1Mukesh Ambani
Indian businessman/billionaire Mukesh Ambani has invested $31 billion to improve India's mobile and internet infrastructure since 2011. He found his motivation in 2011 when his daughter, who was back home from Yale for holiday, tried to submit her coursework and told him that “the internet in our house s*cks.”
2. When the Declaration of Independence was being drafted, Benjamin Franklin suggested that the word "sacred" be replaced with "self-evident" because he believed that the nation should be founded on reason, not faith.
3. Due to a pilot shortage, Chinese airlines are paying airline pilots $300,000 a year, tax-free.
4. 17-year-old Jesse Shipley died in a car crash in 2005. His parent learned in 2010 that his brain was not buried with him, when his classmates went on a field trip to a morgue and saw a jar labeled “Jesse Shipley” that had a brain in it.
5. In 2013, a dog named Killian saved a baby boy from an abusive babysitter. He alerted his owners by growling and standing between the baby and the sitter whenever she was there. Suspicious, the parents left an iPhone under the sofa recording audio. The sitter was later convicted on what they heard.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Mayans
The Mayans created scenes very similar to today's modern comics, including speech bubbles, stink lines, and naughty jokes. In one scene, a cheeky rabbit (dubbed the "Mayan Bugs Bunny") tells an old man to "smell your sweat, wizard penis."
7. Julie Andrews initially refused the role of Mary Poppins because she was pregnant. Walt Disney, however, insisted that she play the nanny, saying, “We’ll wait for you.”
8. In 2006, Gnarls Barkley removed their hit single 'Crazy' from music stores after it remained at the top of the British charts for 9 weeks, so people would "remember the song fondly and not get sick of it."
9. A 14-year-old boy named John once impersonated an MI5 agent online and "recruited" his best friend into the secret services. The initiation test was to murder... John. John became the first person in the United Kingdom to be convicted for inciting his own attempted murder.
10. In Rio Olympics of the top 30 fastest 100m sprints, 9 of them were clean and not associated with doping. All 9 sprints were by Usain Bolt.
11Love Canal residents
In May 1980, after blood tests found that a significant portion of Love Canal residents suffered chromosome damage from toxic waste buried under their homes, homeowners, upset over lack of federal action, held two EPA officials hostage. This action spurred the federal Superfund program to be passed.
12. Americans use the term "downtown" to describe a city's "city center" regardless of its geographic location because the term was inherited from New York — where businesses occupied the bottom of Manhattan island.
13. There are three types of dashes. A hyphen (-) connects compound words, like Anglo-Saxon. The En-Dash (–) is used when showing a type of distance or range, like Mon–Fri. The Em-Dash (—) is used to add a thought into a sentence, like "I memorized the state capitals — all fifty of them."
14. Jackie Robinson was court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus, 11 years before Rosa Parks.
15. The FDA did a study which found that most drugs are still safe and effective decades past the expiration date stamped on the package.
16Krusty the Clown
Krusty the Clown was originally Homer Simpson in disguise - with the joke being that Bart hated Homer but loved Krusty.
17. In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that "eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face."
18. “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” was nominated for an NAACP award because it featured such a diverse cast. Nickelodeon turned away kids for the show that were “too Disney.” Creator D.J. MacHale described “too Disney” as “apple pie, freckles, cute, over-the-top acting.”
19. The Taylor Energy Oil Spill has been going on for more than 12 years in the Gulf and will soon surpass the BP Spill in size.
20. The 2009 movie "Where the Wild Things Are" barely turned any profit despite having mostly positive reviews, making $100.1 million from a budget of $100 million.
21Women's day off
On October 24, 1975, an estimated 90% of women of Iceland participated in a “women’s day off” to demonstrate the value of their work, both paid and unpaid. Fathers had little choice but to bring their children to work or stay home themselves, leading them to call it “the long Friday.”
22. The world's foremost expert (E.O. Wilson) on ants chose to study ants because when he began his entomology career in 1947, insect pins were hard to come by due to World War 2 metal shortages and unlike other insects, ants were and are still stored in vials, not pinned.
23. In Texas Hold 'em, an Ace-King of any suit combination is occasionally referred to as an Anna Kournikova, derived from the initials AK and because it "looks really good but rarely wins."
24. The American Government tried to instill the values of home ownership in the American people with federal programs in 1917 to prevent the rise of communism as they believed people who owned their own homes had a stake in the capitalist system.
25. The Crypt Keeper has Chucky’s eyes. FX technician Kevin Yagher created both puppets and reused Chucky’s clear blue eyes for the show.
