Random Fact Sheet #39 – 35 Fun Facts to Impress Your Friends

While filming Armageddon, Ben Affleck asked Michael Bay why they would train oil drillers as astronauts instead of the opposite to which Michael Bay told him to 'Shut the f*ck up'.

2. Katie Holmes' father negotiated a prenuptial agreement for her that reportedly filled five bankers’ boxes. Because of it, when Katie Holmes made her bombshell announcement that she was divorcing Tom Cruise, the case was able to be resolved in a mere 11 days.

3. Tom Cruise split with all 3 of his wives when they were 33.

4. A day before 9/11, George Carlin recorded a live show for an album that was titled 'I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die" which was shelved due to the events of the next day. The title was later planned to be re-used for a special in 2004 but was again discarded due to Hurricane Katrina.

5. Jewish ballerina Franceska Mann in 1943 while being forced to disrobe at Auschwitz for delousing, distracted an SS guard, stole his pistol and shot him dead.

There was a prison warden named John Whitley so loved that when he retired, 100 inmates pooled together their money to throw him a party.

7. The $4 billion nuclear-powered supercarrier "USS Ronald Reagan" has an unlimited range distance of up to 20-25 years, powered by two A4W Reactors.

8. There was some controversy over the inclusion of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' on the Voyager Golden Record. Carl Sagan was told that rock music was adolescent. Sagan responded, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."

9. The Cali Cartel murdered so many people and dumped their bodies in the Cauca River that the local municipality was eventually bankrupt by the cost of recovering corpses and conducting autopsies.

10. In 2012, Drake had his security team threaten a tattoo artist in his shop, while Drake sat in the car outside.

Woodie Guthrie' copywriters claim to "This Land is Your Land" was for 28 years and stated, "anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern.” Today multiple organizations claim copyright for the song.

12. Humans can generally detect their parents, children, and siblings (but not spouses, half-siblings, and stepchildren/step-parents) by smell, and females prefer sexual partners with a different smell than their own. Scientists believe this is an evolved defense against incest.

13. Alcatraz was the only federal prison at the time to offer hot-water showers for its inmates because the prison staff felt the inmates would find the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay almost impossible to withstand during an escape attempt.

14. Iceland is extremely protective of their language. Instead of loaning words from other languages, they repurpose old ones. The telephone is 'Simi', meaning thread, a jet plane is 'Thota', meaning to zoom and the word for computer, 'tölva' translates to number priestess or numbers witch.

15. A Roman Mile was defined as 1,000 paces. Armies would leave mile markers every 1,000 steps as they marched. As a result, well-fed armies marching at a fast pace marked longer miles.

The Walt Disney Company is the largest consumer of fireworks in the world and the second largest purchaser of explosive devices, right behind the U.S. military.

17. NES games like Battletoads were made so hard because Nintendo was losing money on video game rentals. If they took a long time to beat, people would have to buy the games instead.

18. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 incorrectly predicts a 'mate in two' in a chess game with the astronaut. Fans have speculated whether this was a filmmaking error, a test by HAL of the human’s reliability, or an early sign that HAL is malfunctioning. Kubrick died without revealing the answer.

19. A man named Jonathan Fleming was imprisoned for 25 years before a hotel receipt finally proved he could not have been at the scene of the crime he had been falsely convicted for.

20. There are hypothesized planets better suited for life than Earth, or Superhabitable Planets.

The Miami zoo put 30 flamingos in the bathroom during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to ride out the storm. An image of them huddled inside became one of the most iconic from that hurricane.

22. In 1981, a man named Marcus Sarjeant fired blanks at Queen Elizabeth II, said he did it for fame, showed no mental issues, spent 3 years in jail, then changed his name and continued on with his life at age 20 once released.

23. Tom Green won five Razzies for Freddy Got Fingered and accepted the awards in person. He had to be dragged off the stage because he wouldn't stop playing the harmonica.

24. In 2010, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was deployed to Haiti after the 2010 Earthquake and provided the island with 200,000 gallons a day of fresh drinking water from its desalination plants.

25. Conan O'Brien credited "The Simpsons" with saving him. Prior to being hired on it, he was experiencing a personal and professional slump. He abruptly quit his SNL writing job with no plans other than aimlessly walking the streets of NYC for inspiration.