Random Fact Sheet #99 – 40 Amazing Facts to Add to Your Trivia Knowledge

International Women's Day was first celebrated in the Soviet Union. It used to be called International Working Women's Day until 1975.

2. Stoffel, the honey badger who is a resident of the South African wildlife center is one of the animal kingdom’s greatest escape artists. He has managed to escape his enclosure twice to fight the lions in the exhibit beside his, built towers out of rocks and sticks to climb over his wall, and when introduced with a mate, he stood on her head to unlock the gate and get out once again.

3. On the request from Sir Winston Churchill’s family, there is always a marmalade cat named Jock in residence at Chartwell house. The current marmalade cat who resides in it is named Jock VI.

4. Alexander the Great's army conquered the world while wearing armor made of linen that could stop any arrow made at the time.

5. Green Bay Packers’ wide receiver Max McGee didn't expect to play in the first Super Bowl in 1967. He showed up hungover and without his helmet. He ended up making a one-handed catch to score the game's first touchdown.

Quipos is the Andean writing system which didn't use ink, paper, tablets or skins. Information was encoded in an intricate system of strings of colored yarn tied in a variety of knots. This system survived until just after the Conquistadors.

7. In 2002, Microsoft forgot to renew one of their domains names and a random guy paid the bill just so that he could check his Hotmail.

8. The Night's Watch cloaks from Game Of Thrones are made of 79$ Ikea rugs.

9. In 2015, Costco sold more than 128 million hot dogs in their food courts. That's four times the amount of hot dogs sold in all MLB ballparks combined.

10. In a review of clinical drug trials, almost all negative studies were unpublished, leading to the false impression that 93% of antidepressant trials had positive results. When unpublished studies were included, 51% of all clinical trials were positive and 49% were negative.

Ian Fleming's last words were an apology to his ambulance drivers - "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days".

12. California does not allow you to name your child using anything other than the 26 English letters. This means that José is a banned name in California.

13. From over a million ancient Sumerian texts, which is the earliest human writing to have been discovered; only 30,000 have been translated. The rest of them have been sitting unread in museum warehouses for centuries.

14. Lottie Williams is the only person to have ever been hit by re-entering space debris. She was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 1997 at 3:30 am, when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She was hit by a piece from the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket that was launched in 1996. She was unhurt.

15. Despite producing over 38 billion ballpoint pens each year, China couldn’t acquire the technology to produce their own pen tips domestically until 2017.

Giraffe bread is the exact same thing as Tiger bread. Sainsbury’s renamed it to Giraffe bread after receiving a letter from a 3 year-old-girl saying it looked more like a giraffe.

17. Fucking Hell is a German Pilsner or pale lager with an alcohol content of 4.9%. It is named after the village of Fucking in Austria. Hell is the German word for 'pale' and a typical description of this kind of beer.

18. Mookie Betts of Boston Red Sox bowled a perfect 300 at the World Series of Bowling in the same week he was awarded an MLB Gold Glove.

19. During World War 1, the Germans thought that the shotgun was too inhumane a weapon, and lodged a complaint against the US.

20. J.P. Morgan of JPMorgan Chase & Co and Milton Hershey of Hershey's Chocolate were both in Europe and planned to travel back to the US on Titanic's Maiden Voyage but later changed their plans.

Abraham Lincoln's corpse was sent on a two-week funeral tour across America to be shown openly to thousands of people. In the course of the trip, the body visibly decomposed, bloated, and darkened. In New York City alone, the body was seen by over 150,000 people and was exposed to the air for 23 hours straight.

22. Rumblestrutting is a guinea pig behavior in which they strut around each other shaking their butts low to emit a rumbling sound. It can sound a lot like purring, but it's part of their herd rituals to determine dominance.

23. The word 'Jehovah’ is a Latinized derivative of God's given name 'YHWH’. This translated abbreviation stemming from 4 Hebrew consonants called the ‘tetragrammaton’ is regarded too sacred to be uttered and the letters were replaced by Latin-speaking Christian scholars.

24. President Garfield’s cause of death wasn’t so much as the bullet wound from his assassination attempt as much as it was the treatment he received afterwards. His doctors’ clumsy, unsanitary attempts to heal him resulted in a severe, painful infection that killed him three months later.

25. Maple syrup and maple sugar were used during the American Civil War and by abolitionists in the years before the war because most cane sugar and molasses were produced by Southern slaves.