26 Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt
“The Fat Controller” in Thomas & Friends is called “Sir Topham Hatt” in the American version, because “fat” was considered derogatory in the US but not in the UK. British releases continue to use Fat Controller and reserve his real name for formal situations. The spinoff Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go later adopted the name Sir Topham Hatt in both countries.
27. During World War I in 1917, American department store Sears published a special mail-order catalog offering weapons, uniforms, and other military equipment. Its listings included an $865 Colt machine gun capable of firing more than 400 rounds per minute, plus three Colt handguns: a revolver, a .45-caliber automatic pistol, and a .32-caliber automatic pistol. Sears shipped purchases to soldiers across the United States and offered parcel-post delivery to American troops in Europe.
28. Norwegian King Harald V was three years old when he fled the German invasion of Norway with his mother, Norwegian Crown Princess Martha, and his two sisters in 1940. They crossed into Sweden before sailing to the United States, where Harald lived in Washington, D.C. He returned to Norway after the war ended in 1945. When Harald inherited the throne in 1991, he became Norway’s first Norwegian-born monarch in roughly 610 years, following Olav IV in 1380.
29. In 1961, 90% of 219 doctors surveyed in Chicago said they usually would not tell patients that they had cancer. It reflected the era’s paternalistic medical culture, which gave physicians broad control over how much information patients received. When researchers repeated the questionnaire in 1977, 97% of 264 respondents preferred to disclose the diagnosis, almost completely reversing the earlier result.
30. While filming Japan’s original Godzilla in 1954, Japanese actor and stunt performer Haruo Nakajima performed inside a thick latex-and-foam Godzilla suit under hot stage lights after the first 200-pound version proved unusable. Nakajima could barely see or breathe and remained inside for only a few minutes at a time, while technicians regularly poured a cup of sweat from the costume between takes. By the end of the shoot, Nakajima had lost 20 pounds.
31 Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult
English folklore portrayed the residents of medieval Gotham, a village in Nottinghamshire, as fools. In 1807, American writer Washington Irving mockingly applied the name to New York City in his satirical periodical Salmagundi. Irving intended it as a jab at the city’s culture and politics, but Gotham stuck as one of New York’s most famous nicknames.
32. In 1950, after years of trials, Australia released the myxoma virus as a biological control against its invasive rabbit population. Within two years, the virus killed 99.8% of infected rabbits and cut the continent’s estimated rabbit population from 600 million to roughly 100 million. Surviving rabbits gradually developed resistance, so myxomatosis failed as a permanent solution to Australia’s rabbit problem.
33. A Polish immigrant named Henryk Siwiak was not a victim of the September 11 attacks, but the disruption they caused led him to the place where he died. After the attacks closed his Lower Manhattan construction site on September 11, 2001, he accepted a late-night cleaning job at a Pathmark supermarket across Brooklyn. Limited English and mistaken directions led him three miles from the store into Bedford-Stuyvesant, where someone shot him shortly before midnight. New York’s official crime statistics list Siwiak as the city’s only homicide that day, while reports describe him as the last person killed there on 9/11; his murder remains unsolved.
34. About 90% of new drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail before reaching regulatory approval. Between 40% and 50% fail because they do not work well enough in humans, while about 30% produce unmanageable toxicity or side effects. Poor absorption and elimination account for another 10% to 15%, while commercial or strategic problems cause roughly 10% of failures. Developing one successful drug can therefore take 10 to 15 years and cost around $1 billion.
35. American suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, publicly voiced antisemitic views while maintaining several intense, lengthy relationships with Jewish women. She recorded antisemitic slurs in her diaries and made offensive remarks at social gatherings, yet three of her most significant affairs involved two American women named Ellen Blumenthal Hill and Daisy Winton and a French artist named Marion Aboudaram. Highsmith biographer Richard Bradford found genuine affection in her relationships with Hill and Aboudaram, describing the contradiction as a central conundrum of her life.
36 Jimmy Carter Federally Legalized Homebrewing
On October 14, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337, legalizing homebrewing at the federal level. The law allowed adults to produce limited amounts of beer and wine for personal or family use without paying federal excise taxes, although individual states still controlled the practice. Homebrewing gave aspiring brewers room to experiment, and many later opened small breweries that helped create America’s modern craft beer industry.
37. In 1974, Omaha police made America’s last recorded arrest under an ugly law, one of several ordinances that barred people described as diseased, maimed, mutilated, or deformed from public view. An officer detained a homeless man because he had visible scars and marks across his body. Prosecutors filed no charges because the ordinance never defined ugly, making it impossible to prove the man’s guilt. That same year, Chicago became the final U.S. city to repeal its ugly law.
38. In 1990, the U.S. Secret Service investigated a Steve Jackson Games employee named Loyd Blankenship as part of a real hacking case, then raided the tabletop publisher’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Agents seized three computers and more than 300 floppy disks, including the master manuscript for Blankenship’s upcoming role-playing game GURPS Cyberpunk. Steve Jackson Games sued for lost revenue and privacy violations, winning two of its three claims in 1993. The court awarded $50,000 in statutory damages and $250,000 in attorney’s fees after finding that agents had no basis to suspect the company of wrongdoing.
39. In November 1986, Queen Elizabeth II wrote a secret letter to Sydney’s lord mayor and the city’s residents while visiting the Queen Victoria Building. Staff sealed it immediately under her instructions and secured it inside a glass case in a restricted area at the top of the building’s main dome. The envelope directs Sydney’s lord mayor to choose a suitable day in 2085, open it, and deliver her message to the city’s citizens. Its contents remain unknown.
40. In 2021, a bus-sized extreme ultraviolet lithography machine from Dutch company ASML cost about $150 million and helped manufacturers produce advanced computer chips. It contained 100,000 parts and 2 kilometers of cable, while delivering one required 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks, and three Boeing 747s. To create EUV light, the machine fired high-powered lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second. Six precision mirrors then guided that light through a patterned reticle to etch features only a few dozen atoms wide onto chips.
41 Little Bighorn Cost 42,000 Rounds
At the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory in 1876, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s regiment expended or lost about 42,000 rounds, a rough rate of one hit for every 840 rounds. Lakota and Cheyenne warriors captured some ammunition from cartridge belts and saddlebags, so the soldiers never fired every missing round, and their actual hit rate was higher. Many warriors remained between 300 and 1,200 yards away, while the Army gave its troops little marksmanship training and only about 20 practice rounds per year. Poor training and weak fire discipline played major roles in the cavalry’s defeat.
42. Methuselah, believed to be the world’s oldest aquarium fish, is at least 94 years old (as of 2026) and enjoys belly rubs. The 1.2-meter, 18.1-kilogram Australian lungfish arrived at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium from Australia in 1938, although her exact age remains unknown. Her caretakers believe she is female and say she also enjoys fresh, seasonal figs.
43. Eleonora’s falcons in Morocco imprison live birds for later meals by plucking their flight feathers and trapping them inside deep rock crevices. Researchers documented the behavior in 2014 on the Mogador Islands off Essaouira, where the falcons hunt migrating birds during their July to October nesting season. The researchers believe the falcons keep their prey alive for one or two days so it remains fresh, since dead birds dry out too quickly.
44. When American politician George Wallace became governor of Alabama in 1963, he promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” His “forever” lasted less than two decades. In 1979, Wallace renounced his segregationist past, called his attempt to block Black students from the University of Alabama wrong, and publicly asked Black Americans for forgiveness. He won a fourth term as governor on a liberal platform in 1982 and later appointed a record number of Black Americans to state positions.
45. Who, Me? was a top-secret, sulfurous, nonlethal chemical weapon developed during World War II by an MIT graduate named Ernest Crocker for the US Office of Strategic Services. It smelled strongly of fecal matter and came in pocket atomizers intended for French Resistance members to spray discreetly on German officers, humiliating them and demoralizing the occupying forces. Its volatile sulfur compounds often left the sprayer smelling as foul as the target. After only two weeks, the OSS declared the experiment a failure.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming
British writer Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap has run almost continuously in London’s West End since 1952, pausing only from March 2020 to May 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its contract forbids the rights holders from producing a film adaptation until the West End run has closed for at least six months. Producer John Woolf bought those rights in 1956, but he and his heirs have never been able to use them. Christie also asked that its source story, Three Blind Mice, remain unpublished in the UK while the play continued, although it appeared in a 1950 US collection.
47. In 1776, French queen Marie Antoinette informally adopted a poor five-year-old orphan named Francois-Michel Gagne after her carriage nearly ran him over. She later renamed him Armand. His grandmother consented, but Armand did not want to leave her; he screamed and kicked the queen and her attendants, and he later developed a poor relationship with his royal foster parents. After the French Revolution began in 1789, Armand reportedly embraced republicanism and joined the revolutionary army. He was killed at the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792.
48. In 1940, former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wartime government offered a framework for a united Ireland if neutral Ireland joined the Allies against Nazi Germany. Britain feared Germany might invade Ireland and use it as a route into mainland Britain. Chamberlain was prepared to force concessions from Northern Ireland, while Churchill favored persuasion. Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera rejected the offer and maintained neutrality, arguing that entering the war could trigger another Irish civil war.
49. Belgian king Leopold II, infamous for the atrocities committed under his rule in the Congo Free State, took a 16-year-old French prostitute named Caroline Lacroix as his mistress in 1899, when he was 65. They remained together for ten years, had two sons, and received widespread condemnation in Belgium. They married secretly in a religious ceremony five days before Leopold died in 1909. Because they never held a civil ceremony, Belgian law did not recognize the marriage.
50. For the final 20 years of his life, American actor Telly Savalas, best known for playing Kojak, lived at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel in Los Angeles. He became such a familiar presence at its bar that the hotel renamed it Telly’s. On January 22, 1994, Savalas died in his room from complications of prostate and bladder cancer, one day after his 72nd birthday.
RE: Fact #21 (Meredith Victory Carried 14, 000 Refugees) – Five babies being born during that crossing seems like a lot, even with 14, 000 people. I wonder if there was some selection bias where pregnant women were prioritized for getting on the ship.
The “women and children first” mentality might explain it; statistically, it’s likely a higher number of pregnant women were given spots.
RE: Fact #4 (Celebrity Worshippers Showed Lower Cognition) – There’s definitely a connection there, but I’d be interested to know why. Do people lose focus on other things because they’re pouring their energy into celebrity culture, or are people who are already struggling cognitively more likely to obsess over celebrities?
It’s basically an abstracted version of social engagement. Talking about what people we know are doing is a core human trait, we’re a tribal species, and we’re wired for complex social groups. Gossip is just a shortcut to trigger those same social reward centers without the interaction being ‘real, ‘ similar to how gaming rewards our brains. It makes sense that people who get heavily invested in celebrity lives might be falling into a dopamine loop. Just like someone playing games or slots obsessively, the people who get truly obsessed with gossip might see their mental performance drop as a result of that long-term feedback loop.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
RE: Fact #31 (Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult) – Sounds like they were a village that acted like fools just so the king would skip over them during his royal tours.
RE: Fact #26 (Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt) – I honestly thought that was just his name and ‘The Fat Controller’ was the nickname.
Yeah, it is his real name in both, but the British version leans into the ‘Fat Controller’ nickname.
RE: Fact #28 (Harald Became Norway’s Native-Born King) – Apparently, one of his earliest memories was attending FDR’s fourth inauguration.
RE: Fact #46 (The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming) – At the close of every show, the cast comes out to tell the audience how long it has been running. They explain that it’s lasted this long because nobody has spoiled the twist, and then they make everyone swear not to reveal the ending.
The movie ‘See How They Run’ features that exact moment.
RE: Fact #1 (Antenna Hiss Revealed Big-Bang Radiation) – I can see them standing there and thinking, “We’re going to need a much better way to clean this.”
RE: Fact #24 (Jordan Donated Entire Comeback Salary) – He also gave up his ownership interest in the Wizards just to return to the court, and then he donated that salary on top of it.
The owners promised they would give him his position back after he played, but they didn’t follow through.
RE: Fact #15 (IMAGE Reappeared After Twelve Years) – It really is a shame they lost contact again just a month later. They still aren’t entirely sure what went wrong. It wasn’t reporting any issues before it went silent initially, and there is no sign of damage or debris. When they reached it in 2018, the onboard computers were running and sending the right data. It acknowledged a few commands, then just went dark and hasn’t been heard from since. It must have been incredibly frustrating for the NASA team to get their hopes up and track down old equipment just to talk to it, only for it to vanish again after a few messages.
Maybe it just caught a glimpse of what was happening on Earth and decided to go back to sleep.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I’m not scared of the guy who recycled 177, 451 bottles. I’m scared of the guy who recycled the same one 177, 451 times.
RE: Fact #41 (Little Bighorn Cost 42, 000 Rounds) – Even ignoring the lost ammunition that drives the shots-per-hit number up, the Civil War required 200 to 500 rounds to hit one target, and those were slow-loading muskets. Custer had cased cartridges and could fire much faster, which leads to more ammo spent with fewer hits. The number of rounds per casualty has just gone up over time. In WW1 it was 10, 000 rounds, in WW2 it was 25, 000 to 45, 000, in Vietnam it hit 50, 000 to 200, 000, and in Iraq it was over 200, 000. So, 840 rounds per casualty actually seems right in line with the trend of technological improvement.
Well, in the Civil War, you had columns of soldiers standing in front of each other and firing volleys. Now we use automatic weapons for suppressing fire, which is meant to keep enemies pinned down behind cover rather than hitting them directly. There are also defensive tactics in play now that make hitting targets much harder.
RE: Fact #44 (George Wallace Renounced Segregationist Politics) – It seems like he never actually bought into those beliefs. It was just a cold political calculation to win over white blue-collar voters in Alabama, especially since he had more liberal views on racial equality earlier in his career.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I heard about a case where two cleaners kept feeding the same bottles into a recycling machine, taking them back out of the bin, and running them through again until they had 100 euros worth of deposit slips. They spent the whole night doing it, but when they tried to use the slips, the cashier got suspicious because nobody honestly accumulates that much on a single receipt. Of course, they did the whole thing right in front of security cameras, so they were charged with fraud and fired.
RE: Fact #27 (Sears Sold Mail-Order Machine Guns) – That 1917 military equipment catalog from Sears was wild. You could buy everything from Colt machine guns and pistols to uniforms and camping gear. They offered parcel-post delivery anywhere in the US, or even to soldiers in Europe. It wasn’t just for troops, either, anyone could buy from it. And the best part? It came with the standard Sears guarantee: if you weren’t perfectly satisfied, you could send it back for a full refund.
Since those were Colt machine guns, it had to be the ‘potato digger’ model, which was mostly for training. It’s unlikely many people actually bought one, it was probably just a way for them to dump surplus stock after they stopped production in 1916.
RE: Fact #7 (Bee Space Unlocked Modern Beekeeping) – Beekeeper here: bees treat “bee space” as more of a suggestion than a law. Sometimes we end up with “crazy comb” where they build across the frames instead of on the foundation. It rarely gets so bad you can’t get the frames out, but sometimes they get stuck together. If you catch it early, it’s best to just scrape the extra wax off and put it back; the bees will usually chew it up and rebuild it the right way. The real weirdness is the propolis. It’s essentially regurgitated tree sap, and they use it to glue down anything they can’t carry out, twigs, dead bugs, or even your hive tool if you leave it inside. I’ve had hives where I couldn’t move the entrance reducer bar at all because they’d sealed it shut with rock-hard resin.
They’ll cover anything they can’t chew through in propolis. I’ve seen them seal over dead lizards, mice, and snakes. Once, after a herd of cows knocked over a few of my hives, I saw them propolis over 5-inch gaps.
RE: Fact #9 (Feige Nearly Resigned Over Downey) – Marvel had a huge issue with their “Creative Committee” in New York. They were totally disconnected from the filmmaking process but would constantly meddle. There are plenty of stories about this, but the most obvious one is that they wanted to strip the music and those perfect needle-drop moments out of Guardians of the Galaxy.
People like Perlmutter, who is a well-documented bigot, usually don’t have a clue how art actually works.
RE: Fact #34 (Drug Candidates Face Ninety-Percent Failure) – That is why it’s so common to start a drug discovery campaign by screening millions of compounds. If you’re lucky enough to find a few thousand potential binders, almost all of them will still fail at some point.
RE: Fact #18 (The Good Place Concealed Twist) – The first season was fun and had a vaguely Shyamalan-esque vibe, but season two is what really makes the show special. It asks real questions: can people actually change? What do we owe each other? Do we have free will? It’s a goofy sitcom with something meaningful to say.
RE: Fact #45 (Who, Me? Stench Weapon Backfired) – This reminds me of the CIA’s weird plots to ruin Castro, like the plan to make his hair fall out so he’d lose his standing. They really had some bizarre, failed ideas to take him out.
RE: Fact #43 (Eleonora’s Falcons Keep Prey Alive) – It is funny to me that people think this is so dark. Humans have been doing this for centuries; we just have different methods for keeping our food captive. We also have a long history of keeping our own species captive, often with the intent to harm or kill them, not just eat them.
RE: Fact #16 (Japan’s Liberty-Sized Shafts Prevent Flooding) – Sure, but how much does it cost to ship the Statue of Liberty to Japan seven times a year?
RE: Fact #47 (Armand Joined France’s Revolutionary Army) – “This little unfortunate was nearly twenty in 1792; the fury of the people and the fear of being thought a favourite of the Queen’s had made him the most sanguinary terrorist of Versailles. He was killed at the battle of Jemappes”. It sounds like he might have done it to save his own neck, similar to how Philip Equality tried to survive by voting for his own cousin’s execution and changing his name.
RE: Fact #18 (The Good Place Concealed Twist) – There is a funny clip on YouTube of Tahani, Jason, and Janet finding out about the season finale twist.
RE: Fact #31 (Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult) – Gotham is still around, just south of Nottingham. And it’s pronounced like “goat-em.”
Even the local buses out that way have a little bat symbol on the destination signs.
RE: Fact #8 (Bean Victory Raised Ticket-Sneaking Suspicions) – I don’t remember what we actually went to see, but I definitely told my parents and my friends’ parents that we were headed to see Pacific Rim Uprising. We came home and raved about it, saying it was even better than the first one. About a week later, my dad went to see the movie himself and caught us in the lie immediately.
RE: Fact #10 (Nishiyama Onsen Ended Fifty-Two-Generation Ownership) – The idea of “continuous operation by the same lineage” is pretty misleading. Like many Japanese businesses, this inn kept it in the family by formally adopting adult employees whenever there wasn’t a biological heir. I’m not saying adopted people aren’t family, but adopting a man in his 20s or 30s isn’t the same thing as raising a child, and it’s certainly not continuing the same bloodline.
RE: Fact #38 (Jackson Games Defeated Secret Service) – People often leave out who actually wrote that. It was Loyd Blankenship, known online as The Mentor, who wrote the Hacker Manifesto back in 1986. The Secret Service saw a hacker writing about hacking and one agent even called GURPS Cyberpunk a handbook for computer crime. The company nearly went under and had to lay off half their staff, but they ended up printing The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service on the cover, which became their best marketing tool.
Reminds me of the marketing for Report From Iron Mountain: On The Possibility And Desirability Of Peace.
RE: Fact #7 (Bee Space Unlocked Modern Beekeeping) – The idea of destroying an entire hive just to get honey sounds terrible, so this guy really saved the craft.
That was the standard way for thousands of years. The classic hive shape you see in old art is called a skep, made from wound grass. It was basically a bottom-entry jar. When harvest time came, keepers would smash the whole thing, bees, comb, and all, which killed the colony. They had to catch new swarms every year. Those are considered pretty inhumane now and are illegal in a lot of places.
Man, and Utah’s flag is actually really nice. Now I won’t be able to look at it without picturing dead bee colonies.
RE: Fact #20 (Paper Decomposition Creates Old-Book Smell) – For those interested in the chemistry, vanillin, benzaldehyde, and furfural aren’t just byproducts of paper, they are commonly used in perfumery as well.
RE: Fact #46 (The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming) – I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan, so I have to weigh in. You know that classic joke, ‘the butler did it’? It’s actually from the 1800s, way before Christie started writing. She never actually used a butler as the murderer. Maybe a killer would pose as one, or the butler was guilty of something else, but she never made the butler the culprit. It was considered cheating. In the Golden Age of mysteries, it was a game of wits between the writer and the reader. The butler is a ‘cheat’ character because they have keys to every room, access to everything, and a valid excuse to be anywhere at any time. Of course, the butler did it, that’s why it was a cliché. 🫡
The movie ‘Clue’ supposedly filmed a fourth ending where Tim Curry’s character, the butler, is the killer.
Exactly! That’s my favorite ending, but even then, in true Christie fashion, he’s not the actual murderer, he was Mr. Boddy all along, and the guy who turned up dead was his butler. I love that movie. That line about having ‘flames on the side of my face’ was an ad-lib, and it was just too good to cut.
RE: Fact #50 (Telly Savalas Called Sheraton-Universal Home) – Having your 72nd birthday party at your own local hangout, surrounded by friends, and then passing away the very next day… as far as celebrity exits go, that’s about as poetic as it gets.
RE: Fact #22 (Oney Judge Escaped Presidential Enslavement) – When Pennsylvania introduced laws to gradually free enslaved people at a certain age, Washington started rotating his enslaved staff out of the state before they hit that age just to keep them enslaved.
Interestingly, an English judge once ruled that simply breathing English air made a person free, which really jump-started the abolitionist movement. It raises the question of how slavery could be considered illegal in England but still practiced in places like Jamaica.
RE: Fact #36 (Jimmy Carter Federally Legalized Homebrewing) – Most alcohol regulations are just nonsense meant to protect distributors. My favorite example is when a tasting room attached to a distillery has to buy their own products back from a distributor just to offer tastings.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I knew someone who drank an 18-pack of Coors Banquet every day. He used to drop a piece of pea gravel into every can before crushing it just to get a bit more cash at the recycling center.
that trick doesn’t really work. I worked at a salvage yard for years, and we weren’t born yesterday. We processed so many cans every day that we knew exactly how much a bag of crushed or uncrushed cans should weigh. We knew what to listen for when we shook the bags, and we knew people liked to bring them in after a rainstorm to add weight. We never just weighed the bags; we dumped them into large pre-weighed wire baskets so we could drain the water. We could tell by the feel of the bag if there was junk like sand, rocks, or dirt inside. We would dock them for that. If a 10lb wire basket filled with 10 bags of cans weighed 60lbs and clearly contained pebbles, we’d dock 20lbs for the debris and 10lbs for the basket, paying for only 30lbs. Take it or leave it. If they didn’t like it, they could dig through the baskets to repack their cans, we didn’t care, especially since they were trying to pull a fast one. Plus, we bought those cans at a loss anyway. We only buy them to get people in the door so they’ll look at the prices for the stuff that actually makes us money, like copper, brass, electric motors, and steel. I don’t mean to sound snarky, but people who pull these scams are just thieves, plain and simple.
RE: Fact #26 (Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt) – So, what did they call the thin controller? He didn’t pop up as often, but he was definitely there.
You actually had the answer: The Thin Controller, who ran the narrow-gauge engines in the books, was based on Mr. Edward Thomas, the manager of the Talyllyn Railway.
RE: Fact #37 (Ugly-Law Arrest Collapsed Over Definition) – Haha, I would be absolutely cooked under a law like that since I am old, blind, and toothless.
RE: Fact #15 (IMAGE Reappeared After Twelve Years) – I love the idea of releasing data for crowdsourcing. Whether it is ocean mapping or space exploration, there is so much data being gathered that we should make it more accessible. There is no telling what else might be found.
Plenty of NASA programs already put their raw data out there. Amateur scientists have actually made some cool discoveries by digging through it.
RE: Fact #5 (Buzz Aldrin Saw Cosmic-Ray Flashes) – I actually did a tour of the Kennedy Space Center once and had an astronaut as a guide. When it was time for questions, I asked how hard it was to sleep in space, and he brought this up.
RE: Fact #10 (Nishiyama Onsen Ended Fifty-Two-Generation Ownership) – In a way, this is probably a relief for the family. Nobody should feel forced to run a hotel just because they happened to be born into it.
RE: Fact #33 (Henryk Siwiak: 9/11’s Sole Homicide) – He’s like the ghost of September 11. He isn’t one of the 2, 977, he isn’t on any memorial, and he wasn’t mentioned in ceremonies, yet he wasn’t spared by that day either. The attacks killed his job site, forced him across the city, pulled away the detectives who should have worked his case, and left everyone around him too scared to even open a door. He died from a gunshot, but that day basically handed him to his killer. He deserves better than just being a piece of trivia. Henryk Siwiak was born in Kraków in 1955. He was an inspector for the Polish State Railways until he was laid off. At 46, he was married to Ewa, a high school biology teacher, and had two kids, Gabriela and Adam. He came to New York to visit his sister, Lucyna, in Far Rockaway. Even without a work permit, he stayed to take whatever jobs he could, sending money back to help his family. His plan was simple: save enough to go back to Poland and build a house for them. He never really mastered English. His sister warned him it was dangerous, but he didn’t listen because he liked it there. On the morning of September 11, he was working a construction job in Lower Manhattan and watched a plane hit the towers. After the site shut down, he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to catch a train back to Queens. Needing to provide for his family, he searched for work that same afternoon. He found a cleaning job at a Pathmark in Brooklyn. To fill out the paperwork, he went to an employment agency in Bay Ridge. The agency owner was devastated, waiting to hear if her husband had survived the attacks. She didn’t know yet that he was already dead. Henryk, a stranger who barely spoke the language, stayed with her and tried to offer some comfort, telling her things would be okay, even though his own life had just been upended. He got the job. He went home and told his wife he was alive, but he went out that night anyway because he needed the money. His landlady gave him directions, but he ended up three miles away from the store. He was wearing camouflage gear, which might have made people suspicious on that specific night. He walked toward the wrong area of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Neighbors heard an argument, followed by shots. He was hit in the lung. He managed to crawl to a stoop and ring a doorbell, but the woman inside was terrified and didn’t open it. Understandably, nobody was opening doors that night. He died in the street. Because of the chaos, the police didn’t have the resources to process the scene properly, and the investigation stalled from the start. Some think he was mistaken for a terrorist, others think it was a botched robbery. His case remains unsolved. He was a good man who just wanted to build a home for his wife and kids. Rest in peace, Henryk Siwiak.
I wrote a long piece on here about an unrelated but maybe equally famous 9/11 case. During my research, I concluded that the average Manhattanite was actually more likely to be killed on 9/11 than they were to be murdered in 2001.
RE: Fact #13 (Cornelis Drebbel Took King Underwater) – The final model carrying 16 people with 6 oars is much larger than I would have expected.
How on earth did they seal the ports for the oars? That seems impossible.
RE: Fact #47 (Armand Joined France’s Revolutionary Army) – Marie Antoinette actually took in four children. One of them, Jean Amilcar, was a young boy from Senegal given to her as a gift when he was six. She freed and adopted him, but unlike the others, he wasn’t kept at court; he was sent straight to boarding school. When she was imprisoned and couldn’t pay his tuition, he was kicked out. Luckily, a former teacher took him in and got the revolutionary government to cover his schooling since they supported those who had been enslaved by the old regime. He was a talented artist and got into the Liancourt Academy at 15, but he died of an illness later that same year.
RE: Fact #42 (Methuselah Is Oldest Aquarium Fish) – There was another fish of the same species at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago that lived to be 107 before it died in 2017. A museum docent showed it to me when I took my kids there years ago.
RE: Fact #29 (Doctors Once Withheld Cancer Diagnoses) – ‘So, Doc, regarding those blood results from last week…’ ‘DEFINITELY NOT CANCER, I CAN TELL YOU THAT MUCH.’
RE: Fact #39 (Queen Elizabeth’s Letter Opens 2085) – That is the most sensationalized clickbait way to describe the fact that Queen Elizabeth II left a letter in a 100-year time capsule.
It would be cool if it were some earth-shattering reveal, but it will probably just be a nice note about her memories of the city and the country. You are exactly right.
RE: Fact #19 (Sarah Wakeman Fought As Lyons) – Wartime medical tents must have been incredibly chaotic. It seems almost certain that someone noticed her secret during her treatment or when they buried her. Maybe leaving her buried under her pseudonym was just a lack of care, but I prefer to think it was a deliberate act of kindness by someone who respected both the woman and the soldier.
RE: Fact #32 (Australia Released Myxoma Against Rabbits) – So the 0.2% who made it through were basically invincible super-rabbits. They probably started a ruling dynasty that held power for 20 years.
RE: Fact #28 (Harald Became Norway’s Native-Born King) – Norway was actually under Swedish kings until 1905, when they gained independence and chose a Danish prince as their own monarch. That king was Harald’s grandfather. Harald’s father was born in 1903, right before the family took the throne, so Harald (born in 1937) was the first king born into that new line of succession.
RE: Fact #14 (Columbus Became America’s Fast-Food Laboratory) – London, Ontario, serves the same purpose for Canada. Tim Hortons loves to test new menu items there before taking them nationwide.
RE: Fact #43 (Eleonora’s Falcons Keep Prey Alive) – They time their breeding for when the young of the year, small birds from northern Europe, are migrating across the Mediterranean for the first time, providing plenty of easy food. Their range is basically limited to the Mediterranean, and they hunt over the sea where there is nowhere to hide. Storing live birds is likely a response to big migration days; it ensures they have food left for their chicks on days when winds aren’t right and no migrants are crossing. Remember the name: Eleonora’s Falcon.
RE: Fact #35 (Highsmith’s Lovers Defied Her Antisemitism) – Learning about her is a real rollercoaster. First I thought of her as a great suspense writer, then I learned she was a trailblazer in lesbian fiction, and then I found out she was hateful and a pretty awful person to have in your life. She also stalked women, was obsessed with snails, and made a lot of her own furniture.
RE: Fact #32 (Australia Released Myxoma Against Rabbits) – I used to see rabbits suffering from myxomatosis whenever I visited my cousins in Devon. It was a horrible thing to witness and such a cruel way to handle a cull.
RE: Fact #37 (Ugly-Law Arrest Collapsed Over Definition) – It is wild to think about sending people to fight in a war, only to make it illegal for them to be in public if they came home with combat injuries.
Exactly. That is actually part of why the book First Blood was written; the author wanted to call out how poorly veterans were being treated in America.
RE: Fact #30 (Nakajima Lost Weight Inside Godzilla) – I’ve always wanted to be Godzilla. Losing weight by wearing a heavy costume sounds like just another way to get in on the fun.
RE: Fact #38 (Jackson Games Defeated Secret Service) – Interesting fact: Fallout was originally meant to be a GURPS game, but Steve Jackson had some issues with it, including one about Vault Boy, I think.
RE: Fact #19 (Sarah Wakeman Fought As Lyons) – “She contracted chronic diarrhea of which she eventually died on June 19, 1864.” It is easy to forget that we aren’t that far removed from a time when illness wiped out a huge portion of military forces.
RE: Fact #20 (Paper Decomposition Creates Old-Book Smell) – You named three common ones, but there are so many more involved in that process. Some of them are pretty nasty, and a few are even potentially carcinogenic.
RE: Fact #5 (Buzz Aldrin Saw Cosmic-Ray Flashes) – I’ve had radiation therapy for my brain, and when the beam crossed my eye, I saw these strange, fluorescent ultraviolet flashes. It was surreal. Also, 1/10 would not recommend being bolted to a table while they shoot radiation at your brain.
RE: Fact #2 (Dopamine Shopping Sites Deliver Nothing) – This feels a lot like those simulator games where you do a job just to get the virtual reward.
RE: Fact #47 (Armand Joined France’s Revolutionary Army) – The term ‘adopted’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It was really more like fosterage; he didn’t receive any noble title or the Bourbon name. She could bring a five-year-old into court and support his family without making him royalty in any legal sense, which makes the whole situation even weirder.
RE: Fact #25 (Emperor Franz Joseph Vetoed Rampolla) – Incredible move by Pius to pull the ladder up like that.
RE: Fact #5 (Buzz Aldrin Saw Cosmic-Ray Flashes) – I’m not sure I could ever stop being creeped out by the idea of radiation particles literally passing through my eyes.
Trillions of neutrinos pass through your body every second, too. They aren’t even massless like light, they’re just incredibly tiny.
RE: Fact #18 (The Good Place Concealed Twist) – “Holy mother forking shirtballs.” That is easily one of the best twist endings I have ever seen.
Someone told me to watch it without knowing anything, but I didn’t take that as a sign that there was a major twist. My jaw hit the floor. It was handled so perfectly and didn’t feel forced at all.
RE: Fact #32 (Australia Released Myxoma Against Rabbits) – The Australian ecosystem is a total mess. Invasive species are doing their best to destroy entire food chains, while the local wildlife is stuck trying to kill off the main problem.
RE: Fact #12 (Frisson Extends Beyond Musical Goosebumps) – I saw Nathaniel Rateliff perform with the Colorado Symphony and had goosebumps almost the entire time. It was an experience unlike anything else I have ever had.
Nathaniel Rateliff is on my bucket list! Seeing him with a symphony sounds incredible.
RE: Fact #40 (ASML’s $150-Million Machine Blasts Tin) – I am lucky enough to be on the team that builds these. They are the most advanced machines humans have ever designed. You should also check out the work Zeiss does with the optics. It is wild.
RE: Fact #48 (Ireland Rejected Britain’s Unity Proposal) – This doesn’t really capture the political climate of the time or why there was so much hesitation to accept the deal, and it definitely exaggerates the scale of the offer. It felt a lot like the pre-WWI Home Rule offers that were constantly promised and then taken back. Having British troops in Ireland while the government was still cozying up to the Ulster Volunteers was a non-starter.
Also, Ireland didn’t really have much of an army to speak of back then, or for quite a while after independence.
RE: Fact #14 (Columbus Became America’s Fast-Food Laboratory) – That explains why we have so many competing fast-food and gas station chains that usually stay out of each other’s territory. I love my incredibly average city, it is a fantastic place to live, but a super boring place to visit.
RE: Fact #26 (Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt) – Just to be clear, he’s called Sir Topham Hatt in the books and the UK TV series, too. They didn’t just make up that name for the US version.
RE: Fact #13 (Cornelis Drebbel Took King Underwater) – I bet it is a very short list of monarchs who have ever been on a submarine.
RE: Fact #11 (Veronika Became First Tool-Using Cow) – There is a highway near me bordered by cow paddocks, and you can always see cow hair stuck to the barbed wire fences. Cows definitely know how to scratch themselves.
RE: Fact #22 (Oney Judge Escaped Presidential Enslavement) – She managed to reach New Hampshire and lived the rest of her life there, though she was never legally a free woman.
RE: Fact #3 (Victorinox Sales Collapsed After 9/11) – When I was a kid on a flight before 9/11, I found a brand-new Swiss Army knife in the seat pocket. It was the Victorinox Champion model that actually came with a magnifying glass. That was one of my best finds ever and I think I still have it tucked away. Every time I fly now, I still have this tiny urge to check the seat pocket for lost treasures.