Random Fact Sheet #29 – A Collection of 35 Amazing Random Facts

In 2004, a Wal-Mart was built on a section of Teotihuacan. Ancient artifacts were shipped off to dumps by workers who found them on the site.

2. The intended use of Rubber bullets is to fire at the ground so that the round bounces up and hits the target on the legs, causing pain but not injury.

3. Jeff Daniels only got paid $50,000 for his role in Dumb and Dumber, while Jim Carrey got paid $7 million.

4. There's a plant called the TomTato which is a cherry tomato plant with potatoes as roots. It yields large quantities of both tomatoes and spuds.

5. When a factory worker from Wonka was asked about the production of Nerds candy, he said: "Basically we start off with a sugar crystal and we just keep coating it with more sugar."

Researchers at MIT studied phantom traffic jams (jams that arise in the absence of any obstacles) and found they are inevitable at a certain vehicle density threshold. The waves of traffic are named Jamitons and are similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions.

7. Both of Geddy Lee's (lead singer/bassist of Rush) parents were Holocaust survivors. First imprisoned at Auschwitz, they were separated to Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. They found each other after Allied liberation, married, and emigrated to Canada.

8. An Argentine farmer named Pedro Ureta planted 7,000 trees to make a guitar shaped forest as a tribute to his late wife Graciela.

9. The most senior officer named Charles Lightoller to survive the Titanic also participated in evacuating soldiers off the coast of Dunkirk.

10. In 2014, Ireland was outraged after an Australian article suggested that the Irish used potatoes as a source of currency.

The "Take On Me" video used a pencil-sketch animation / live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. Approximately 3,000 frames were rotoscoped, which took 16 weeks to complete.

12. Most toilets in Hong Kong are flushed with seawater in order to conserve the city’s scarce freshwater resources.

13. Michigan rock collectors named Ross and Nancy Deye found an impressive 93 lb. Petoskey stone in Lake Michigan in 2015, only to have it promptly confiscated by authorities. The stone violated a Michigan law that states no more than 25 pounds of rocks or minerals can be taken from the Great Lakes per year.

14. Homeopaths Without Borders went to Haiti in 2010 to treat malaria, cholera and other life threatening diseases with sugar pills and "diluted" water.

15. According to a study on Academy Award speeches, Steven Spielberg has been thanked more than God.

American president John F. Kennedy told the Secret Service to keep Jackie Kennedy away from shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. She married him after Kennedy's assassination.

17. Mathematician Leonhard Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter, so in an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have discovered them after Euler.

18. The stars in the Brazilian flag represent the stars in the sky at the day and hour of its independence.

19. While filming Poltergeist, Oliver Robbins truly got choked during a take by the robot clown doll. It wasn't until the boy turned purple that Spielberg realized what was actually happening.

20. There are still 10 people that are living in iron lungs.

Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day holiday, later became unhappy with its commercialization and began organizing a petition to rescind Mother's Day. She was placed in a sanitarium, and people connected with the floral and greeting card industries paid the bills to keep her there.

22. Retronyms are the words created to differentiate between two words, where previously no clarification was required, like an acoustic guitar.

23. The Greek origin of the word "idiot" was used to mean someone who did not participate in politics and public affairs.

24. Wild marijuana grows all over Northern Japan.

25. During the Cold War, the BBC planned to air "The Sound of Music" after a nuclear strike to improve the morale of survivors.