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

Giant tortoises on whaling voyages were stored helplessly on their backs for up to six months before being killed and eaten. While alive, they drank gallons of water at a time and kept it in a special bladder, making a properly-butchered tortoise a source of cool, perfectly drinkable water.

27. Ann Wilson of Heart wrote the song Barracuda after her recording company created a rumor that her sister and she were having an incestuous relationship for publicity. Following a concert, a fan asked how her “lover” was. Enraged, she went directly to her hotel room and began writing the lyrics.

28. Marilyn Monroe never intentionally posed for the first issue of Playboy. Hefner paid $500 to a Chicago calendar company for the photos which were taken 4 years earlier. Marilyn was paid $50 for the initial shoot and had to buy a copy of the magazine herself to see the photos.

29. In 2016, a rural city in Victoria, Australia had a tumbleweed outbreak so bad that they named it "hairy panic." Tumbleweed was piling up around homes, at times reportedly reaching roof height.

30. According to Zipf's Law, in almost every language, the most common word will occur 2 times as often as the second most common word, 3 times as often as the third most common word, and so on.

The Weather Channel released a compilation of the music used during their 'Local on the 8s' segment. It peaked #1 on the Billboard Top 100 chart for Contemporary Jazz.

32. After Nelson Mandela's death, NHL goalie Jonathan Bernier gave a TV interview in which he referred to Mandela as 'one of the most-known athletes' and 'a great guy off and on the ice'.

33. “The New Shadow” was a supposed sequel to Lord Of The Rings that told of the reign of Aragorn’s descendant, men turning back to evil, and a plot to oust the king of Gondor. Tolkien quickly abandoned it after writing only 13 pages.

34. Most of the wasabi we eat in the US is fake. Real Wasabi is hard to cultivate and expensive to mass produce.

35. The do-not-call list does not work anymore which has allowed massive robocalls to happen.

In 2014, Singapore's anti-gambling agency, in a bid to leverage the world cup fever, published an advert that showed a worried kid telling his friend that his father had bet all their savings on Germany winning the world cup. Germany won.

37. The success of ‘Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure’ led to the creation of a cereal called “Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal.”

38. Cavemen had tattoos. Ötzi the Iceman from 3250 B.C. had 61 tattoos on his body.

39. In 1990, Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor refused to give a concert in New Jersey because the organizers insisted on playing the American National Anthem before her act. Frank Sinatra threatened to "kick her in the a*s" and New Jersey prohibited her from ever singing in that concert hall again.

40. The amount of time it would take Mount Rushmore to erode into unrecognizability (assuming that it is not maintained) is approximately 7.2 million years.