Random Facts Generator

Half of the Irish Travellers (i.e. Gypsies) do not live past the age of 39 and unemployment among male travellers is 73%.

A crocodile named "Gustave" in Burundi's Rusizi river has allegedly killed as many as 300 people.

A British Army officer named Eric Lomax (left in the photo) was a prisoner of war in Japan during World War 2. He was starved, viciously beaten and tortured by a Japanese officer named Nagase Takashi. 50 years after he was released, Eric Lomax met his chief tormentor again and they became great friends.

In the 16th century there was a Spanish soldier named Gil Pérez who claimed to have teleported from his post in the Philippines to Mexico. He said that he knew about the assassination of the governor of the Philippines and was thrown in jail for his claims until a ship from Manila verified his claims.

One of the dangers of working in a try-works (a furnace in the whaling industry) is that a rotting pregnant whale could fill with gas and burst, ejecting a fetus the size of a motor vehicle with sufficient force to kill a man.

Cleopatra once had claimed that pickles made her beautiful.

During the Great Depression, Clifton's Cafeteria eateries boasted the slogan "Dine free unless delighted." In the original restaurant's first three months of business, 10,000 customers took him up on the offer. Enough customers paid their bills to make them a success.

The current herpes stigma is a result of an intentional "disease-mongering" campaign by a drug company developing a treatment. "There were no markets for this compound. Most had hardly heard of genital herpes. Marketing the medical condition as a 'stigmatized genital infection' was key."

Instead of pesticides, the Mexican state of Coloma releases billions of sterile fruit flies to outcompete fertile ones for mates.

In a housing experiment that relocated families from poor neighborhoods to wealthier ones, boys experienced PTSD rates comparable to those of combat soldiers, while psychological well-being improved for girls. The study found that boys were perceived as juvenile delinquents, whereas girls in similar situations were embraced by the community as disadvantaged individuals in need of help.