26 Voltaire’s Aliens Discovered Microscopic Whale
In his 1752 science-fiction novella Micromegas, French philosopher and satirist Voltaire imagined a giant alien from a planet orbiting Sirius who left home after a court banished him for 800 years. Micromegas traveled to Saturn, befriended the much smaller but still gigantic secretary of its academy, and brought him on a journey to Earth. When the Saturnian declared the apparently empty lifeless planet, Micromegas rejected his hasty conclusion and fashioned a magnifying glass from a diamond in his necklace. Through it, he discovered a “microscopic” whale in the Baltic Sea and later a ship filled with human philosophers.
27. Scrotie, the unofficial mascot of the Rhode Island School of Design, is a giant anthropomorphic human penis known for its aggressively vulgar persona and dry-humping rival mascots. A puppet designer named B. Sure created the first costume in 2001 for the school’s struggling hockey team, the Nads, and Scrotie’s appearances attracted more spectators. At games, Scrotie chants, “The Nads are your dads,” and fans answer, “We fu*ked your mom.” During a 2004 game against Massachusetts Maritime Academy, offended spectators attacked Scrotie and tore the costume apart after the mascot mocked them and shouted obscenities.
28. Japanese Olympic judo athlete Isao Inokuma won heavyweight gold at the 1964 Tokyo Games and a world championship in 1965. After retiring from competition, he remained involved in judo and became CEO of Tokai Construction in 1993. In 2001, reportedly amid the company’s financial difficulties, Inokuma died by committing seppuku. Tokai Construction declared bankruptcy 14 days later with liabilities of approximately 20 billion yen. It is the last notable case of seppuku.
29. In June 2004, Reason magazine mailed personalized covers to approximately 40,000 subscribers, placing each reader’s name and a satellite image of their home or workplace on the front. Reason designed the stunt to demonstrate the power of public databases and Xeikon’s customized printing technology. The New York Times described the experiment as the ultimate in customized publishing.
30. A 2022 medical review reported a BMI of 6.7 in a patient with anorexia nervosa, the lowest value documented in the medical literature it examined. Mathematically, that BMI equals approximately 39 pounds at 5 feet 4 inches (17.7 kg at 163 cm), or 49.5 pounds at 6 feet (22.5 kg at 183 cm). The review classified any BMI below 15 as extreme and warned that anorexia can cause complications throughout the body’s organs and systems, creating a high risk of death.
31 WWII Veterans Number Roughly 31,000
The US Department of Veterans Affairs projected that approximately 31,000 American World War II veterans would remain alive in fiscal 2026. That represents fewer than 0.2 percent of the roughly 16.4 million Americans who served during the war. The VA model counted approximately 95,000 surviving veterans in fiscal 2023, and its figures imply a current decline of more than 14,000 per year, or about 40 per day. It projects fewer than 10,000 survivors by 2029 and fewer than 1,000 by 2034.
32. Kuwait’s unofficial Souk Al-Manakh stock market grew so large that its capitalization trailed only the United States and Japan. Operating from an air-conditioned parking garage in Kuwait City, traders used postdated checks to finance speculation in largely unregulated non-Kuwaiti companies. In August 1982, a dealer presented one such check for payment, but it bounced and triggered the collapse. Investigators later counted $94 billion in worthless checks from about 6,000 investors, while the debts left every Kuwaiti bank except the National Bank of Kuwait technically insolvent and pushed the country into recession.
33. American CIA officer John T. Downey spent more than 20 years in Chinese prisons after Chinese forces shot down his aircraft over Manchuria in 1952. He and another CIA officer named Richard Fecteau had entered China aboard an unarmed C-47 to extract an agent, but Chinese forces ambushed the plane and later convicted both men of espionage. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai offered their release first for an admission that they were CIA agents and later for access by American journalists, but US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rejected both proposals. After US President Richard Nixon publicly admitted Downey’s CIA connection, China released him on in 1973.
34. The 1992 science-fiction horror film The Lawnmower Man was marketed as an adaptation of American writer Stephen King’s 1975 short story, even though the two plots shared almost nothing. The filmmakers converted an unrelated screenplay called CyberGod into the adaptation, retaining only a sequence involving a telekinetic lawnmower and a character named Harold Parkette. King sued, arguing that the film bore “no meaningful resemblance” to his work, and a federal judge ruled in his favor. An appeal ordered King’s name removed from advertising, and he received $2.5 million before a court later held New Line in contempt for continuing to use his name on home-video packaging.
35. In ancient Greek poet Homer’s Iliad, the legendary warrior Achilles was not invulnerable: the Paeonian warrior Asteropaios threw two spears at him, and one grazed his elbow and drew blood. No surviving source before the first century AD describes Achilles as generally invulnerable. The earliest surviving explicit River Styx version appears in Roman poet Statius’s unfinished Achilleid, in which Thetis dips her son in the river but leaves the heel she holds untouched.
36 Solar Storm Outstripped Carrington Tenfold
About 14,300 years ago, Earth endured a solar storm that researchers estimated was roughly 10 times more powerful than the Carrington Event of 1859. Scientists detected its chemical signature through a sharp carbon-14 spike in ancient tree rings recovered near the Drouzet River in the southern French Alps. They confirmed the timing with beryllium records from Greenland ice cores, identifying the largest known solar storm of its kind.
37. In Ireland and Scotland, people buried butter in peat bogs by the first century AD, creating what archaeologists call bog butter. They sealed butter or other animal fats inside wooden containers and buried them in cold, acidic, oxygen-poor bogs, conditions that could hinder spoilage. In 2011, a discovery in Tullamore, County Offaly, yielded about 50 kilograms of bog butter that still carried a faint dairy smell.
38. After retiring from the NFL in 2016, former defensive end Justin Tuck earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. The two-time Super Bowl champion, who won both titles with the New York Giants, then joined the private wealth management division at Goldman Sachs. By 2026, he had risen to managing director, building a second career in finance after 11 seasons in professional football.
39. Lead recovered from ancient Roman shipwrecks now shields highly sensitive physics equipment because it emits exceptionally little radiation. Freshly refined lead contains radioactive lead-210, which has a half-life of 22 years, but the isotope disappeared from the ancient metal as it decayed over many centuries. Experiments including CUORE and XENON100 have used this low-background lead to shield particle detectors from radiation that could interfere with their measurements.
40. U.S. federal regulations require manufacturers to disclose when onion rings contain diced onions instead of whole onion slices. They must label the product onion rings made from diced onions, or onion rings made from dried diced onions when using dehydrated onion. The disclosure must appear immediately after or directly below the words onion rings in legible, contrasting boldface type that meets federal minimum-size requirements.
41 Henry Ford Hired Disabled Workers
Beginning in 1914, American industrialist Henry Ford directed his factories not to reject or dismiss workers because of physical disabilities, except in cases of contagious disease. His workforce included blind and deaf employees, amputees, and people with epilepsy, while Ford argued that subdivided factory work could also employ people with limited intellectual abilities. Ford divided production into simple, monotonous, repetitive tasks and classified 7,882 factory jobs according to their physical demands. He concluded that 4,034 jobs did not require full physical capacity and paid disabled employees the regular wage when they produced the expected output.
42. In 1991, the Soviet Delta IV-class submarine K-407 Novomoskovsk became the first ballistic missile submarine to launch all 16 of its MIRVed submarine-launched ballistic missiles in one salvo. During Operation Behemoth-2 in the Barents Sea, the crew launched them from a depth of 50 meters with 14 seconds between missiles. The 224-second salvo expelled more than 650 tonnes of mass from the submarine. The first and last missiles completed full flights to the Kura Missile Test Range in Kamchatka, demonstrating that a submarine could safely launch its entire missile load in rapid succession.
43. A lavender marriage is a mixed-orientation marriage that a man and a woman enter for convenience to conceal the stigmatized sexual orientation of one or both partners. The term arose in the early 20th century and became closely associated with Hollywood celebrity marriages, especially before World War II. During the 1920s, studios added morality clauses to actors’ contracts, prompting some closeted stars to marry to protect their reputations and careers. These marriages became less common as public attitudes toward LGBTQ people changed later in the century.
44. In 1845, Southern Baptists in the United States split from the national Triennial Convention over slavery in the years preceding the Civil War. The immediate dispute centered on whether Baptist mission boards would appoint enslavers as missionaries. After northern representatives refused, southern delegates met at First Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, from May 8 to 12 and founded the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1995, the denomination formally apologized for its historical defense of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy.
45. In May 1985, Soviet KGB colonel and British double agent Oleg Gordievsky returned to Moscow after a sudden recall, where the KGB drugged and interrogated him for about five hours. He maintained his cover, but the KGB placed him under surveillance and barred him from working abroad. After activating MI6’s Operation Pimlico, Gordievsky evaded his KGB tails on July 19 and hid inside the boot of a Ford Sierra heading for Finland. At the border, a British diplomat’s wife dropped her baby’s dirty nappy, causing the sniffer dogs to flee and helping Gordievsky escape before MI6 flew him to Britain via Norway.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Shaker Community Grew To Three
In 2025, the last active Shaker community in the United States grew from two residents to three when a 59-year-old woman named April Baxter moved into Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. She entered as a novice and must live there for five years before the community can accept her as a full member. The celibate Christian sect began in England in 1747 and later grew to about 5,000 believers in communities from Indiana to Maine. Because Shakers do not have children, they have relied on converts, making it difficult to sustain their numbers.
47. False cognates are words that look or sound alike and carry similar meanings despite having different etymologies. They can appear in unrelated languages, related languages, or even within the same language. For example, bad means the same thing in English and Persian and sounds nearly identical in both. English bad may descend from Old English and Proto-Germanic roots, while Persian bad derives from Old Iranian wata, making the resemblance completely coincidental.
48. For 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick used a $750,000 rotating spacecraft set measuring 38 feet across and 10 feet wide at its broadest point. The Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group built the centrifuge to spin at up to 3 mph, with desks, consoles, bunks, and hibernation compartments secured inside. When filmmakers fixed a camera to the rotating structure, the set and camera completed 360-degree turns together while actors appeared to walk up the walls and across the ceiling. Panavision specially modified the Super Panavision camera magazines so they could continue operating upside down.
49. Among 1,032,365 active U.S. physicians counted in 2024, only 7,719 practiced plastic surgery. That placed plastic surgeons at roughly 0.75% of the total, or about one for every 134 active doctors.
50. When the term milkshake first appeared in print in 1885, it described an alcoholic whiskey drink similar to eggnog rather than today’s ice cream treat. One account called it a “sturdy, healthful eggnog type of drink” made with eggs and whiskey and served as both a tonic and a treat. Before electric blenders became widespread, people made milkshake-type drinks by hand-shaking crushed ice with milk, sugar, and flavorings. By 1900, the name referred to chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla drinks, and people began adding ice cream during the early 1900s.
RE: Fact #10 (Brazil Nuts Risk Selenium Overload) – Also, if you eat Brazil nuts and then have sex with someone who has a nut allergy, they could have a reaction.
RE: Fact #3 (London Smog Closed Movie Theaters) – It didn’t help that the government pushed people to buy cheap, low-quality coal. People were happy to do it because it was an incredibly bitter winter and you didn’t even need a ration coupon.
RE: Fact #43 (Lavender Marriages Hid Hollywood Stars) – There is a great book called Lavender House about a gay detective investigating a murder at a place where everyone is in a lavender marriage, everyone knows the truth, and they are all basically dating each other’s spouses. It is a murder mystery, but they mostly live quite happily.
RE: Fact #12 (Nathan Fielder’s Team Won Provincials) – Every time I see something like this, I realize how boring my high school was, mostly just limited to sports and an underfunded band.
RE: Fact #13 (Japanese Navy Hid Midway Defeat) – Japan lost 4 carriers at Midway compared to America’s 1. Their report claimed 2 Japanese carriers were damaged, while 2 American carriers were sunk and others damaged. This led to a lot of overconfidence in the Japanese army and navy for months, as they didn’t expect themselves to be in such a strong position, which helped the allies in the Guadalcanal campaign. As for the survivors, many were sent to isolated posts in Southeast Asia, and the wounded were kept under armed guard.
RE: Fact #9 (Ariana Richards’ Scream Woke Capshaw) – She had already handled Graboids, which are dinosaurs you can at least see coming.
RE: Fact #5 (David Radies Saved Ancient Forest) – I work in the logging industry, and I can tell you this company definitely knew what they were doing. They were knowingly trying to wipe out a natural treasure, and someone in the government must have given them the green light. You don’t just miss a forest that old. It’s criminal.
I saw a 1950s “How It’s Made” video on YouTube about plywood production. It was such a waste watching them grind up those old-growth trees.
RE: Fact #40 (Onion Rings Require Diced Disclosure) – Why would they even use diced onions? It seems like it would be more expensive since you need more labor and a binding agent to keep the ring shape.
RE: Fact #7 (Americans Game Weekly Across Generations) – My mom logs way more hours playing games than I do, but she just plays those casual word scramble games on her tablet every day.
RE: Fact #18 (Utahraptor Nearly Carried Spielberg’s Name) – “Hey! Stop giving our movie free publicity and positive promotion!”
RE: Fact #1 (Sleep Activates Brain Waste Clearance) – REM sleep plays a huge role here. Back when I used edibles before bed, it would knock me into deep sleep too fast, and I missed out on that necessary mental cleanup. I was using it to cope with PTSD. It took about 10 years, but I don’t need it to sleep anymore and I feel so much better, though having dreams again is a strange feeling.
Actually, it’s the complete opposite. You skip or reduce REM right after pulling an all-nighter; your brain prioritizes slow-wave sleep with a lot of Delta activity. That’s when the glymphatic system clears out metabolic waste. Those big, slow waves are essentially your brainstem signaling everything to take the trash out. REM increases later in a normal night once the ‘cleaning’ is done. Also, your take on weed is way off: THC decreases the time it takes to fall asleep but increases REM latency in the short term, and over the long term, it just ruins your deep sleep and memory formation.
RE: Fact #11 (Pliny Documented Beer-Foam Bread Leavening) – It’s amazing that humans were selectively breeding plants and animals for ages before we formalized the idea of evolution. You have to wonder how it took us so long to figure it out. It’s even crazier that people still argued against it even after dog breeding had been documented for so long. Like, we can genetically condition an animal to fetch ducks without damaging them, but the environment can’t influence what breeds?
RE: Fact #33 (John Downey Survived Twenty-Year Imprisonment) – Spending 20 years in a Chinese prison because your CIA mission went south is quite the career detour.
RE: Fact #13 (Japanese Navy Hid Midway Defeat) – I remember reading an account from a Japanese civilian after the war. He said they realized they were losing because the press kept announcing “victories” that were happening closer and closer to Japan on the map.
RE: Fact #25 (Cleveland Stroud Reported Championship Violation) – I touched it before it went out of bounds, coach. I touched it. It’s their ball.
RE: Fact #45 (Oleg Gordievsky’s Dirty Nappy Getaway) – So there was a baby involved in the escape? Did they really bring a baby along to help rescue someone from the KGB?
RE: Fact #39 (Roman Shipwreck Lead Shields Experiments) – The same thing happens with steel from ships that sank before nuclear testing began. Everything on the surface is at least slightly contaminated.
RE: Fact #44 (Southern Baptists Split Over Slavery) – Reminds me of that Emo Philips joke about the guy on the bridge where he narrows down their religious denomination to a specific region and year before shouting, “Die, heretic!” and pushing him off.
RE: Fact #30 (Anorexia Patient Reached Record-Low BMI) – It’s so annoying that they gave hypothetical BMI examples instead of just listing the actual person’s stats. It’s like they wanted to obscure the reality.
The article wouldn’t let me see anything beyond the BMI, so thanks for sharing those details. For those in the U.S., that’s roughly 5’6″ and 42 lbs.
RE: Fact #46 (Shaker Community Grew To Three) – There is a cool, preserved settlement in Kentucky you can tour. The buildings are actually quite nice.
RE: Fact #6 (Simpson Jurors Endured 265-Day Sequestration) – I’ve always wondered what happens to people’s jobs when this happens. How do people live? Jury duty definitely isn’t covering my salary. How are people expected to keep up with bills when they’re stuck on a jury for that long?
RE: Fact #48 (2001’s Centrifuge Made Walls Walkable) – Kubrick was a genius when it came to pioneering new ways to film. For “Barry Lyndon, ” he famously wanted to shoot using natural candlelight. Modern cameras couldn’t handle it, so he grabbed specialized lenses from NASA. The result was one of the most uniquely beautiful films ever made.
RE: Fact #6 (Simpson Jurors Endured 265-Day Sequestration) – Part of me thinks, “I’d have books, that’s fine, ” but then a more sensible part kicks in and says, “you’d barely see your family or your cats for nine months, ” and I realize, no way.
I fly out for work weekly, from Tuesday morning through Thursday night. I got a jury summons for a four-month trial where they wanted me available either Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday for six hours. Who has time for that? Luckily I wasn’t picked, because that would have forced me to try and live on that tiny daily stipend.
RE: Fact #20 (Nematode Awoke After 46, 000-Year Freeze) – This gives me hope. Even if we wreck the planet for ourselves, life finds a way to survive.
RE: Fact #49 (Plastic Surgeons Number Just 7, 719) – The five least common specialties are: Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Clinical Neurophysiology, Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology, Pediatric Anesthesiology, and Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
RE: Fact #38 (Justin Tuck Tackled Wall Street) – That reminds me of Alan Page. He was an NFL MVP and Super Bowl winner who started law school while he was still playing. He actually took a job at a firm before he retired, and eventually became an Assistant Attorney General and a state Supreme Court justice. Incredible career path.
RE: Fact #22 (Cow Waterbeds Increase Milk Production) – I remember reading years ago that you could tell the cows loved the waterbeds because they would actually wait their turn to use them.
RE: Fact #19 (Time Capsule Included Emergency Windmill) – So they’ll forget how to use electricity, but they’ll remember they have an appointment to open a box 6, 000 years later?
RE: Fact #20 (Nematode Awoke After 46, 000-Year Freeze) – It makes you wonder how old that thing actually is. It lived before that permafrost even existed. It’s crazy stuff; we still know so little about our world.
RE: Fact #36 (Solar Storm Outstripped Carrington Tenfold) – If you enjoy survival games, check out The Long Dark. It’s about trying to stay alive in remote Canada during the dead of winter right after a massive solar storm.
RE: Fact #33 (John Downey Survived Twenty-Year Imprisonment) – Dulles was director until ’61. Why didn’t the directors who followed offer any concessions to get him out?
RE: Fact #24 (George Sperti’s Inventions Funded Research) – I did a deep dive and found out the FDA forced a change to the original Preparation H formula, which used to contain a live yeast cell derivative. I think some other countries still have the original version, but we don’t have it in the US anymore.
RE: Fact #2 (Toyohiro Akiyama Battled Orbital Nausea) – Nicotine withdrawal is the worst. Space is the last place I’d ever want to deal with that.
RE: Fact #41 (Henry Ford Hired Disabled Workers) – Labor turnover is one of the biggest costs for a business because of the time and money spent on onboarding. These disabled workers didn’t have many other options, so they weren’t going to be headhunted by competitors. You hire them once and they often stay in the same position for five or even twenty years, unlike someone who quits after a year.
RE: Fact #47 (False Cognates Share Accidental Similarities) – Years ago, someone told me the English word “sheriff” was borrowed from the Arabic “sharif.” Actually, it comes from the Old English “shire reeve, ” which just got slurred together over time.
RE: Fact #44 (Southern Baptists Split Over Slavery) – Episcopalians are a distinct denomination only because of the American Revolution.
RE: Fact #39 (Roman Shipwreck Lead Shields Experiments) – When Romans smelted the lead for those ships, the process burned off the naturally occurring uranium. The lead would have been slightly radioactive at the time, but after centuries, almost all of that isotope has decayed into stable Lead-206. That’s why you can take an ingot from those shipwrecks and it’s radiation-free enough for high-precision scientific gear. I could write a book about this, but I’ll leave it there.
RE: Fact #40 (Onion Rings Require Diced Disclosure) – How did you find this obscure fact? Also, after reading it, does it apply to actual diced onions or just dehydrated ones used for rings?
RE: Fact #23 (Abduwali Muse Received 33-Year Sentence) – The resemblance between the pirate and the actor who played him is honestly uncanny.
RE: Fact #15 (Chrysler Building Hid Record-Breaking Spire) – The wildest part is that there was actually a dentist’s office inside that steel spire.
RE: Fact #32 (Souk Al-Manakh Crippled Kuwait’s Banks) – Wow, I’m from Kuwait and I spend a lot of time following the market, but I had no idea about this. Thanks for the heads up!
RE: Fact #34 (Stephen King Won Name Removal) – This reminds me of that I, Robot movie. It had nothing to do with the actual book, yet they kept the name. Isaac Asimov really should have sued them for that.
RE: Fact #4 (Pisces III’s Oxygen Nearly Ran Out) – I never would have guessed there was more than three days of oxygen in a sub like that.
RE: Fact #50 (Milkshakes Began As Whiskey Eggnog) – I’ve never understood why ice cream cocktails aren’t more of a mainstream thing.
RE: Fact #11 (Pliny Documented Beer-Foam Bread Leavening) – Lots of big discoveries seem to happen in weird ways. Gunpowder, for example, was a happy accident by monks looking for a fountain of youth potion. The same goes for medicine, chewing on a plant that coincidentally had aspirin precursors. Then there’s Penicillin, discovered because a scientist went on vacation and came back to find mold had killed the bacteria in his petri dish. There are so many ancient stories like this that didn’t have clear explanations until modern science caught up.
RE: Fact #29 (Reason Magazine Showed Subscribers’ Homes) – [Here’s what that looked like, in case you were curious.]
RE: Fact #40 (Onion Rings Require Diced Disclosure) – Interesting. I dug into this further and it is all about food labeling regulations. If you look at § 102.39, I checked to see if there was a court case that triggered this requirement, but I couldn’t find one.
RE: Fact #12 (Nathan Fielder’s Team Won Provincials) – Sometimes you lose the battle but win the war. I’m sure Fielder, Rogen, and Goldberg are doing just fine compared to the team that beat them in the high school national championships.
RE: Fact #31 (WWII Veterans Number Roughly 31, 000) – I think I had this realization back in high school, that during my lifetime, every single veteran from the 20th century’s conflicts will be gone. Growing up, WWII was such a huge cultural backdrop in the 90s and early 2000s, but it’s sobering to know that in a few short years, nobody with a personal memory of that era will be left.
RE: Fact #38 (Justin Tuck Tackled Wall Street) – A lot of pro athletes end up in private wealth management like he did. Their name recognition helps bring in high-net-worth clients. They often go into sales or relationship management roles. Take Colt McCoy in commercial real estate, they basically wine and dine prospects, trade stories about their playing days, and then get down to business. Firms love having former athletes around to network. I’m sure he’s good at his job, though the real finance stars are the PhDs and investment banking experts. He could probably run his own firm if he wanted to.
RE: Fact #18 (Utahraptor Nearly Carried Spielberg’s Name) – I don’t understand how a museum could be sued over a time period. I also don’t see how a museum exhibit could hurt a movie’s success.
RE: Fact #21 (Isaac Davis Deposited Stolen Money) – Sometimes I feel like people are getting dumber, but then I read stories like this and realize we’ve always been this way.
RE: Fact #20 (Nematode Awoke After 46, 000-Year Freeze) – “Dude, I feel so relaxed, I slept really well tonight. I wonder what time it is.”
RE: Fact #22 (Cow Waterbeds Increase Milk Production) – I had no idea it took a cow that long to lie down, 8.5 minutes on a standard mattress versus 5 on a waterbed. That’s a serious amount of time.
RE: Fact #47 (False Cognates Share Accidental Similarities) – My favorite example is how “emoji, ” which comes from Japanese, is totally unrelated to “emoticon.” “Eh” means picture and “moji” means character, while “emoticon” is just a mix of emotion and icon.
RE: Fact #45 (Oleg Gordievsky’s Dirty Nappy Getaway) – I read his biography, “The Spy and the Traitor”. Parts of it feel like a spy thriller; his escape from Moscow was genuinely movie-worthy, complete with boneheaded mistakes, quick thinking, and a tense car chase. It is a fantastic read if you have any interest in real-world spycraft. He was actually promoted to run the London KGB office, so he definitely wasn’t a low-level operative.
RE: Fact #50 (Milkshakes Began As Whiskey Eggnog) – It’s a shame I can’t live back when people actually thought those drinks were “healthful” without questioning how ridiculous that is.
RE: Fact #6 (Simpson Jurors Endured 265-Day Sequestration) – “Sequestered jurors can get antsy and snappish. Instead of ensuring that the defendant gets a fair trial, discussions between jurors can become contentious, heightening the pressure on jurors who are holding out on coming to a consensus.” I’ll be honest, if I’d been effectively locked away for 265 days, I’d agree to whatever verdict got me back home to my family.
RE: Fact #28 (Isao Inokuma Died By Seppuku) – Seppuku was usually done to regain honor after a major failure or shame
RE: Fact #26 (Voltaire’s Aliens Discovered Microscopic Whale) – Micromégas! Such a great story. I remember reading it years ago in an anthology of early sci-fi.