Random Fact Sheet #161 – 40 Unpredictable Facts That Will Amaze You

A New York Judge named Robert Restaino in 2017 jailed 46 people when a cell phone rang in court and no one took responsibility.

2. Before committing suicide with gas, British composer Peter Warlock locked his cat outside so that it wouldn't die with him.

3. Auguste Deter, the first woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, could not recite her own name. She instead would just repeat "I have lost myself." ("Ich hab mich verloren")

4. The Donner party refused food from Native Americans who then kept their distance when they witnessed the Donner party resort to cannibalism.

5. American actor Humphrey Bogart stood up for Lena Horne when her Hollywood neighbors tried to kick her out because she was black. He said “if anyone bothers you, please let me know.”

During the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, Sacha Baron Cohen, who wore a jockstrap and wings as Bruno, crash-landed on Eminem's lap, buttocks aloft. Eminem, who left the ceremony in disgust, returned to his hotel room and laughed for 3 hours. He later revealed that it was mutually staged.

7. After China made a ripoff of American cartoon "The Amazing World of Gumball", the "Gumball" creators added the ripoff characters to the show as a group of money-grubbing copycats.

8. In 2016, Disney sold the streaming rights for the original Star Wars films to Turner Broadcasting until 2024. Now that Disney is planning to start a streaming service, they have repeatedly been asking for the rights back but Turner has refused every time.

9. Detroit has the worst 911 response time in America, with police and EMS taking over an hour to show up. In 2013, despite numerous 911 calls, police arrived 90 minutes later to find Stacey Hightower had been murdered by an intruder. Her mother sued the city of Detroit, but they were bankrupt.

10. Freddie Mercury held a party in New Orleans in 1978, which featured nude waiters and waitresses, a man biting heads off live chickens, naked models wrestling in a liver pit, and dwarves walking around with trays of cocaine strapped to their heads.

75% of the world's food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species.

12. In 1974, Jimmy Carter gave an alumni speech at the University of Georgia Law School. Instead of honoring the alumni, he delivered a speech attacking the injustice in the judicial system so mercilessly that Hunter S. Thompson later named him as one of the three meanest people on Earth.

13. Heartbreak can cause severe physical pain and nausea. This is believed to be part of the survival instinct. The "social-attachment system" uses the "pain system" to encourage humans to maintain their close social relationships by causing pain when those relationships are lost.

14. During the development of arcade game Space Harrier, the president of SEGA insisted that if the graphics were done, a game was ready for release. To properly finish the game, the lead designer rigged a secret switch to the bottom of his desk that would mess up the colors whenever giving a demonstration.

15. Due to the explosive popularity following the release of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, the cast was thrust into stardom so quickly that when Harrison Ford went to a record store to buy an album one day, enthusiastic fans tore half his shirt off.

During the 2015 active shooter incident at the Navy facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Staff Sergeant David Wyatt, one of four slain Marines, directed his junior troops to clear a nearby neighborhood park that was packed with children. They rounded up all of the children and hunkered down in a building nearby.

17. In the shanty "Drunken Sailer," one response to "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?" is "Put him in the bed with the captain's daughter." The Captain's Daughter is another name for the Cat o' Nine Tails, a multi-tailed whip.

18. Jingle Bells is actually a Thanksgiving song, written about sleigh racing.

19. In English, a ‘French Exit’ is to sneak out of a party without telling anyone. In French, it’s known as ‘partir à l’anglaise’—to leave the English way.

20. NBC refused to produce a Seinfeld episode wherein the script—George Costanza got in trouble for saying he’s never seen a black person ever order a salad.

A shogun of Japan named Tsunayoshi Tokugawa loved dogs so much that he set laws for dogs in place such as making it a capital crime for harming a dog and saved over 50,000 dogs from the streets, placing them in kennels begrudgingly funded by citizens of the capital city of Edo.

22. Ninjas didn't wear black masks. The mask associated with ninjas is actually an amalgamation of how a thief dressed in Japan. Ninjas also didn't use shuriken (throwing stars). These were used by Samurai swordsmen.

23. Norse explorer Erik The Red who discovered Greenland, called it Greenland in spite of its ice cover, because people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name, and used it as a trick to lure settlers to Greenland.

24. British writer Virginia Woolf killed herself by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into the River Ouse.

25. In 2017, Harvard scientists managed to store a GIF animation of a galloping horse in the DNA of bacteria.