Random Facts Generator

Rhododendrons and Azaleas are toxic to both pets and humans, including honey made from both plants.

In 1985, a guy programmed his computer to call Jerry Falwell Sr's toll-free prayer line every 30 seconds for 8 months. It clogged up the lines and cost them over $750,000 in reverse charges.

In the late 1800s, rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh waged a bitter feud known as the Bone Wars. Their competition to discover and name more dinosaurs led to bribery, theft, and even the destruction of dig sites to prevent the other from claiming fossils. Despite the sabotage, they still managed to describe and name over 130 new species, laying the foundation for modern paleontology.

James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew (known as the Marauders) created the Marauders Map while they were students at Hogwarts. The map is a magical document which exposes every part of Hogwarts, including the secret passages, as well as the location of every person on the grounds, indicated by a dot and their name (though in the movies footsteps were used as indicators instead). The map can’t be fooled by invisibility cloaks or any kind of potion or spell, and can even detect the castle ghosts. The only flaws of the map are that it’s unable to discern the identities of people with similar names (like Barty Crouch Jr./Sr.), and it doesn’t show rooms that are unable to be plotted on a map (like the Room of Requirement).

George Lucas originally offered the Star Wars roles of Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi to Toshiro Mifune, who starred in many of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies. These films, specifically The Hidden Fortress, had a great influence on the Star Wars series.

Americans actually started using the dating system (mm/dd/yyyy) from the UK, who used it before the 20th century.

MIT researchers have been able to capture sound from a soundless video of a chip bag using a high FPS camera recording. All sound causes objects to vibrate and using advanced software, they were able to match the vibrations shown in the chip bag to the respective audio frequencies.

There exists a museum named Museum of Bad Art in Massachusetts which is dedicated to exhibiting sh*tty art that is "too bad to be ignored".

In 2002, German actor Günther Kaufmann confessed to accidentally suffocating his accountant by falling on him with his 260-pound body. However, in 2005, investigators discovered Kaufmann was innocent. He had falsely confessed to protect his dying wife, who had actually committed the murder.

People with red hair are more sensitive to thermal pain, are less sensitive to electrically induced pain, and require larger amounts of anesthetics than people without red hair due to a mutation in their melanocortin 1 receptor.