1Charles Bronson
Charles Bronson, the tough guy actor of classic films like ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘Death Wish’, grew up in abject poverty. He was the 11th kid among 15 siblings. His family was so poor that he once had to wear his sister’s dress to school. When he was 16, he mined coal for $1 per ton.
2. Buzz Lightyear's original name was Lunar Larry, before being changed to honor astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.
3. Tongue twister ‘she sells seashells by the seashore’ is about a real girl named Mary Anning. She also happens to be one of the very first people to discover a massive dinosaur fossil. She found it at the age of 12 while looking for seashells to sell by the seashore.
4. Tatooine from Star Wars is a real town in Tunisia that is spelled Tataouine and it is famous for its cave dwellings.
5. In 1936, after being thrown from his horse, a jockey named Ralph Neves was pronounced dead, brought to the morgue, injected with adrenaline to the heart, jumped up, returned to the racetrack, and demanded to be allowed to ride the rest of his mounts that day.
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6Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden left a will that he had written shortly after 9/11. In it, he urged his children not to join al-Qaeda and not to continue the Jihad.
7. After cutting off his ear, Vincent van Gogh painted a portrait of the doctor who treated him, then gave it to the doctor. The doctor hated it and used it to repair a chicken coop before giving it away. It's now worth $50 million.
8. In 2015, a team of architects in U.K. led by a man named Jonathan Wilson started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise $2.9 billion to build Minas Tirith, the beautiful city that was built into a mountainside in ‘Lord of the Rings.’
9. Trench coat was invented by Thomas Burberry during World War 1 to help crawl and walk through the trenches.
10. Conus geographus, a species of predatory cone snail is one of the most venomous animals on the earth. Its venom is a mix of hundreds of toxins which it delivers through a harpoon-like tooth and there is no known anti-venom.
11Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s got so bad that he once took a mini ceramic White House model out of his fish tank and when asked what he thought it was, he answered, “I don’t know, but it’s something to do with me.”
12. During World War 2, if a US submarine sank all the targets it engaged, it was considered a "clean sweep" and a broom was attached to the periscope to celebrate their accomplishment.
13. Tokyo has a huge modern arcade named ‘Anata No Warehouse’ which is made to look like a dystopian cyberpunk city.
14. While filming a scene in the live-action adaption of “Jungle Book” where Mowgli meets King Louie (voiced by Christopher Walken), director Jon Favreau spotted a cowbell on stage and said, “this is what Mowgli has to use.” Mowgli rings the bell to awaken Louie as an homage to Walken’s SNL skit.
15. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston marathon with an official number. After realizing that a woman was running, race organizer Jock Semple went after her trying to stop. The photographs taken of the incident made headlines around the world.
16Heroin
Heroin overdose is more likely to happen during relapse. People who use heroin long enough eventually build up a tolerance. People who get sober sometimes relapse but take a dose they were on at their worst. They unintentionally kill themselves by not realizing their tolerance dropped.
17. Seinfeld composer Jonathan Wolff rewrote the theme song for every single episode. He says, "The bassline is so simple it can start and stop for his jokes, hold for laughs, and that way I could architect each piece of music for each monologue, Lego-style.”
18. Nazi 'perfect Aryan' poster child was Jewish.
19. Each commercial airplane in the U.S. is struck by lightning more than once every year on average.
20. A jogger named Rachel Borch in Maine once drowned a rabid raccoon in a puddle after it latched onto her finger and would not release her.
21Curling
In curling, good sportsmanship and politeness are essential. Congratulating opponents and abstaining from trash talk are a part of what's known as the "Spirit of Curling."
22. In the 1920s, a man named John R. Brinkley falsely claiming to be a doctor implanted goat testicles into people across the US as a cure for all diseases. He was condemned by the American Medical Association and media, but ran for governor of Kansas in 1930, narrowly losing after thousands of votes for him were questionably disqualified.
23. The Canadian military has developed a stealth snowmobile that is able to switch to "silent mode" for covert special ops missions in the Arctic.
24. The famous headline "Foot Heads Arms Body" (published after Michael Foot was chosen to be the chair of a nuclear disarmament committee) was written by a sub-editor as a joke and was never intended to be published.
25. Pommer’s Law is one of the “Laws” of the Internet, which states that “A person’s mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
