Random Fact Sheet #183 – 45 Quirkiest Trivia Yet

In 2006 Prince did a 'Willy Wonka' and made Universal hide 14 purple tickets—seven in the U.S. and seven internationally—inside his latest album, 3121. Fans who found a purple ticket were invited to attend a private performance at Prince's Los Angeles home.

27. Scientists proposed a “Minimal Turing Test” where you get to use only one word to convince others you are human and not a machine. The single word that people found most likely to distinguish a human from a machine based on a new study was the word “poop”.

28. While hospitalized after a 2008 plane crash, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker was in so much pain that he repeatedly called friends and offered them $1 million to assist him in committing suicide. Hospital staff eventually took his phone away.

29. Scientists have found cancer in a 1.7 million-year-old foot bone and a 2 million-year-old spine from two ancient hominin specimens in South Africa. Before these finds, the oldest dated cancer in a human was only 120,000 years old.

30. An FDA study requested by the military found 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were still safe and effective even 15 years after the expiration date. Expiration dates don’t really indicate a point at which the medication is no longer effective or unsafe to use.

Prince backed out of singing with Michael Jackson on Bad, because of the line “your butt is mine.” Prince said “Now, who is going to sing that to whom? Cause [he] sure ain’t singing that to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to [him].”

32. Chickens produced in the US has been banned in the EU since 1997 as it is washed in a strong chlorine solution. The chlorine washing is popular in the US due to poor hygiene standards in abattoirs.

33. In 2017, undercover officers from two different precincts in Detroit tried to arrest each other in a drug sting. Both precincts had undercover officers as drug dealers/buyers and they didn't know about each other. When they tried to deal drugs with each other, guns were drawn and a fight started as both of them claimed to be the police.

34. In 1945, a school dropout and self-taught electrical engineer named Percy Spencer was working at Raytheon. Once when he stepped in front of a magnetron, a device that powers radars, he noticed that chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Later that year, he filed a patent for the first microwave oven.

35. Patton Oswalt once stood absolutely motionless during an entire 3-minute opening scene on the sitcom "King of Queens," and no one noticed it until years later.

A deer's eyes are more sensitive to light than ours. That's why when a deer is suddenly struck by the beam of a car’s headlights, its fully dilated pupils become blinded by the abundance of light, so it cannot see anything at all. This is why they just stand still in front of an incoming car.

37. The reason the film ‘Selma’ didn't use MLK’s actual speeches is because Steven Spielberg has the sole film rights to all of MLK's speeches which he bought in 2009. Ava DuVernay wrote speeches that were plausible, but different enough to avoid a copyright battle.

38. After "Rocky IV," a joke circulated around Hollywood that Rocky had run out of earthly opponents and would have to fight an alien if a fifth film was made. That joke inspired the script for "Predator."

39. Charles Darwin and his wife were first cousins. They had 10 kids of which only 7 made it to adulthood. Worried that his marriage had something to do with the deaths, he began to experiment with plants. He learned that with any kind of breeding, it's better to cross-breed than to keep relatives together.

40. There is a small café named La Petite Syrah in France that sells coffee to rude customers for €7 while polite customers get coffee for €1.40.

A man named Dean Karnazes can run without ever getting tired due to his exponentially high lactate threshold. He was able to run a Marathon in the south pole at -25°C and run for three consecutive nights before having to stop for sleep.

42. Wyatt Earp was the last surviving participant of the OK Corral shootout, dying in 1929, aged 80. He'd held many jobs throughout his career, one of which was as an enforcer at a brothel. In his later years, he’d consulted on Hollywood westerns and got to know various actors and directors.

43. Tom Hanks refused to get paid for his roles in Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan, preferring to take percentages of the movies’ worldwide total gross instead. He got almost $60 million from Forrest Gump and between $30 million and $40 million from Saving Private Ryan.

44. There have been several cases whereby identical twins are acquitted of crimes even though one of them is a definite guilty as identical twins have almost identical DNA and legal system cannot afford to punish the wrong twin for the crime.

45. Due to a 4-year-old boy misunderstanding his mother, young children diagnosed with cystic fibrosis are taught to say "65 roses" to help them pronounce the condition.