Random Fact Sheet #197 – 45 Unconventional Facts To Get You Excited

Elvis Presley was a huge Monty Python fan. He would watch Python all night. He would learn and recite them. Took the tapes on his plane. He would call people Squire from the "Nudge Nudge" sketch.

27. Scientists used Sunflowers near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear accident, to extract radioactive cesium from contaminated ponds nearby. This process was again used in 2011 at Fukushima to extract radiation from the nearby communities.

28. Parasocial Relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person pours emotions and effort into the relationship and the other doesn't know the first exists.

29. Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it.

30. Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff wrote a novel, City of Thieves, about 2 people surviving the Nazi onslaught in Russia. This novel was later the "major artistic inspiration" for the hit video game The Last of Us.

Because regular air is toxic at high pressures, deep sea divers live on a mix of helium and oxygen, meaning they live and speak with a squeaky helium voice for around a month while working.

32. Keanu Reeve’s first name Keanu is Hawaiian, Ke’Anu meaning “Cool breeze over the mountains, but almost went with Chuck Spadina as his stage name when starting out in Hollywood at his agent's request.

33. Luz Long was a German competitor against Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Owens was later quoted saying “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four karat friendship that I felt for Luz Long.” Owens was the best man at his son’s wedding.

34. After 3 years at Harvard, American computer programmer Gabe Newell dropped out to join Microsoft in 1983. He later said: "I learned more in 3 months at Microsoft than in my entire time at Harvard."

35. When the Romanov family was executed in 1918 the daughters Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria survived the initial gunfire because they had over 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds) of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which the bullets ricocheted off. They were subsequently killed with bayonets.

Aristotle observed that fossils of seashells in rocks resembled those found on beaches. He inferred that the fossils in rocks were formed by organisms, and he reasoned that the positions of land and sea had been changing slowly since ancient times. Leonardo da Vinci agreed with this reasoning.

37. 1 gram of uranium 235 has 19,870,900,000 calories and would take over 50 million hours of cycling to burn off.

38. The murderer Dr. Crippen fled to Quebec from London in 1910 after being investigated for the murder of his wife. The Chief Inspector of the case Walter Dew was alerted and reached Quebec before Crippen. Dew greeted Crippen as he got off of his ship and promptly arrested him.

39. The phrase "Let the cat out of the bag" originated in the late middle ages. Con artists would put a cat in a bag but say it was a piglet. It was normal for buyers to agree on a price without looking inside first. This later gave rise to laws giving rights to inspect a product before purchase.

40. In 2014, The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation released a statistic, which states 8 out of every 10 law enforcement members are overweight.

Bats compete with one another for food by jamming each other's sonar signals that they use to hunt insects.

42. The artist Camille Corot is one of the most forged artists ever. He had a lazy attitude towards copies. He would sign replicas and even loan his works to professional copiers. Efforts to stop this by publicizing his art backfired, when forgers used the catalogs as guides to refine their fakes.

43. Sea Stars will purposely detach an arm as a means of asexual reproduction and the new Sea Star will be an exact genetic replica. In fact, some species do this as a dominant form of reproduction.

44. Major General Peter Conover Hains is believed to be the only person to have served in both the American Civil War and World War 1. He retired at the mandatory retirement at the age of 64 but was recalled to active duty out of retirement at the age of 77 in 1917 to serve in World War 1 as an engineer.

45. There's a Swedish eSports team named Silver Snipers where all of the members are between 62 and 81. Playing Counterstrike online has helped them to improve their mental agility.