26 Khatiwada Died Flying Yeti Airlines
In 2006, a Nepalese Yeti Airlines co-pilot named Dipak Pokhrel died when a Twin Otter crashed near Jumla. His death inspired his widow, a woman named Anju Khatiwada, to become a pilot, and she had logged nearly 6,400 flying hours by 2023. On January 15, 2023, more than 16 years after her husband’s death, Khatiwada was co-piloting Yeti Airlines Flight 691 when it crashed into a gorge near Pokhara, killing all 72 people aboard.
27. At the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans, French race car driver Pierre Levegh and 84 spectators died in the worst accident in racing history. The disaster prompted Levegh’s co-driver, American race car driver John Fitch, to invent the Fitch barrier, a system of sand-filled plastic barrels. Inspired by sand-filled fuel cans that had protected his tent from strafing during World War II, Fitch tested prototypes by personally crashing reinforced vehicles into sand-filled liquor barrels. Highway crews now place the barriers between highways and exit lanes, where their progressively heavier sand loads scatter during collisions and slow vehicles more gradually.
28. Since 1995, the average flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport has taken 18 minutes longer, with planes spending more time leaving the gate, taxiing and flying. In response, the airlines added 23 minutes to the published schedule, five minutes more than the actual slowdown of the trip. That extra buffer reduced the share of flights arriving behind schedule from 51 percent to 37 percent, even though the trips themselves became slower.
29. Contemporary garlic bread originated in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, when Italian immigrants adapted the much older Italian dish bruschetta. Because olive oil remained uncommon in the United States, they replaced it with butter and spread it with garlic over crusty bread. By at least the 1950s, many American restaurants served garlic bread alongside pasta dishes.
30. Stan Lee’s publisher initially dismissed Spider-Man as “the worst idea I have ever heard.” He argued that people hated spiders, teenagers could only serve as sidekicks, and superheroes should not have personal problems. Lee finally introduced the character in Amazing Fantasy No. 15 because the publisher planned to cancel the magazine and did not care what appeared in its final issue. When it became the publisher’s best-selling magazine that month, he asked Lee to create an entire Spider-Man series.
31 Starlink Loses Satellites Every Day
By October 2025 one or two SpaceX Starlink satellites were falling out of orbit and reentering the Earth’s atmosphere daily. More than 8,000 Starlink satellites remained overhead, but spacecraft in low Earth orbit typically last only five to seven years before requiring replacement. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian, estimated that expanding satellite constellations could one day produce five reentries a day. Scientists are continuing to study how vaporized satellite metals may impact the atmosphere.
32. On October 1, 1847, a librarian named Maria Mitchell discovered a comet using a three-inch telescope in a rooftop observatory. The Italian astronomer Francesco de Vico independently discovered the same comet two days later and was the first to report it to European authorities, leading to a dispute over credit. Mitchell showed that she had seen it first and filed calculations of its orbit to establish her claim. In 1848, she became the first American and first woman to receive an astronomy prize when King Christian VIII of Denmark awarded her a gold medal.
33. As of 2026, the New Forest in southern England is roughly 947 years old, dating to about 1079, when Norman King William the Conqueror proclaimed it a royal hunting preserve. In medieval usage, “forest” described territory governed by forest law and reserved for royal game, not simply land covered with trees. William used the preserve mainly to hunt deer and created it at the expense of more than 20 hamlets and isolated farmsteads. Recorded as Nova Foresta in the 1086 Domesday Book, the area became a national park in 2005.
34. Life is so ubiquitous on Earth that scientists have found microbes about 3,000 meters below the surface inside sedimentary rock. These organisms do not occupy open caves but microscopic cracks, holes, and pore spaces containing water and dissolved nutrients. Cut off from sunlight, they obtain energy from chemical reactions involving substances such as hydrogen, methane, sulfur and iron, and their metabolisms can run as much as one million times slower than those of surface organisms.
35. On September 9, 1971, 1,281 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility in New York seized part of the prison and took 42 staff members hostage while demanding better living conditions and political rights. After four days of negotiations, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered law enforcement to retake the facility by force. Officers dropped tear gas into the yard and opened fire, killing all but one guard and three inmates among the 43 men who died, including nine of the ten correctional officers and employees killed. The Attica uprising ended with the highest death toll in the history of United States prison riots.
36 La Cabina Forced Telefonica Reassurance
The 1972 Spanish film “La Cabina,” in which a man becomes trapped inside a phone booth, frightened Spaniards so badly that some callers kept booth doors open while using them. Telefónica responded by hiring the film’s lead, Spanish actor José Luis López Vázquez, to recreate the situation in a commercial. This time, he exited the booth without incident, assuring viewers that Telefónica’s phone booths were safe.
37. More than 130 years after French engineer Gustave Eiffel completed the Eiffel Tower for Paris’s 1889 International Exposition, accumulated paint has made it about 700 metric tons heavier than when it was built. Workers have repainted its ironwork 19 times, applying about 60 metric tons during each cycle while erosion removes only 15 to 20 metric tons.
38. American World War II general George S. Patton believed in reincarnation and claimed that he had fought in wars for thousands of years. He believed his past lives included a Roman legionary under Julius Caesar, an English knight in the Hundred Years’ War, and a French marshal under Napoleon. During World War I in France, Patton wrote to his mother that a Roman road felt familiar and wondered whether he had once led a legion along it or stormed a nearby chateau during the Middle Ages. He summarized his belief in a poem: “I fought in many guises, many names, but always me.”
39. The Nihilanth, the final boss of the 1998 video game Half-Life, was inspired by the birth of American video game developer Gabe Newell’s eldest son, Gray, in the late 1990s. Newell and his wife considered childbirth the most frightening thing they could think of at the time, so the Nihilanth resembles a giant, monstrous baby. Gray later said that the boss was supposed to represent him.
40. For over 150 years, the Menominee Tribe has sustainably managed its forest in northeastern Wisconsin while still harvesting about 15 million board feet of timber each year. The United Nations has recognized the tribe’s forestry work. Timber from the forest even supplied flooring for Fiserv Forum, the Milwaukee Bucks’ arena.
41 Vermont Curator Cremated Egyptian Mummy
In 1886, a man named Henry Sheldon bought a poorly preserved mummy said to be Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef, the two-year-old son of Egyptian king Senusret III, for his Vermont museum. The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History stored it in its attic for decades. In 1945, a curator named George Mead rejected a suggestion to throw it out, had it cremated in his neighbor’s furnace to prevent student pranksters from digging it up, and buried the ashes in his family plot at Middlebury Cemetery. The headstone gives a death date of 1883 BC, the earliest recorded on an American tombstone, although no one ever confirmed the mummy’s identity.
42. Between 1930 and 2014, the average shot length in English-language films fell from about 12 seconds to roughly 2.5 seconds.
43. Watson Brake in Louisiana dates to around 3500 BCE, placing it before Stonehenge and roughly 1,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids. Hunter-gatherers built its 11 connected earthwork mounds over several centuries, arranging them in an oval nearly 900 feet across. Eight members of the Gentry family have owned most of the site since the 1950s, and one refuses to sell the land to the state. That refusal keeps Watson Brake closed to the public, although the family permits selected archaeologists to conduct research there.
44. The Ogallala Aquifer supplies water to roughly one-quarter of all irrigated land in the United States, but intensive pumping since the late 1940s has significantly drained it. Large-scale extraction expanded after World War II as farmers adopted center-pivot irrigation and engine-powered wells, reducing the aquifer’s saturated volume by an estimated 9% since 1950. In its arid sections, nature replaces water at only about 10% of the withdrawal rate, so scientists estimate that an emptied aquifer would take more than 6,000 years to refill naturally.
45. In 2019, house renovations at 53 Sevilla Street in Carmona, Spain, exposed an unlooted first-century Roman mausoleum containing a glass urn with five liters of liquid. The urn held the liquid alongside cremated human remains and a gold ring. Five years later, researchers identified it as wine made during the first century AD, making it the world’s oldest surviving liquid wine and surpassing the previous record by three centuries. Chemical analysis showed that the now-reddish wine had originally been white.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Boston Carried Lewis’ Contract Posthumously
When American NBA star Reggie Lewis died at age 27 on July 27, 1993, his contract continued counting against the Boston Celtics’ salary cap for two full seasons. The NBA had no rule allowing it to void the contract of an active player who died, and the other teams rejected Commissioner David Stern’s proposal to grant Boston an exemption. The league later changed its rules so insurance would cover a comparable contract, a provision used when blood-clotting problems ended Chris Bosh’s NBA career in 2017.
47. Despite serving as Formula One’s sole tire supplier for 15 years, beginning in 2011, Italian manufacturer Pirelli still trails Goodyear for the most Grand Prix victories. As of the 2026 Hungarian GP, Goodyear had 368 wins from 494 starts and Pirelli had 365 wins from 519 starts. The gap is even more striking as Goodyear supplied all the cars with only 113 races, against 315 races as sole supplier for Pirelli.
48. Augustus, the first Roman emperor (27 BC-AD 14) was worried about declining birth rates among the upper classes in Rome, and introduced incentives to encourage people to have more children. The jus trium liberorum was a Roman law that provided tax advantages and exemption from compulsory services to citizens with at least three children, or freedpeople with at least four. Qualified women could avoid legal guardianship by male relatives, and could get inheritances that otherwise would have gone to their children. But the Romans soon found loopholes, and emperors began granting the privilege for good deeds, military service or personal favors, until Justinian abolished it in 534 AD.
49. In 1959, 12-year-old American actress Patty Duke competed on The $64,000 Question and won $32,000 by answering questions about popular music. Investigators later exposed the game show as rigged and called Duke before a US Senate panel. During the hearing, she broke down in tears and admitted following instructions to speak falsely.
50. In 1945, an elevator operators’ strike stranded 1.5 million New Yorkers in the streets because they could not reach offices inside the city’s skyscrapers. Building owners responded by purchasing automatic elevators, even though manufacturers had offered the technology for about 50 years. The disruption finally overcame decades of public skepticism and accelerated the shift toward self-service elevators.
RE: Fact #17 (Stork Derby Rewarded Nine-Child Mothers) – It’s sad to think about those kids growing up knowing they were basically part of a competition for money, likely missing out on the individual attention they deserved.
RE: Fact #36 (La Cabina Forced Telefonica Reassurance) – That is fascinating. I wonder if it influenced the movie “Phone Booth” with Colin Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland.
RE: Fact #35 (Attica Gunfire Killed Almost Everyone) – One definition of sovereignty is having a “monopoly on violence.” Most states do not take it well when others challenge that.
There was a George Carlin bit about how the only reason America fought the Nazis was because they wanted the monopoly on killing people they disliked, not because they disagreed with the actual extermination of groups they deemed undesirable.
RE: Fact #14 (Nicholson’s Batman Deal Kept Paying) – Why did they agree to that deal? You would think anyone would know that Batman was going to be a massive hit. It wasn’t like Iron Man before RDJ; Batman was a huge property. The 66 show was a massive TV success, and the marketing budget was huge. Unless they were completely desperate for Jack Nicholson, surely someone else would have taken the role for a standard flat fee.
Batman wasn’t expected to be the cultural juggernaut it turned out to be. Fans actually lost their minds when Michael Keaton was cast as Bruce Wayne. Jack was a massive presence in Hollywood, so his involvement gave the movie some serious buzz. It just happened to be that Keaton was the perfect fit.
Don’t forget that Tim Burton was only known for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure back then. Fanboys were rabid about him directing.
RE: Fact #5 (Hillary Dawa Sherpa Survived Everest) – That sounds a lot like Joe Simpson’s story. He fell off a cliff and into a crevasse in the Andes, and his team at base camp thought he was dead and were getting ready to leave. He managed to crawl out with a broken leg and inch his way back down the mountain, eventually making it to camp just as they were about to pack up.
RE: Fact #24 (Kennedy’s Funeral Required Two Caskets) – I’m curious how exactly it was ‘damaged’ enough to be unsuitable. It must have been messy inside, but an open casket was definitely not in the plans.
RE: Fact #33 (New Forest Nears Its Millennium) – The craziest part is that the medieval system is still in place. The ponies you see aren’t actually wild; they belong to locals exercising grazing rights that go back to those original forest laws. Every autumn, there’s a ‘pannage’ season where pigs are let out to eat fallen acorns, acorns are toxic to the ponies, but the pigs handle them fine. There’s even a Verderers Court that still manages the whole thing.
RE: Fact #43 (Watson Brake Predates Egypt’s Pyramids) – The pyramids in Egypt are surrounded by trash, and Stonehenge gets littered on and graffitied. It’s probably for the best that this site isn’t open to the public. I’d be perfectly happy with some drone footage, cool infographics, and an interesting documentary. I don’t need to go trampling all over it.
RE: Fact #46 (Boston Carried Lewis’ Contract Posthumously) – Back then, the salary cap was only around $15 million, so his $3.3 million salary really tied up over 20% of their space. It basically killed their chance to rebuild right when the Bird and McHale era was wrapping up. Under current rules, league insurance covers player deaths, and teams can request to get that cap hit cleared immediately.
The Celtics could have had Len Bias and Lewis stepping up after Bird, McHale, and Parish, but since both passed away, the team ended up struggling for years.
RE: Fact #20 (Pneumatic Mail Carried Living Cat) – What the heck.
RE: Fact #15 (Robert Graves Holed Their Lifeboat) – This story makes me appreciate the value of quality vocational training. It sounds like the crew was just a bunch of random people who wandered onto the docks looking for work, rather than actual mechanics or experienced sailors.
RE: Fact #2 (Christian Bale’s Accent Fooled Crewmates) – I was totally shocked when I first heard him speak at an awards show. Same thing with Hugh Laurie. It really goes to show just how talented those actors are.
It always makes me laugh when people say they were fooled by Hugh Laurie in House. Everyone should watch Blackadder; the guy is about as British as it gets.
His American accent is so convincing that his actual British accent ends up sounding like a parody to me.
RE: Fact #30 (Spider-Man’s Rejected Debut Became Bestseller) – Wasn’t the original concept totally different? I thought we didn’t get the version we know until Ditko started working on it.
RE: Fact #29 (Bruschetta Became America’s Garlic Bread) – People love to bash Americanized versions of food, but most of them just came about because immigrants had to get creative with whatever ingredients they could actually find to feed their families. It’s the same reason Italian immigrants swapped out traditional seafood for things like beef, pork, or chicken, which were much cheaper and easier to get here.
RE: Fact #18 (Harry Brearley Created Rustless Steel) – I’ve heard sailors call it “stain less” because eventually, even the best steel gives in to seawater.
Yeah, in Norwegian we have “rustfritt stål” and a specific term for the marine-grade stuff that handles acid better. I don’t think there’s a direct English equivalent for that distinction.
RE: Fact #29 (Bruschetta Became America’s Garlic Bread) – A lot of great food throughout history was born out of necessity, shortages, or even famine.
RE: Fact #43 (Watson Brake Predates Egypt’s Pyramids) – The state owns part of the site, and the family lets researchers in. Keeping it closed to the public is probably the best way to keep it from getting damaged.
There’s a reason Stonehenge is roped off. Before they did that, people would scratch their initials into the stones or chip off pieces. Now, you can only really get close to them during the summer solstice.
It’s sad that people ruin things, but the restricted access is probably for the best. There’s a funny story about how Stonehenge became state property, too: a local wealthy man bought it on impulse at an auction, but his wife didn’t like it, so he donated it to the government to maintain.
RE: Fact #1 (Bretz’s Flood Theory Earned Vindication) – Is that Bretz? We used to call them the Bretz Floods, and he didn’t even need NASA to back him up. Once airplanes were invented, people could fly over Washington state and finally see those massive ripples in the ground from the floodwaters for themselves.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – That kind of thing happened with a lot of foods. Frozen items took off because they didn’t require rationed metal for cans, and tons of new drinks appeared due to supply shifts during the war. Even things like pizza and tiki culture blew up because soldiers brought home a taste for what they found overseas. The British diet changed completely too, since so many pre-war staples just weren’t available anymore.
RE: Fact #14 (Nicholson’s Batman Deal Kept Paying) – He is also close friends with Danny DeVito. When DeVito was offered the role of The Penguin for the sequel, he called Jack for advice on whether to take it. Jack just told him, “Try to get the same deal I did.”
DeVito had actually already pulled off a similar deal. He, Schwarzenegger, and Ivan Reitman took no upfront pay for Twins the year before and just split 40% of the gross.
RE: Fact #34 (Microbes Thrive Three Kilometers Underground) – Living inside solid rock would be absolute hell if you were sentient. Maybe that is what hell is.
It is not exactly solid rock, but I work underground as a geologist every day. It is not that bad.
RE: Fact #23 (Jesse Owens Became A Janitor) – Jesse Owens’s career essentially ended right after the 1936 Olympics because the AAU banned him for life for not doing their exhibition tour. They forced him to race all over Europe to make them money, and when he was too exhausted and flew home to support his family, they stripped his amateur status for missing one race. He couldn’t compete anymore, so he went from gold medalist to working at a gas station and a dry cleaner, eventually going bankrupt.
RE: Fact #7 (Euler’s Papers Outlived Him Decades) – Essentially, a dead Euler was still outpublishing most living mathematicians of his era.
I’ve always wondered if anyone else even compares to Euler in terms of productivity. He’s always called “one of the most prolific, ” but I can’t think of a better candidate, even if it’s a bit subjective. He was so prolific that dozens of theorems are named after the “second” person to work on them, because labeling everything “Euler’s Theorem” would be absurd.
Paul Erdős. He was one of the first traveling mathematicians who barely owned a house; he’d just visit collaborators, stay at their homes, publish papers, and move to the next spot. He didn’t care about anything more than math. Every waking second he wasn’t doing math felt like time wasted. If we’re talking about impact, though, maybe Euler still takes the crown.
RE: Fact #25 (Napoleon’s Seventy-Two-Bottle Cologne Order Survives) – I think people might be imagining him spraying it constantly, but he was probably just pouring the small bottles into his bath water.
RE: Fact #24 (Kennedy’s Funeral Required Two Caskets) – A bit off-topic, but I’ve been inside both expensive and cheap caskets, and both times the lid was closed. If you’re going to spend eternity in one, you might as well go for the fancy one. It was actually more comfortable than my own couch.
RE: Fact #2 (Christian Bale’s Accent Fooled Crewmates) – He’s definitely one of the most famous method actors out there. I’ve always wondered why so many British actors can pull off perfect American accents, but it rarely works the other way around. I still remember finding out Hugh Laurie was British while watching House, and it blew my mind as a kid.
RE: Fact #42 (Movie Shots Shrunk Across Decades) – Back in 1930, movies were blocked and shot a lot like stage plays. People stood in one spot, and they often used just one camera angle without even cutting back and forth. As the medium evolved, directors learned to use the camera’s perspective more intentionally.
RE: Fact #12 (Spinning Jenny Provoked Violent Backlash) – “Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labor, but science itself is not a liberator. It creates means not goals. Man should use science for reasonable goals. When the ideals of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three [years old]. We must not condemn man’s inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature because they are being used wrongly and disobediently now. “The fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development.”” – Albert Einstein
RE: Fact #25 (Napoleon’s Seventy-Two-Bottle Cologne Order Survives) – That’s almost two bottles a day. Now I’m picturing him constantly reaching into his coat, pulling out an atomizer, and spritzing himself every twenty minutes.
People supposedly drank it. It was originally sold as a cure-all mixed with water and sugar. When laws forced companies to list their ingredients, they just rebranded it as ‘Eau de Cologne’ with a wink and a nod that you shouldn’t actually drink it.
RE: Fact #26 (Khatiwada Died Flying Yeti Airlines) – I’m pretty sure there was a passenger livestream of this, and things went downhill incredibly fast. It was such terrifying and heartbreaking footage to watch.
RE: Fact #16 (Iron Hand Kept Berlichingen Fighting) – You’re skipping the poetic part, he’s credited as the first person to use the phrase, “he can lick my ass.”
Which led to arguably one of the most famous compositions in history, Mozart’s “Leck mich im Arsch.”
RE: Fact #31 (Starlink Loses Satellites Every Day) – The ISS orbits at 400km, and there’s still enough air resistance there that it needs boosters to stay up. Since Starlink satellites are even lower at 300km and don’t have boosters, having one or two drop out of orbit daily seems perfectly reasonable given how many are up there.
RE: Fact #6 (Humans Sleep Least Among Primates) – Well, chimps don’t have to worry about creating deliverables for shareholders, so there’s that.
RE: Fact #44 (Ogallala Aquifer Refills Over Millennia) – Meanwhile, in Arizona, they’re literally dumping water onto the ground in an attempt to raise the groundwater levels.
RE: Fact #7 (Euler’s Papers Outlived Him Decades) – My favorite Euler fact is that he was apparently a very kind and helpful person. He spent a lot of time corresponding with young mathematicians, encouraging them and helping them improve their work.
RE: Fact #11 (Sushi Tradition Favored Bare Hands) – Also, you should dip the fish side into the soy sauce, not the rice, or the sushi will fall apart.
RE: Fact #32 (Maria Mitchell’s Comet Claim Prevailed) – Saying he nearly ‘stole’ the credit is a stretch. Francesco de Vico saw the comet independently and reported it without knowing Maria Mitchell had already found it two days earlier. There was no malice involved.
RE: Fact #15 (Robert Graves Holed Their Lifeboat) – As far as I know, the only version of this story comes from Graves himself, so I assume he might have taken some liberties.
RE: Fact #40 (Menominee Forest Sustains Timber Harvests) – Check out the satellite photos of this area. It’s a gorgeous, lush green stretch that really pops against the rest of the countryside.
RE: Fact #17 (Stork Derby Rewarded Nine-Child Mothers) – The guy had a real sense of humor. Forcing three guys who hated each other to live in a house together? That’s legendary.
RE: Fact #26 (Khatiwada Died Flying Yeti Airlines) – Aviation in Nepal is notoriously dangerous. Their airlines are banned from landing in a lot of countries.
RE: Fact #27 (John Fitch Invented Crash Barrels) – As a transportation engineer and driver, I’ve got to say this was a brilliant invention. It’s cheap and super effective. Most other impact attenuators cost way more and often need to be replaced after a crash, which doesn’t always happen fast enough. Any engineering solution that’s simple, effective, and affordable is top-tier, especially when it saves so many lives.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – If you’ve ever actually tried it, you’d know the real problem with mutton is that it just has a very distinct, overpowering taste.
RE: Fact #44 (Ogallala Aquifer Refills Over Millennia) – For anyone wondering, here are the predictions for when the water will run out: Southern regions: 25 to 30 years. Central region: Mostly gone in 35 years. Northern region: Should be fine for a while.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – Turns out, serving terrible canned meat to an entire generation of soldiers is a great way to make sure they never touch it again.
RE: Fact #35 (Attica Gunfire Killed Almost Everyone) – Tom Wicker witnessed that carnage and wrote a book about it called A Time To Die.
RE: Fact #28 (Airline Padding Manufactured Better Punctuality) – Coast-to-coast flights were about 30 minutes faster back in the 60s. Pilots used to be able to set their own cruise speeds and usually redlined them. Now, flight speeds are determined by spreadsheets to save on fuel costs because airlines know people won’t complain about a few extra minutes in the air. It’s pretty strange that we’re flying slower now than we were 60 years ago.
RE: Fact #11 (Sushi Tradition Favored Bare Hands) – Wow. I feel like a chump for always using chopsticks. It makes sense, though, it’s basically a handheld rice taco. Still, I’m going to stick with my chopsticks and deal with the pieces falling apart.
RE: Fact #4 (Tobias Geffen Made Coca-Cola Kosher) – The fact says he asked the company for a list of ingredients, but isn’t an ingredient list totally different from the actual formula? I guess companies weren’t required to disclose ingredients on their products back in 1935, or at least didn’t make them public.
The issue is that some things are allowed to remain vague. Labels like ‘natural’ or ‘artificial flavoring’ can mean almost anything, and some of those hidden components might not be kosher or could be problematic for holidays like Passover.
It isn’t just about the ingredients themselves; it’s about the processing equipment and the substances used to create those ingredients. For example, cane sugar is plant-based and theoretically always kosher. However, white cane sugar is sometimes processed using bone char. If that char comes from a non-kosher animal, the sugar isn’t kosher. Geffen would have looked at the ingredients but also asked deep questions about the entire process.
RE: Fact #50 (New York Strike Automated Elevators) – It’s a pretty risky strategy to go on strike when your strike effectively proves that your job is no longer necessary.
RE: Fact #39 (Childbirth Inspired Half-Life’s Baby Monster) – Having a much easier birth with my second child really helped cure the PTSD I had from the terrifying experience of my first.
RE: Fact #23 (Jesse Owens Became A Janitor) – Back then, to be in the Olympics you were required to be an amateur. You couldn’t have your sport be your full-time job.
The Olympics were really stubborn about keeping professionals out, even though many Eastern bloc athletes were professionals in all but name. That said, I’m not sure there was really a professional track circuit in the 30s for Owens to make money in anyway. Even if he could, being a Black man in that era put major limits on what he could actually earn.
RE: Fact #42 (Movie Shots Shrunk Across Decades) – This really bugs me during action scenes. I want to actually see a fight happen, but instead, we get a half-second clip of a punch, a quarter-second of someone getting hit, and then quick flashes of the next move. It drives me crazy.
RE: Fact #12 (Spinning Jenny Provoked Violent Backlash) – There used to be entire rooms of people called “computers.” Their job was just to take numbers, perform calculations, and pass the results to the next desk. Every person was basically just a living cell in a spreadsheet.
RE: Fact #36 (La Cabina Forced Telefonica Reassurance) – José Luís López Vázquez was a top-tier Spanish actor. George Cukor even begged him to learn English and move to Hollywood. His work in La Cabina, Mi querida señorita, Atraco a las 3, El cochecito, and El verdugo is unforgettable.
RE: Fact #41 (Vermont Curator Cremated Egyptian Mummy) – Who throws away a perfectly good dead toddler? /s Seriously though, were mummies so common back then that you’d toss out “extra” ones instead of selling or donating them to other museums?
RE: Fact #16 (Iron Hand Kept Berlichingen Fighting) – You should definitely read more about this guy. His hand was incredible, but the things he got up to were wild. There really should be a movie about him.
RE: Fact #6 (Humans Sleep Least Among Primates) – I’m a human primate too, and eight hours has never been enough for me. Nine is fine, but I’d much rather get ten.
RE: Fact #47 (Goodyear Maintains F1 Victory Record) – What’s more relevant is the 2005 US Grand Prix disaster, where only six cars even started because the Michelin tires were deemed unsafe for the track.