1Country Time Lemonade
Country Time Lemonade once offered free legal assistance when children’s lemonade stands were being ticketed by local governments. They titled the service, Legal aid.
2. In 2001, a Massachusetts man named Kenny Waters was wrongly imprisoned for 18 years for murder. He was finally freed after his high-school drop-out sister went to law school and fought the courts for him to prove his innocence. However, 6 months after his release, he died in a freak accident.
3. Dr. Mary Walker was an abolitionist, suffragist, surgeon, and the only female Medal of Honor recipient. She advocated for women to wear what they wanted. She’d often get arrested for wearing men's clothes, though she insisted “I don't wear men's clothes, I wear my own clothes.”
4. When a simple AI was taught to play Tetris, the best solution it found was to pause the game just before the screen filled up so it would never lose.
5. For almost 300 years, the office of the Pope was almost certainly a death sentence. 28 of the first 31 consecutive Popes were violently murdered.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Jet Li
Jet Li turned down a role in The Matrix Reloaded because Hollywood producers wanted to record and copy all of his martial arts moves into a digital library, with all rights going to them.
7. An Olympic rower named Henry Pearce stopped mid-race to allow ducklings to pass by him and he still won the race.
8. Princess Diana was 19 when Prince Charles, 31, proposed to her. Because royal custom required Charles marry a virgin, nearly every other woman of good lineage nearer his age was disqualified.
9. Samuel Maverick was a Texas rancher who refused to brand his cattle, which led to the word 'maverick' meaning someone who is independently minded.
10. In Japan, on Valentine's Day girls buy chocolates and other gifts for boys they like. A month later, on March 14th, White Day is celebrated. On this day, boys buy gifts to give back to the girls who bought them gifts on the Valentine's Day.
11Burrito
Burrito means 'little donkey' in Spanish. It is named this way because burritos can carry many things, much like a donkey can.
12. Civilian Public Service (CPS) was a US government program that provided conscientious objectors with an alternative to military service during World War 2. CPS draftees fought forest fires, helped reform an abusive mental health system, and even acted as test subjects in medical experiments.
13. Any day of the year has a 1 in 7 chance of being celebrated as Independence Day from the British. 61 colonies have gained independence from the United Kingdom with 52 unique Independence Days.
14. Russell Crowe commissioned Nick Cave to write a sequel to Gladiator. When Cave asked "didn't you die at the end of gladiator" Crowe responded, "yeah, but you sort that out."
15. In 2008, an Australian court case costing over a million dollars had to be aborted when it was realized that five out of the twelve jurors were playing Sudoku instead of paying attention.
16Chocolate stamp
In 2013, Belgium printed half a million postage stamps that smelled and tasted like chocolate as a celebration of the country’s chocolatiers.
17. A Brazilian man named Chiquinho Scarpa announced he would be burying his $500,000 Bentley so he could use it in the afterlife. After a lot of critique about him wasting money, it turned out that it was a PR stunt for organ donations.
18. Studies have shown that feeling awed by something makes one feel healthier. It also makes people feel more generous, decreases aggressive attitudes and makes them feel more satisfied with their lives.
19. Harriet Tubman had narcolepsy. She developed it after getting hit in the head with a 2lb weight and suffering a Traumatic Brain Injury. Wanted ads used to describe her as having “a habit of abruptly falling asleep.”
20. In February 1939, Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner described a groundbreaking nuclear phenomenon in a letter to Nature editor and called it Nuclear Fission. Five years later, a Nobel prize was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of fission; a word he never used in his original paper.
21Art Babbitt
Art Babbitt, the creator of Goofy, became the face of the Disney animators' strike in 1941. He would scream at Walt Disney through a bullhorn when he rolled into work and the two nearly got into a fistfight in the parking lot.
22. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of the famous president, was the only General to land in the first wave of the D-Day landings, despite having a heart condition that forced him to walk with a cane. He succumbed to a heart attack a month later and was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
23. Struggling black model Amylia Dorsey kept getting rejected because she didn't fit the prototypical body type for models. This enraged her rapper boyfriend Sir Mix-A-Lot to write "Baby Got Back" and asked Amylia to be the "OMG Becky" voice we hear in the song.
24. A 7-year-old girl named Alexis Goggins once took 6 bullets meant for her mother. The perpetrator, her mom's ex, fired several shots in her body, but she still managed to survive.
25. Despite being no larger than 4cm, the female Darwin's Bark Spider can create a web bridge spanning up to 75 feet across rivers by releasing several strands of silk which the wind carries to the other side. She then reinforces it, allowing her to hunt for insects flying over the river.
