems some of the victims did get lawyers, but everything ended up being settled. Doesn’t sound like there were nearly enough consequences for anyone involved.
But instead, practically no one actually faced real punishment. She got off with just a few weekends in jail and even got her nursing license back.
RE: Fact #45 (Wu-Tang’s Two-Million Dollar Album) – Just learned that this is actually cursed. The piece starts out as a single copy—no downloads or streams allowed. Cilvaringz and RZA were trying to bring back the value of music by treating it like fine art, but then Martin Shkreli bought it, the government took it after his fraud conviction, sold it to some corporate entity, which handed it off to an NFT collector. Since then Shkreli has streamed it, got sued by the NFT guys, and those guys have made money by selling “partial shares” for a buck each that add 88 seconds to the release. Even cutting the time in half nets them over ten million dollars. It feels way more cursed than just putting it on the internet.
RE: Fact #21 (Dioxin Dusting Destroys Times Beach) – I used to drive past Times Beach all the time as a kid; it was right off the interstate and you could see it from miles away. It was super unsettling—abandoned, overgrown houses, huge fences and creepy signs. The town just decayed for years before they finally cleaned it up. Turns out it was a toxic fallout from Agent Orange that was made in Verona, Missouri, about three hours away. Now people are saying Verona might get a Superfund designation too because of the leaching and toxic water, especially since cancer rates there have spiked. So they’ve set up a temporary chain‑link fence around about 50 yards of the Verona Creek—right through the creek itself—to try to stop the toxins from spreading.
RE: Fact #21 (Dioxin Dusting Destroys Times Beach) – I know this isn’t pre‑EPA, but it’s still early in the EPA’s history. People today have no idea what folks were doing before the EPA or before 1990. They would just pour toxic stuff into rivers, bury it in rusty barrels under what later became an elementary school, let water tables get hit with forever chemicals, and so on. I’m pretty sure they used to dump trash and mining tailings straight into Lake Superior.
Lake Erie was basically a dead lake before EPA regulation kicked in. By the 1960s it had become super polluted, thanks largely to all the heavy industry along its Cleveland shoreline and other cities. Factories poured chemicals straight into the lake and its tributaries with barely any government oversight. City sewer waste also ran off into the water, as did fertilizer and pesticides from farms. All those pollutants raised phosphorus and nitrogen levels, which triggered eutrophication—a process that fuels algal blooms. The lack of oxygen caused huge fish kills, leaving dead fish scattered along the shore. These episodes gave rise to the catchphrase “Lake Erie is dead,” a bit more sensational than factual, and it started popping up in national papers in the late 1960s. Then in 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire, adding more bad press… all of which helped spark the Clean Water Act of 1972.
I’m from the west coast of Canada and back in the ’80s I’d visit my aunt who lives on Lake Erie. Even now I can still feel that sting on your skin after you jump into the water and have to rush to a shower right away. And that river between Windsor and Detroit? The oil sheen on its surface really blew my mind – in a bad way.
RE: Fact #28 (Berry Amendment And All-American Uniforms) – If you can source almost anything from the US, do it—clothing included. It keeps things simpler and harder for people to mess with.
Oh man, fact: The titanium used in the SR‑71 Blackbird came almost entirely from the USSR… through a convoluted shell game so they wouldn’t know who it was for, and even then they probably knew it was headed to the US.
RE: Fact #26 (Cast Away’s Studio-Made Island Sound) – Totally, it makes me appreciate sound design so much more.
And acting, because re‑recording lines and sending them back to the studio with the same emotional punch you’d get in real life is a skill that really needs to be polished.
I always get a kick out of watching actors re‑dub fight scenes. It really takes a talented sound crew and a skilled actor to nail that “guh, ruh, aaahhh!” in the studio so it fits right into the action. When I hear those parts nailed, I can see why bad fight scenes feel off—they just don’t have that polish.
RE: Fact #26 (Cast Away’s Studio-Made Island Sound) – They actually filmed that iconic Marilyn Monroe subway‑grate scene on a real set, but when they got there the place was full of guys whistling and shouting, so they had to bring it back into the studio for a proper shoot.
My favorite take on that was the last scene of *Michael Clayton* when Clooney walks out after the big showdown and hops into a cab. They only had one or two chances to nail that shot, and the whole time people on the street were yelling nonsense at him. So while he’s playing this deeply poignant moment of catharsis in the film, he’s really just trying not to laugh at some random heckler.
RE: Fact #37 (Las Vegas Sphere’s GPU Powerhouse) – I just want a quick, cheap, straight‑to‑streaming flick that shows how to steal all that RAM.
Honestly, this is definitely going to turn into a GTA 6 mission in some future DLC.
RE: Fact #34 (Whitney And Badwater’s Closeness Explained) – I remember when I hit Death Valley, Badwater was over 110°F in the late morning. I set up camp a couple of hours later at Mahogany Flats, where it was only about 70°F. The two spots are just 17 miles apart as the crow flies, but there’s an 8,500‑foot climb between them!
RE: Fact #17 (Ghost B-52 Circles Vermont Sky) – Engineering is all about learning from failures. In the military those mistakes can be really costly. Step two? Just ask, “What’s happening?” The cost of that step? One plane.
For step two, the development cost was about ten million dollars back in 1960 for just one A‑B52.
Cost, not costed. “Cost” means the value of something back then. “Costed” is just the past‑tense way to say you went through the process of figuring out that value.
Nobody mentioned that the tail gunner was killed and his body wasn’t recovered for seven months.
RE: Fact #49 (Blood Petitions For Assassins’ Leniency) – Before he got shot, the Prime Minister tried to talk it out with the officers—most of them were no older than 20. One of them just said calmly, “Dialogue is useless,” and then fired.
RE: Fact #20 (South Park’s 399 Swear Words) – I remember watching “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” where Matt Stone talked about the difference between working with the MPAA on Orgazmo, and South Park. He said that when a studio was behind them, the ratings board was very accommodating and helped them figure out what to cut and what could stay. With the other films, they got no feedback at all. Also, NC‑17 is basically a death sentence for a theatrical release—it’s huge to avoid it.
It’s wild that this is even a thing over there, especially since the US has an 18 rating in the UK, which is totally fine and not seen as a death sentence at all.
It’s kinda funny and feels like a loophole—you can actually drop an unrated movie into theaters these days.
RE: Fact #34 (Whitney And Badwater’s Closeness Explained) – That’s exactly why the Badwater marathon was made. When my cousin ran it, he couldn’t run in the heat anymore, had to wear reading glasses, and started sweating at night.
I just learned the Badwater Marathon exists, and I’m absolutely never running it.
Hold off until you hear about the Barkley Marathons – you won’t regret it. I can’t recommend the documentary enough, *Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young*. In its first 25 years only ten people finished.
RE: Fact #10 (Pedialyte, Children’s Drink, Adult Hangover) – been super sick and couldn’t eat, happened to me a bunch of times
can you handle ensure? it’s got more calories if you aren’t eating
RE: Fact #18 (Rooftop Ninja Hides Inside Sign) – I might just be commenting from behind a McDonald’s sign, and nobody would even notice!
RE: Fact #16 (Traci Lords’ Porn Career) – All those movies have been taken down from any legal sites because they’re CP. She apparently managed to get a stolen birth certificate, then used it to pull a fake passport and a California driver’s license. Those weren’t forged at all—they were real official documents issued by the federal government and the state of California. That’s why nobody ever got charged; the producers, agents, and everyone else had no reason to suspect she was lying since she had genuine IDs, several of them.
RE: Fact #16 (Traci Lords’ Porn Career) – On a lighter note, she’s actually on camera now. She was Layla in Hitman: Absolution and does random NPC lines in Hitman: World of Assassination. Her voice is pretty unique and really stands out.
RE: Fact #33 (Charles Barkley Flies In Heckler) – More gold: “Ficker talks from the gut. He once annoyed then‑Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson by reading out loud from Jackson’s basketball memoir, ‘Maverick,’ during a game while sitting behind the Chicago bench. Jackson said he was going to have the referees come over if I kept reading,” Ficker recalled. “What got him so upset, I don’t know. If he didn’t want to hear passages from the book, he shouldn’t have written it.” At Charles Barkley’s request, Ficker even went to the 1993 NBA Finals in Phoenix and roasted Michael Jordan about a series of gambling allegations. “Barkley got me a seat behind the Bulls bench, so I brought these huge playing cards, dice and a bunch of dollar bills,” he said. “During the game, I was dealing Jordan a hand and asking him what he wants to bet. And he’s turning around and holding up three fingers. It was fun.” Alas, the Bulls won the series in Phoenix. Still, at least Ficker knew his target.”
RE: Fact #13 (Coded D-Day Pigeon Still Unread) – The real kicker here is that the UK never kept records of those code books from back then, so anyone who knew how to crack them basically vanished less than fifty years after the war ended. You’d expect a decent number of the people involved in cryptography to still be around.
They’re probably one‑time pads, so it doesn’t really matter how much crypto knowledge you have if you don’t have a record of the code books.
The article says it’s unlikely that it was a one‑time pad because the first and last groups of text are the same.
The codes were meant to be disposable right from the start – they didn’t have to lock everything down forever. “Bomb bridge at 1 pm on Tue” is just dead weight once you’re past that hour, so it’s basically useless info after the fact. The one‑time pad is a cryptographic method that can never be cracked. It uses a single‑use pre‑shared key that’s as long or longer than the message itself. You pair each bit of plaintext with a random secret key bit, then encrypt by combining them with modular addition.
According to Wikipedia, the idea that this code uses a one‑time pad is pretty unlikely because the first and last groups are identical—so it’s probably just a message start and end block.
If they actually used a true one‑time pad, nobody would ever break it unless, by some miracle, the original code page somehow survived in somebody’s stuff. But back in WWII there was this weird case where the Germans had an OTP system and ended up tricking themselves into reusing ciphers for the Navy—apparently because swapping out code books on a ship was too hard. They layered that on top of Enigma. The Brits who were cracking Enigma spotted those patterns, and as a result the German navy got pretty much wiped out for a big chunk of the war over it.
Some of them were still alive, but that doesn’t really help when you don’t have the codebook.
RE: Fact #29 (Family Guy’s DVD-Led Revival) – If you really want to see how well it sold, there were even box‑set seasons of it released on PSP UMD discs.
RE: Fact #14 (Transplanted Organs Often Time Out) – Kidneys actually have a set lifespan even before they’re transplanted. Surgeons aim to give patients with better overall health the kidneys that will last longer. This comes from a talk at Presbyterian St Luke’s Transplant Center about kidney transplants.
The body’s rejecting the kidney, not the kidney itself.
Kidneys come in all sorts of qualities depending on whether they’re from a living donor, how big the donor is, and their overall health.
If you have to stay on immunosuppressants forever just to avoid an acute rejection, you’re also ramping up your chances of infections and cancer a lot. It’s basically buying yourself some extra time—at a steep cost.
RE: Fact #24 (Columbus Miscalculates His Ocean Distance) – Sort of. He figured out that driftwood showing up on the Canary Islands too often couldn’t come from the far‑off distance between Europe and Asia. So he was right that there must be a big landmass closer than that, just not the one he guessed. Another mix‑up: he thought he’d landed in India, but what he actually meant was The Indies—modern Indonesia.
I’ve never come across or even heard about any of this driftwood stuff. I’ve read all the books on Columbus and every piece he wrote. Where’s it even coming from? Really curious to find out.
I’ve never heard any talk about this either. It just feels like one of those things that sound really good. I’m sure some AI will scan this fact later on and turn it into the accepted answer.
RE: Fact #39 (Why Snow Makes Streets Whisper) – I saw a German film once about a girl whose parents are deaf. I still remember the part where her dad asks, “Is the snow falling loud?” and she replies, “No, quite the opposite.” It always struck me as fascinating because it shows how different experiences can be; it caught me off guard. I’m not sure how realistic it is that snow could actually be loud, but that uncertainty makes it even more intriguing to think about.
I’ve heard deaf folks ask if the Sun makes a noise. It’s totally understandable—such a huge force could produce sound. You can’t see wind, but it can be incredibly loud.
You can feel the sun too—it has its own kind of force. If you close your eyes and step outside, you’ll know whether it’s clear skies or sunny just by feeling it. And when a cloud drifts over, you can sense that change as well. It makes sense that people who rely mainly on touch and sight would think the sun is “loud.”
RE: Fact #3 (Rice Farmers Versus Wheat Individualists) – this sounds like one of those times where correlation doesnt mean causation, you know rice and wheat are grown in different parts of the world and the cultures are similar in those areas, so its kinda a stretch to say its because of the rice or wheat
china used to grow mostly wheat and it wasnt until the song dynasty that rice became a big thing, and thats because the north was occupied and they had to move south, and now theres this idea that the north is more individualistic than the south which kinda supports this theory but its probably just a coincidence
RE: Fact #46 (AK-47 Samples Chernobyl’s Elephant’s Foot) – Sure thing – you’d expect that mixing heavy, radiation‑blocking materials with uranium would give you a super dense, super hard piece when you melt it and let it cool fast.
RE: Fact #11 (Forty-Four Percent Never Drink) – those other 56 percent are making up for it though
RE: Fact #36 (French Bring Curry To Vietnam) – Every time you dig deeper into food’s past, you start to see that “authenticity” isn’t really a thing—at least not the way most folks picture it.
Trying to convince people that tomatoes and peppers aren’t originally from India? Good luck with that.
Oh yeah, chili’s a post‑colonial thing. It didn’t grow in India at all – it was brought over by Portuguese traders from South America in the 15th‑16th centuries. They landed via Goa around the 1530s and almost immediately took over black pepper and long pepper as the main heat source for Indian food. Now India is the biggest producer, consumer, and exporter of chilies in the world.
Yeah, tomatoes and pasta weren’t originally from Italy either.
RE: Fact #40 (Woman Injects Crushed Black Widow) – I’m not surprised she made it through. As a spider fan I know that, with proper ICU care and the right meds, survival rates for most animal venoms are sky‑high. Even if there’s no specific antidote, keeping vital functions working—oxygen masks for breathing, drugs to control blood pressure and heart rate, painkillers, things like that—is usually enough. The real danger comes when you miss a bite and don’t get to the hospital in time; the venom can then build up and do its full damage. It’s even worse if you’re older or already sick.
Deaths from spiders are almost nil these days. The most poisonous is the Phoneutria, though many sources name the Atrax robustus as the biggest threat because people react badly to it. But there’s a key difference: Phoneutria tends to bite once and then run off, while Atrax can stay on you and keep injecting venom, which can make it more dangerous in that scenario. Latrodectus mactans is the third most venomous; its smaller size means you’re more likely to miss the bite entirely.
There’s also Loxosceles reclusa. Its venom might not hurt much at first, but it can cause necrosis and even sepsis later on. Still, if you get to a hospital quickly and they have the right equipment and drugs, you’ll usually survive—same goes for snakes and other venomous creatures.
RE: Fact #23 (Secondhand Weed Smoke Tags Kids) – The article even goes further—parents who smoke outside still somehow expose their kids. I’d love to see how that’s actually worked out.
RE: Fact #49 (Blood Petitions For Assassins’ Leniency) – Honestly, nobody in the West really talks about Japan in the 30s like they do Germany or even Italy and Spain, but Japan was sliding into fascism just as badly before WWII. The Japanese Empire back then wasn’t just “Japan being Japan”; it was a military takeover by an ultra‑radical right wing. Just like Europe, there was this whole pre‑war fight between those folks and the communists while liberal institutions and the old social order crumbled, and most of the old guard ended up backing the fascists. From the article: the court handed down an almost nothing punishment, and the Japanese press had no doubt that the murderers of Prime Minister Inukai would be out in a couple of years, maybe sooner. Not punishing the May 15 plotters hard only weakened the rule of law and the democratic government’s ability to confront the military. That fed into the February 26 incident and the rise of Japanese militarism. Inukai’s last words were basically “If I told you, you’d understand,” and his killers shot back, “Dialogue is useless.”
The slide’s background really ties into why Japan never got a seat at the colonial club that Europe was building after they invaded China. That exclusion pushed them to think they had to get even more militarized if they wanted any respect. It’s such an intriguing story—I read a book about it in college, but I can’t remember the title right now. Dan Carlin also talks about it on his podcast series.
Exactly – Japan got mad because they felt disrespected after WWI ended, a sentiment that Italy shared too since it fought in WWII. That’s why I sometimes say the war never really finished; it just paused and carried on into the 1940s. Nearly every big problem can be traced back to how WWI wrapped up, how Germany was dealt with, and how nations like Japan were treated.
In the West we barely learn about the Greater East Asian Co‑Prosperity Sphere and colonialism in China, but that gap makes it hard to get why we relate the way we do with East Asia.
RE: Fact #34 (Whitney And Badwater’s Closeness Explained) – On the map it’s about 135 miles. There’s actually an event, the Badwater Ultramarathon, that follows that exact stretch. It sounds like a blast if you’re totally crazy enough to do it.
Badwater Ultramarathon doesn’t actually take you to Mount Whitney’s summit. Whitney needs permits and they don’t let races happen there. Instead the race ends at Whitney Portal, a few thousand feet lower. There’s a more backcountry‑style hike called Lowest to Highest that Brett Tucker put together; it goes from Death Valley all the way to Whitney and only a couple dozen people do it each year. L2H actually heads to Telescope Peak first— that’s the highest relief mountain in the lower 48— before tackling Whitney, and a lot of the route is off‑trail cross‑country navigation.
The lowest‑to‑highest hike I’ve ever tackled was brutal—too early in the season for sure. Badwater felt like a lake where you had to wade through miles of water, every step crushing through sharp salt crust and sticky mud. Telescope hit deep snow that piled up right to our hips, plus the steepest elevation gain I’ve ever seen. Basically it was messed up. But we still had good times.
I mean, the lowest spot on Earth being the hottest place—who even thought that was a good idea?
They’re starting at 8 p.m., just trying to ease it a little.
RE: Fact #12 (Magnus Carlsen’s No-Streak Record) – He’s got a few rare losses that go viral, but in truth he wins almost every tournament he enters. His domination over everyone else is absolutely insane.
I don’t know much about chess. Could he be considered the best ever?
The whole thing boils down to a clash between him and Garry Kasparov. Kasparov was world champion for 15 straight years, while Magnus held the title for 10 before dropping out because he got bored with the tournament format. Magnus has kept the highest chess rating longer than anyone else ever did, and his peak rating of 2882 tops Kasparov’s best of 2851. On the other hand, Kasparov holds the record for most consecutive tournaments won—15 in a row. Magnus’ longest unbeaten streak is 125 games straight with no loss.
So there isn’t really a clear winner; it’s a debate over peak performance versus consistency. Kasparov played professionally for decades, and Magnus is only 35. In the end, people will probably lean toward Magnus, but you wouldn’t be wrong picking either of them as the best ever.
RE: Fact #7 (Dr Pepper Invents Pepper Soda) – Dr Pepper tastes like cherry and almond to me it’s kinda like drinking a liquid bakewell tart
pistachio flavoring is weird to me it’s like halfway between almond and cherry or something
had a Dr Pepper yesterday and yeah i can taste the marzipan and cherry notes we danes love our marzipan
so apparently Dr Pepper’s got 23 flavors including cola cherry licorice amaretto almond vanilla and a bunch of other stuff
only a few flavors really stand out to me like cola cherry almond and vanilla the rest are pretty meh
i guess Dr Pepper’s flavor is like fruit punch but with a ton of spices thrown in makes sense i guess
RE: Fact #16 (Traci Lords’ Porn Career) – I watched a biopic‑style show on A&E about her. She started her own production company at 18, so every film she made was all hers in terms of revenue. Then she produced a porn movie for that company. Around the same time the FBI got an anonymous tip about her underage films. After the scandal broke, only one legal porn film with her remained, and she took all the money from it.
RE: Fact #31 (J. Cole’s Honor Roll Records) – What really impresses me is that he actually finished his degree. A lot of artists explode before graduation and just quit school. It says a lot about his character and priorities that he stayed the course, even after signing with Jay‑Z’s label.
So, this thing is kinda funny. If you keep reading, it turns out he graduated in 2007 but didn’t actually get his diploma until 2015—by then he was already a big deal. He finally got the degree while performing at the university’s homecoming concert, after they’d held it back because of unpaid library fines.
Once you’re rich and famous, everything comes free—even unreturned library books. Some people just have all the luck!
RE: Fact #8 (Siri’s Accidental Eavesdropping Costs Apple) – so there was this lawsuit against apple, lopez v apple, and it was all about siri recording people without them knowing. basically whistleblowers came out and said siri would pick up on random sounds like zippers or certain words and start recording. then these recordings would get sent to humans who would listen to them, and they’d hear all sorts of private stuff. it’s pretty wild considering apple’s all about privacy, but yeah people were listening to like a thousand recordings a shift. and get this, sometimes apple watches would think a zipper sound was someone saying ‘siri’ and start recording people getting changed or using the bathroom. also the lawsuit brought up some weird coincidences where people would talk about stuff like air jordans or olive garden with siri around, then see ads for those things right after. anyway it all ended with a 95 million dollar settlement
we were having a kid and talked about getting certain clothes at this one store. never searched for it before, but then we start seeing ads for those exact clothes, in that size, from that store. freaked me out, so i deleted facebook
that’s fu*ked up. by the way, if you still want that 85 inch lg oled tv, there’s a code superbowl26 for an extra 5 percent off
RE: Fact #40 (Woman Injects Crushed Black Widow) – Honestly, I too would get nervous if I was just crushing, mixing, and mainlining a non‑venomous spider.
You’ve probably got a bunch of other symptoms too, not just that one. Don’t pour any random junk into your body—especially solid stuff.
No liquid spiders either? 😔
I’m gonna pause on judging this and just say: if you’re a drug user, anything you’re thinking of slipping into a needle has probably already been tested out. If it was good, you’d just buy it from a dealer.
Did you know that every spider actually has venom? The whole fangs‑and‑venom thing is what makes them spiders. Most of the time, though, the venom’s pretty mild and a lot of species are so tiny their fangs can’t even pierce human skin. Another neat fact: the creatures most Americans call daddy‑longlegs or harvestmen aren’t true spiders at all, and they don’t have venom. Just because some Australian “daddy‑longlegs” do happen to be real spiders doesn’t mean you should play with them down under.
RE: Fact #22 (Patton Slaps Soldiers, Leads Phantom) – Eisenhower’s reprimand to Patton comes off both low‑key and brutal: “I know sometimes you have to be firm and decisive to get what we need, but that doesn’t excuse being cruel, mistreating the sick or losing your temper in front of subordinates… I appreciate everything you’ve done for the U.S. and the Allies lately—it’s priceless. Still, if there’s any truth to these accusations, it seriously makes me question your judgment and self‑control, and I’m not sure how useful you’ll be going forward.”
Honestly, the biggest twist is that Patton was smart enough to know exactly how painful a burn really is…
Leading with “You’re a genuinely excellent combat general” and then dropping “and you’ve shown that you’re so bad at being an actual person in leadership that your battlefield successes are outweighed by it,” right off the bat, is hard to miss.
The general was done so well that even Gordon Ramsay would give it a thumbs up.
General of the Armies John J. Pershing publicly condemned his actions, and that left Patton deeply hurt—he never spoke to Pershing again. I can only imagine how stinging it must have felt to hear the one man who still held that rank say he was disappointed in you.
Leaders should set the example they want from their crew—discipline, restraint, good judgment. Basically, he’s saying if Patton behaved so badly, how can he expect his troops to show those qualities when he himself isn’t modeling them? It’s kinda funny when you think about how many generals treated their subordinates in WWII. Some were downright brutal and sociopathic. Remember that guy FDR joked was “shaving every morning with a blowtorch”?
The guy they call Admiral Ernest King was basically the blow‑torch type—people say he was a total jerk.
RE: Fact #4 (Bruce Lee’s Short-Lived Stardom) – Dude spent his whole life trying to hit it big in American movies. He was a huge name back in Hong Kong, but over here, he was basically just a TV helper. And then, his first massive American blockbuster? It dropped right after he passed away. ‘Enter the Dragon’ pulled in 400 million bucks.
RE: Fact #7 (Dr Pepper Invents Pepper Soda) – someone asks about good pepper sodas and they’re like yeah we got Dr Pepper and they’re all yeah that’s a good one
RE: Fact #2 (Yale Fertility Center Fentanyl Swap) – Having gone through an egg retrieval myself, I seriously can’t even picture how awful that would be with no pain medication. This person is truly a monster.
Back in Afghanistan, our battalion medic actually switched out morphine for saline. One day on patrol, a guy stepped on a landmine, completely losing his left foot. In all the craziness, the medic gave him what was supposed to be morphine, but the poor man was still screaming in agony. The senior medic then questioned if the junior medic might’ve taken the morphine himself. The junior medic swore up and down that wasn’t possible, claiming the guy already had his ‘morphine’ so giving him more would thin his blood. Turns out, the medic did give him the saline, and that poor soldier had to just deal with a severed foot for hours until they could finally give him real meds. The battalion medic was actually getting high, got busted for it, and ended up in prison. What a total piece of sh*t.
So, I had my leg amputated in a hospital, completely planned, with every drug and nerve block available, and I still needed dilaudid and an extra day there because the pain was out of control. So, to that medic, a huge, heartfelt fu*k YOU. Seriously, I’d love to just whack him a few times with my prosthetic leg. It’s titanium and carbon fiber, so it’d definitely leave a mark.
It makes me think maybe they gave a real vial or two at first, and then the ones after that were fake. Anything else seems like it would have been way too obvious, in my opinion, to keep getting away with.
You should really check out the podcast that covers this. No one initially believed these women, and they were constantly made to doubt their own experiences. It’s called The Retrievals, put out by the CBC.
Right? If I remember correctly, she actually went through the procedure herself. So she absolutely knew how bad it was. I just can’t wrap my head around such extreme cruelty.
Bet she got plenty of drugs when it was her turn for the procedure.
Could be where she first developed her liking for fentanyl, actually.
RE: Fact #31 (J. Cole’s Honor Roll Records) – I’m from Fayetteville, and J. Cole went to the “good” high school, Terry Sanford. Jack Britt has taken over as the top school now, but back when he graduated Terry Sanford was the best around. If anyone’s curious…
I saw you’re calling it Fayettenam. Ever since that 2014 Forest Hills Drive documentary dropped, I’ve been curious—do you actually call the locals “the Fayette Cong”?
Let me know if anyone calls locals “the Fayette Cong”—nobody says that here lol. Actually, it’s a pretty funny nickname for the local people.
Wow, back in the ’80s when I was stationed there we used to call it Fayette‑Tnam. None of us had the wit to name the locals “The Fayette Cong.” That’s absolutely hilarious. Thanks for the laugh.
RE: Fact #11 (Forty-Four Percent Never Drink) – we used to say in college finish your drink theres sober kids in africa. I had no idea we were actually right
in wisconsin i just tell people dont worry about finishing it they brew more every day
RE: Fact #26 (Cast Away’s Studio-Made Island Sound) – The work that goes into getting a “good” sound is usually way out there. A few things I can think of off the top of my head: In Titanic, Rose’s hair‑freezing effect was actually celery thawing in the sound guys’ counter. The original Godzilla was just a glove dragged across a stand‑up bass. T‑Rex in Jurassic Park was made with a baby elephant, a tiger and an alligator, and the MGM lion is actually a tiger. Star Wars? That’s a whole book by itself. Darth Vader’s breathing came from inside a SCUBA tank, a lightsaber was an old projector plus TV white noise while swinging a mic overhead, and blasters were made with a metal guide wire hit by a hammer. If you find a movie with really good sound it feels so much better, even if you can’t pinpoint exactly why.
RE: Fact #32 (Michael Fay’s Singapore Caning Sentence) – Today’s “things that make me feel old” fact had me learning a bunch of things I still vividly remember happening.
RE: Fact #1 (When Anyone Could Roam Airports) – just got off a plane after a week away and it was awesome to see my wife and kids waiting for me at the jetway, those were different times
yeah i used to love seeing my dad when he got off a plane when i was a kid, different times but we can still make it happen
i dont think we’ll ever go back to low security airports after 9-11
one good thing about the new rules is i can still see my family after security, and now i can actually find a seat near my gate, back then it was packed
RE: Fact #14 (Transplanted Organs Often Time Out) – My dog lived around seven years—then he slipped off the list and had to go back on dialysis. Now I’m just stuck in the waiting game again. It’s a real hassle, but there’s not much else you can do.
My kidneys gave out because of Covid in 2020. I got a transplant in 2022, and just this month it failed again. We knew it was coming, but that doesn’t make it any less of a bummer. I’m grateful to the donor for those few years of relative normalcy when I could move countries to be with my wife. I hope their family has found peace. It’s painful. I’m always exhausted, and the dialysis hangover is killer, but it’s better than nothing! I’ll be back on the transplant list soon—wonder how long the wait will be?
My girlfriend works as a dialysis nurse. Most of the folks they see are 80 or older, so they’re not usually eligible for transplants. But every now and then there’s one or two patients in their 30‑s or 40‑s. When a kidney becomes available for someone like that, the nursing group chat lights up for an hour because everyone’s just so happy for the person—it’s really heartwarming to see. A couple weeks ago it happened, and it was insane: three days a week, four hours in a hospital is such a pain in the ass. Hope you get a new one soon!
RE: Fact #4 (Bruce Lee’s Short-Lived Stardom) – He totally blew up those old Asian stereotypes in movies, which is wild because then he kind of made a new one himself.
Someone once told me that martial arts movies really helped put Chinese culture back on the map globally, especially after that ‘century of humiliation.’ I’m not totally sure how accurate that is, especially since Hong Kong was British until ’97, right? But hey, 90s Hong Kong cinema was absolutely awesome.
My ex, who’s Korean, mentioned how wild it’s been to see people’s views on Koreans and their culture totally change since K-pop blew up. He said he used to get a lot of hate or mistaken for other Asian groups, but now everyone loves it and wants to chat about Korean culture. So yeah, I can definitely see how media could totally shift a culture’s image like that.
Nicely said. Then Bobby Lee showed up, lol.
RE: Fact #30 (Eminem Stalker’s Three Home Invasions) – It says Eminem was the one who got him in trouble. What’s up with that? Did they actually fight? Was Eminem holding him down until the cops showed up? Or did a security guard step in? This is such a vague story. I want to know how exactly Eminem managed to put him in police custody after finding him standing over him while he was sleeping.
Yeah… something must have happened after that encounter and before he got arrested. Maybe he set off an alarm or something, and the cops were practically already on site.
I don’t even put Eminem on my list of celebrities I’d go after. A lot of rappers grow up in comfortable environments and just act “street‑bred” for the vibe. Eminem didn’t have a cushy childhood, so I think he knows how to fight.
I think Em probably just said, “Hey, before you kill me, do you want to hear some new tracks I’ve been working on?” A little while later, somebody pushes a panic button or something, and boom—he’s arrested.
Maybe just a dash of weed mixed in with some hard liquor.
I remember when it first dropped—Eminem chatted with him for a bit, then the cops arrived and hauled him off.
I remember reading that Em just talked to the guy in a way that matched him and showed some compassion, which calmed things down enough for the dude to surrender when the police came.
RE: Fact #6 (Child Labor That Haunted Dickens) – his daughter said he’d still get all teary if he walked past the road where the factory was, even as an adult
my dad has this old photo of a building being torn down, it’s where he had his first job as a kid, gutting fish and all that
that’s so sad, feel for those kids
i know, it’s wild, kids used to want to work in mines and now they get to be kids, it’s a big change
my great nanna would avoid the street where the old workhouse used to be, guess the cultural memory was still pretty strong even at her age
workhouses were still around till 1948, they were super harsh, basically designed to strip people of their dignity, beatrice webb’s report tried to change that but it was tough
RE: Fact #15 (BFI Screens Original 1977 StarWars) – Sure thing: they’re saying that “Han shot first” is solid—Jabba’s not getting in his way or anything.
He shot Greedo and nobody else did anything—Greedo just got killed like a punk.
I swear, every time I see him, Luke is still calling Leia “Carrie.”
RE: Fact #44 (Jennifer Lopez Serenades Turkmenistan Dictator) – Turkmenistan isn’t rich at all, and its folks aren’t wealthy either. The corrupt leaders there took the few tax dollars they had and used them to hire JLo for a vanity project that only helped the country’s elite. JLo is basically a walking humanitarian disaster.
If you walk through the city’s center, you’ll immediately wonder whether anyone actually has any cash—just look at those crazy skyscrapers.
RE: Fact #41 (AOL Dial-Up Runs Up Fortune) – Long‑distance was such a scam—I worked fifteen miles from home and every call between my house and office was billed as long distance. I had to shell out an extra sixty bucks just to make them local, or pay by the minute and risk it.
The pizza place in the strip mall about a mile from my house was a long‑distance call, but Walmart on the other side of the road felt local. Even though the town five miles south was called local, the one three miles north turned out to be long distance.
I grew up in town A. My grandparents owned a place with a phone in town B, but they lived in town C. So A to B was local, B to C was local, but A to C felt like long distance. We set the B phone to forward calls to C automatically, and that made calling from A to C feel like a local call.
When phones first came out, long‑distance calling made total sense. In the same town you could hook anyone up to anyone else with no problem. But when you wanted to talk to someone in another town you had to use a trunk line between central offices, and there were only so many “slots” for calls. The carriers charged for that to keep people from clogging the network.
Even after everything went digital, those trunks still had limited capacity, so the cost stayed on the bill. Over time the system evolved to let anyone in town A call anyone in town B with virtually unlimited bandwidth, but the long‑distance fees didn’t disappear overnight—they were part of a billing model people were used to.
Now voice calls are ridiculously cheap for the amount of traffic you can run through the same hardware. It might feel like a scam today, but there was a solid reason behind those charges for many years.
RE: Fact #22 (Patton Slaps Soldiers, Leads Phantom) – Hold on till you realize that isn’t even half of the worst stuff he’s said or done.
RE: Fact #18 (Rooftop Ninja Hides Inside Sign) – I watched the body cam footage and it was really interesting.
I skimmed through it, nothing really stuck with me, but I liked how she didn’t come across as overly troubled. It seemed like things worked out for her on that roof during that year, and being a squatter who wasn’t a total jerk, she handled herself pretty well overall.
I’ve actually been a contractor who’s had this happen to me. The guy scared the living hell out of me because it was 2 a.m., and I was working on their condenser units. I didn’t say a word to the store owner and left the roof hatch unlocked.
If you’re curious, here’s the link. They’re all surprisingly friendly.
RE: Fact #32 (Michael Fay’s Singapore Caning Sentence) – Alright, six was a bit overboard—let’s stick with four.
I’m all for a 33 percent drop in bodily harm—count me in.
From what I’ve seen of that punishment, I’d gladly take that plea bargain— it’s the only thing they offered me.
RE: Fact #3 (Rice Farmers Versus Wheat Individualists) – what about the people who eat potatoes
potatoes are a pretty recent thing outside of the americas, they only came over a few hundred years ago
and it took a while for people to start eating them, they were skeptical at first because theyre part of the nightshade family and look like belladonna
thats pretty wild, like when explorers found that tribe in papua new guinea growing yams, and it turns out the seeds or whole yams must have drifted over from the pacific, just one of those times when nature throws a curveball at scientists and fu*k with our data
sweet potatoes were introduced to polynesia around 1000 years ago and they became a big part of maori culture, they had to fight over land to grow them and it was a pretty big deal, they even had ceremonies to honor the god of cultivated plants
i heard europeans liked potatoes because they could just leave them in the ground and invading armies wouldnt know where to find them, so they could just be all like oh yeah take all our food and then just dig up the potatoes later
maybe its just because potatoes helped fewer people die from starvation
i think its because potatoes are just a really high yield crop, you can feed a lot of people with them and theyre pretty easy to grow, just gotta watch out for blight
RE: Fact #9 (Dan Burros, Nazi And Jewish) – it’s wild the KKK didn’t do their homework on this guy. everything i’ve heard about them is like something straight out of a comedy sketch
some journalist applied to ICE and got a job offer a few weeks ago, even though a simple google search would’ve shown she’s written stuff critical of trump. these people don’t really care about fact checking
my dad was a black state trooper and he got a klan application just because his name sounded pretty normal. he kept it all these years as a reminder the klan is still out there, even in places like central illinois
RE: Fact #2 (Yale Fertility Center Fentanyl Swap) – And get this, she ended up with just a really light sentence all because she’s a mother. Meanwhile, every single one of those women who went through so much pain just so she could get her fix, they were actually trusting her to help them become mothers.
RE: Fact #13 (Coded D-Day Pigeon Still Unread) – The cipher reads: AOAKN HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ KLDTS GQIRU AOAKN 27 1525/6. It’s probably not a one‑time pad, so it can be cracked. GCHQ thinks it was a one‑time pad.
Delete this. If the enemy sees it and figures out what’s going on, it could be disastrous and might even let Britain lose World War II.
Picture this: Nazis somehow time‑travel to the future, stumble onto this FactRepublic thread, and see all the stuff here.
Did they write it in Pidgin?
RE: Fact #43 (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria And ADHD) – Just so you know, this isn’t a medical diagnosis. It’s handy for talking about a bunch of complicated behaviors, but it doesn’t stand alone as a condition.
It’s also worth pointing out that many pros don’t see RSD as a separate ADHD symptom; they just view it as emotional dysregulation in reaction to social rejection, which is inherently painful. That can easily evolve into broader social anxiety over time, so you’ll notice it a lot in people with ADHD.
You’re right. Dysphoria isn’t really the best word for that emotional dysregulation experience.
I never imagined I had ADHD, but I’m definitely a reckless guy who loves instant dopamine hits. One thing’s for sure—I do have SAD.
RE: Fact #47 (Are We Inside Cosmic Void) – In plain terms an astronomer says that if we were stuck in a cosmic void, it might actually solve one of those stubborn physics puzzles we still can’t crack. There isn’t solid proof for that yet; the idea just makes a hard problem fit our existing models if it turns out true. The research could give some clues to back up the claim, but it’s nowhere near definitive.
This is science, anyway. Take this case—it’s a solid explanation for the data we see now. We just need another experiment to test if it really works or not. It might sound like an unlikely scenario, but if it explains what we observe, we have to tackle it somehow.
It feels like a bunch of things get “proven” just because someone says it, and then a handful of folks come along saying, “Yeah, that idiot—let me prove them wrong.”
RE: Fact #45 (Wu-Tang’s Two-Million Dollar Album) – Do you know if Martin Shkreli still owns it?
No, it got sold off when he went to jail.
He’s filing a lawsuit to get it back now that he’s out of jail.
It got seized to cover his debts after he was convicted of aggravated douchebaggery and securities fraud. Ironically, an NFT collector group bought it and is now auctioning off partial ownership, planning to release it once the whole thing’s sold.
Nah, he gave it up to the U.S. government and then the arts collective PleasrDAO snapped it up.
NFT scammers, right? I’ve been quiet on Twitter since June 2024. My record’s probably just sitting in some Goodwill in Duluth by now.
RE: Fact #15 (BFI Screens Original 1977 StarWars) – I remember how annoying it was back then, but as a kid I’d tape the whole trilogy on VCR while it aired on the sci‑fi channel in the early ’90s. There were all those commercials you had to fast‑forward through, and Carrie Fisher would pop up to “host” the block, sharing behind‑the‑scenes stories after each break. It felt pretty magical—definitely not the re‑releases. I did a quick check: it was 1993 and that was actually the first time they’d shown all three movies back‑to‑back on TV. Here’s Carrie kicking off the event about a minute in.
RE: Fact #36 (French Bring Curry To Vietnam) – Back in ’68 we were on recon out in the steaming Mekong Delta. One of our guys had a fever and took off his flack jacket to show a T‑shirt with an ironed‑on MAD slogan that read “Up with Mini‑skirts!” We all cracked up, even though I didn’t really get it. That little distraction gave “Charlie” the chance to strike us. I spent the next three years in a POW camp, eating a thin stew of fish, veggies, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. Here in the States I almost went mad looking for that flavor – they just can’t get the spices right!
RE: Fact #39 (Why Snow Makes Streets Whisper) – Also, you won’t hear any bugs shrieking in the winter.
RE: Fact #38 (Tarantino Reclaims Hollywood Film Rights) – Tarantino wants a $95 million budget, full final‑cut rights, “extraordinary creative controls,” and 25% of the first‑dollar gross. He also wants the rights to *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* back after 30 years. In a separate bidding war, Universal snagged Christopher Nolan’s next film, *Oppenheimer*. Nolan is asking for a $100 million budget, another $100 million for marketing, full creative control, 20% of the first‑dollar gross, a three‑week blackout before and after the release where no competing films will launch, and a 100‑day exclusive theatrical window to push back streaming.
Wow, 25% of that first dollar’s gross revenue? That’s crazy.
When you know how much you’re worth, just head out and grab it.
Nolan also wanted The Odyssey’s rights to go back to Homer after 5,000 years, and Universal responded by sending a gorgeous hand‑carved horse statue straight to his house. Since then, industry reports on their talks have stayed pretty quiet.
RE: Fact #39 (Why Snow Makes Streets Whisper) – Sounds like sound actually travels better in winter. Back when my parents ran a farm, we could only pick up the cows at the milking shed from about a mile away during the coldest part of the year. In summer you never hear them, even on the quietest nights.
RE: Fact #50 (Katy Perry Outrates Super Bowl) – I find it kind of amusing to remember just how huge Katy Perry was back then.
You mean that astronaut, Katy Perry—the one dating Canada’s first Black Prime Minister?
Jeffrey Epstein—the New York financier?
Looking back, I think she had the most abrupt and disastrous fall from grace—not because anyone accused her of serious crimes.
She figured she’d turned into the poster girl for some fluffy cotton‑candy pop and wanted to move on to something deeper and more serious—classic story. So her plan was to drop a whole album attacking her core fans as dumb and brainwashed for loving her stuff. On top of that, she split up with her creative team and blew it badly when she got into a feud with Taylor Swift. I’m all about Katy Perry, but 2015‑2017 wasn’t really a good era for her.
So America was just itching for another wardrobe mishap.
I was hoping to get a sneak peek at those warlocks.
RE: Fact #5 (Bonnie Lohman Spots Herself Missing) – i never saw the cartons but i read this series and it was pretty fascinating – she gets kidnapped by a woman who convinces her own parents it’s her kid, which is a pretty wild identity crisis to explore
this series is so good, especially the part where she’s trying to figure out her feelings about the kidnappers – they raised her so she loves them, but she’s also super angry at them, it’s been a while since i read it, only got through the first three books, just found out there are more on audible, the narrator’s not bad either, pretty likable voice, gonna re buy it now cuz i need to know what happens in the end
if i remember right she was raised by the kidnapper’s parents, they thought she was their real granddaughter and hadn’t seen the actual kidnapper since she was little
RE: Fact #24 (Columbus Miscalculates His Ocean Distance) – Back then, that’s exactly how it felt being an explorer.
Back in the ’80s I was just biking around town. One day I got totally lost but kept going, hoping to spot something familiar. It started getting dark so I stopped at a corner store and pulled out my phone to call Mom. I was crying because I thought I’d be in big trouble. I gave her the address, she just sighed and said “I’ll be there in a minute.” Turns out I was only a block away.
He was incredibly lucky, honestly. Back then folks were trying to figure out how big Earth was, and his wild math guess was that it was much smaller than everyone thought. He struggled to get money for his journey because people assumed he’d die along the way. Turns out there was another landmass right in his path.
RE: Fact #43 (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria And ADHD) – I heard somewhere that kids with undiagnosed ADHD get over ten thousand negative or corrective messages from parents, teachers, and caregivers by the time they’re 10. I know “I read somewhere” is the weakest citation you can make, but that’s all I’ve got on this one. Being criticized by people you care about for things you’re doing your best to avoid is really scar‑ting. That, plus differences in neurology and how we process threats, explains a lot about RSD. I have almost zero tolerance for rejection. Seriously, I can’t even stand being downvoted. I’ll delete my comment rather than let strangers see it get rejected. It’s just too much.
RE: Fact #29 (Family Guy’s DVD-Led Revival) – Remember that episode when Brian went on *The Bachelorette*? It first aired back in June 2005. Fast forward twenty years and both shows are still running.
RE: Fact #4 (Bruce Lee’s Short-Lived Stardom) – What was that movie where they used a cardboard cutout of him for scenes they still needed to shoot after he passed away?
That was ‘Game of Death.’ They even had other guys acting in motorcycle helmets and, get this, actual footage from his funeral. Pretty wild stuff.
RE: Fact #12 (Magnus Carlsen’s No-Streak Record) – That’s an impressive stat, but just to give some context, classical chess at the highest level is pretty drawish. In tournaments between super‑GMs more than half of the games usually end in draws, so losing three games straight isn’t something other top players see often either. Still, avoiding it altogether is still a solid achievement.
Magnus isn’t much into drawing. He really shines when it comes to end‑game calculations, and it’s always exciting to see him turn a draw into a win.
He doesn’t win as many games in classical as those top‑tier GM guys, but he’s still pulling off about a fifty‑percent win rate.
RE: Fact #21 (Dioxin Dusting Destroys Times Beach) – Did you know that for a long time the cheapest way to dispose of toxic waste in the U.S. was just to spread it on rented farmland as fertilizer? Back then there were no laws stopping it, especially if the waste had any organic material.
Sure, it’s basically just adding more steps to the dump.
Sure thing – you can actually earn money from people for taking their trash instead of paying someone to handle it yourself.
Yeah, that’s exactly why waste rules now forbid it outright. There are a few rare cases where a waste product can actually be useful when put on land, but you can’t just dump it wherever you want and claim it’s for a good purpose.
My granddad ran a business that pulled metals out of waste oil and then sold that oil back to manufacturers. He made decent money from both sides, but he never checked the oil for PCBs – which were definitely there. A handful of mistakes later, his name’s now on a Superfund site.
There’s PFAS and PFOS forever chemicals everywhere in well water now because of that exact practice. The waste sludge from making waterproofing and stain‑proofing items was loaded with fertilizer compounds, and people used it as a cheap way to get rid of the stuff while giving farmland an instant boost.
The EPA just green‑lit two new forever‑chemical products for pesticide use.