Random Fact Sheet #131 – 40 Offbeat Facts You Won’t Believe

After the “The Walkie-Talkie” building in London was finished, due to its weird concave design, it unintentionally melted cars and changed weather patterns. It focused a beam of light that was 6 times brighter than sunlight on to the pavement below which heated to nearly 250°F at certain spots.

2. Tech companies often test new products in New Zealand because they’re an ethnically diverse, tech-savvy, and English-speaking nation, yet still relatively isolated. If a product is a flop there, the news is unlikely to spread quickly to the rest of the world and damage a company’s reputation.

3. In 1982, a South Korean man named Woo Bum-kon snapped and went on a murder rampage. He ended up killing 56 people. He snapped after his girlfriend woke him up trying to swat a fly on his chest when he was asleep.

4. The phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” isn’t a line from Shakespeare. It’s a paraphrase from a play by William Congreve. The full line is, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

5. Continually getting promoted until you reach the point of incompetence compared to your peers is called the Peter Principle.

Microwaves use the 2.4 GHz frequency to cook your food which is the same frequency that WIFI uses. This is why microwaves can sometimes cause WIFI interference.

7. In China, if you hit someone with your car you pay for their medical care. Killing someone, however, is a onetime fine. For this reason, people have gone back to kill someone they accidentally hit.

8. The word “Nonchalant” has no opposite. There’s no “chalant,” just “nonchalant.” This is the only word that only has a negative form in the English language.

9. Walt Disney often visited Disneyland in disguise; wearing old clothes and a straw farmer’s hat to avoid attention to himself. He would sit on rides and time them to make sure operators didn’t rush Disneyland visitors.

10. Senator Hugo Black who originally drafted ‘The Fair Labor Standards Act’ in 1932, which is responsible for the 40-hour workweek, originally proposed 30-hour workweek but was met with stiff resistance.

There has been a Raisin Cartel managed by the US federal government since 1949. It would steal raisins, by force even, from farmers to keep the prices high. It finally got taken down by the Supreme Court in 2015.

12. Moscow street dogs display specialized behaviors that differentiate them from domesticated dogs and wolves. The street dog pack leaders tend to be the most intelligent rather than the strongest, and they tend to deploy their cuter members first, as they are more successful in begging for food from people.

13. In 2012, rumors began circulating on the Iranian Internet that Pepsi planned to use powerful lasers to shine the image of their logo on the Moon’s surface. Thousands of Iranians climbed onto their roofs to stare at the Moon. When nothing happened, some bought Coca-Cola out of spite.

14. Japan has the largest organized crime group in the world called Yamaguchi Gumi that is worth $80 billion. By contrast, Sinaloa, Mexico’s largest drug cartel, was worth $3 billion.

15. The iPhone didn't work when they demonstrated it for the first time, but Steve Jobs made it look like it did by doing things in the right order. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order that made the phone look as if it worked.'

A study conducted by the University of Queensland has concluded that “extreme” music such as Heavy Metal can positively influence those experiencing anger by regulating sadness and enhancing positive emotions.

17. When Pablo Escobar’s daughter wanted a unicorn, he bought her a horse and stapled a cone to its head and wings to its back. The horse died from an infection.

18. When Marco Polo passed through Sumatra, he saw an animal, which he thought was a unicorn. He said it was a combination of a wild boar, a buffalo, and an elephant. The animal he was describing was actually a rhinoceros.

19. When Segway, the American company which manufactures self-balancing personal transportation devices, sued a Chinese company named Ninebot for selling knockoff units and patent infringement, Ninebot acquired Segway in 2015.

20. Budapest was once two cities, Buda and Pest. They merged in 1873.

Hitler did not learn of the allied D-day landings as they happened but only when he woke up at noon the next day. His staff did not dare wake him up because he had been up till 3 am chatting with friends at his residence.

22. The four vultures in Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ were both designed after and originally supposed to be voiced by ‘The Beatles.’

23. Ron Jeremy was a teacher before going into Porn and holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education.

24. Research has found that dye in blue M&M's repairs rats' spinal injuries when injected into them. It also turns them blue.

25. Special buses were used by Nazi’s to transport mentally disabled people. The buses had their exhaust fed directly into the passenger compartment, in order to kill the occupants.