Random Fact Sheet #219 – 40 Entertaining Facts That Will Make You Laugh and Learn

Separating bananas slows down the ripening process.

2. Food Network’s Guy Fieri didn't register his Times Square Restaurant's internet domain, so a random person bought it and made a fake website.

3. Dave Grohl's hometown of Warren, Ohio honored him with gigantic 902 lb drumsticks in 2012. The massive pair broke the Guinness World Record.

4. Paul McCartney used the pseudonym “Bernard Webb” on the song, “Woman” to prove that his music would be successful no matter who took credit for it and sure enough, “Woman” went to #14 on the U.S. pop charts and #28 in the UK.

5. In the early 2000’s students at an elite Japanese university formed 'Super Free', a social club revolving around meticulously planning and regularly executing gang rape. They targeted women from out-of-town schools using cult techniques. The rape club made huge profits by making it a pyramid scheme for its members.

Art Scholl, the pilot who was hired to do inflight camera work for Top Gun, died while filming the scene leading to Goose's death. His plane spun through its recovery altitude, at which time he radioed "I have a problem... I have a real problem". The film is dedicated to his memory.

7. Europeans traditionally swam the breaststroke, while Native Americans swam the front crawl. When two Native Americans won an 1844 swimming competition in England, newspapers criticized their barbaric, "un-European" form. Europeans refused to use the faster front crawl for decades.

8. Chinese armed forces use crossbows at all unit levels to stop persons carrying explosives without risk of causing detonation.

9. People with schizophrenia are not fooled by the Charlie Chaplin Optical Illusion.

10. In 1964, a 49-year-old man named John Thomas Doyle left a puzzling suicide note before he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. It read "Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache."

California Penal Codes 837, 839, and 844 allows citizens to round up a posse Wild Wild West style and kick in the front door of someone's house to arrest them for committing a felony, whether or not a police officer is present for the arrest.

12. The entire declaration of independence of Indonesia reads: We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters which concern the transfer of power and other things will be executed by careful means and in the shortest possible time. Djarkata, 17 August 1945.

13. Dire wolves' extinction has been related to their inability to compete for prey against faster wolves, making them scavengers.

14. When a Ford plant pulled out of Green Island, New York the town seized it's water-powered electrical turbine by eminent domain and now it provides electric to its residents for about 40% cheaper than surrounding areas. Most residents have electric heat.

15. A man received an emergency satellite locator beacon as a present, didn't read the instructions and ended up triggering 9 false alarm Search and Rescue deployments over the course of 12 weeks.

A California man driving in an HOV lane claimed the Articles of Incorporation of his business, which had been placed unbuckled on the driver’s seat, constituted a person, citing a California law that defines a person as "natural persons and corporations". The courts ruled against him, citing "common sense."

17. An American schoolgirl named Samantha Smith became famous in the USSR after she wrote a letter to the newly appointed Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov in 1982, and received a personal reply which included an invitation to visit the Soviet Union, which she accepted.

18. Stephen King wrote the book Misery because his fans complained about The Eyes of the Dragon, which was written for his children, not being a horror book.

19. Coyotes and badgers sometimes hunt together. The badger digs up the prey and the coyote runs it down.

20. In July 1984, President Ronald Reagan called ice cream "a nutritious and wholesome food" and established National Ice Cream Month.

Rock musician Chuck Berry created Berry Park in Missouri, his own rock n roll themed amusement park with a guitar-shaped swimming pool, in response to the whites-only country clubs from where he was once excluded.

22. Lisa Montgomery was a Kansas woman who in 2004, strangled a pregnant woman, cut the baby from her womb, then proceeded to show the baby off as her own to her friends and family.

23. Due to their small brains, koalas are unable to perform complex, unfamiliar tasks such as eat leaves off of flat surfaces.

24. "That orange couch" from Television series The Wire was originally found in a dumpster by the set crew and used in the Pilot. A month later when the show was picked up, they spent $5,000 building a new couch from scratch because someone threw out the old one.

25. Morgan Freeman played a singing vampire obsessed with vegetables on The Electric Company in the 1970s.