1Severus Alexander
Severus Alexander, a generally meek emperor who ascended the throne at the age of 14, used to entertain himself by watching puppies play with little piglets.
2. Apple pie is not American. The pie was invented in Medieval England, while the modern recipe for apple pie with a lattice crust was created and perfected by the Dutch.
3. A man known only as "Django" drove his own boat out and freed a whale caught in a shark net off an Australian beach (without cutting the net). Before taking action, Django had waited hours for help from officials who had been called. When officials arrived, they were angry and he was fined for acting alone.
4. American actor Johnny Depp spent $3 million blasting Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon that was placed atop a 153 feet tower shaped like a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button.
5. Musician Gram Parsons wanted his body cremated and scattered at Joshua Tree, but his family arranged for him to be buried in Louisiana for financial reasons. His friends, drunk and assisted by an unwitting police officer, stole his body from the airport and burned the casket themselves.
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6Gianni Russo
Pablo Escobar called off a hit on a man who had fatally shot a member of the Medellin Cartel when he found out that the shooter, Gianni Russo, had starred in The Godfather.
7. American rocket scientist Jack Parsons was a follower of occultist Aleister Crowley. He was defrauded of his life savings by his friend L. Ron Hubbard, worked for Howard Hughes, homebrewed his own absinthe, and died in a lab explosion which a colleague claims was intended to create a homunculus (humanoid creature).
8. Sharks can expel the entire contents of their stomach by literally forcing the stomach inside-out all the way past its teeth. This is called 'stomach eversion' and it's a way to get rid of indigestible objects but occasionally the stomach is unable to retract, which can be fatal.
9. Australia actually sells sand to Saudi Arabia. The reason behind this is that the type of sand used to make concrete is different than the sand usually found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia (and other countries in the region), so for Dubai to build the Burj Kalifa they had to import the sand to make the concrete to build it.
10. Ronald Reagan would write personal checks to individuals with financial struggles. He was known to drop $4,000 or $5,000 checks into the mail for certain people. He was also known to call upon the Air Force to aid in the transport of children who were experiencing medical emergencies.
11Sarah Hyland
Sarah Hyland, of Modern Family fame, was diagnosed with kidney dysplasia when she was young, received two kidney transplants from her father and her brother and has undergone 16 surgeries, even during the shooting of Modern Family
12. Pink Floyd musician David Gilmour CBE auctioned his guitars for charity. His Black Strat sold for $3,975,000 making it the most expensive guitar sold at auction. Proceeds of the auction, which raised $21,490,750, were donated to ClientEarth environmental charity.
13. Aluminum was once so valuable that Napoleon III served dinner to his most honored guests on aluminum plates, while the less distinguished was served on gold and silver plates.
14. The song "Sultans of Swing" was inspired by Mark Knopfler witnessing a shoddy pub band playing to a small, drunken crowd. At the end of their set, the singer finished with “Goodnight and thank you. We are the Sultans Of Swing.”
15. The Japanese word for “brown” is 茶色 (cha-iro). The first character means “tea”, and the second one means “color”. Thus, literally translated, it means “tea color.”
16Green Thumb
The term “Green Thumb” comes from the fact that algae growing on the outside of earthenware pots will stain a person's thumb (and fingers) if he or she handles enough pots. Hence, a person who is always working with flowerpots has a green thumb.
17. "Glomar response" ( the 'neither confirm nor deny' response) was created by the CIA in reaction to media inquiries about a covert agency program. When the CIA opened its Twitter account for the first time, they tweeted: 'We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.'
18. When he was young, boxer Manny Pacquiao ran away from home and lived in a cardboard box after his drunk father ate his dog.
19. The name of the mid-90s fad, "Pogs" was actually an acronym for Passion/Orange/Guava, which was the type of juice that kids used the caps of when it was first invented in Hawaii.
20. As of 2020, the world's longest domestic flight (and the world's longest flight by distance) is a 15728 km flight between Paris and the city of Papeete in the Pacific territory of French Polynesia, which takes between 16-17 hours.
21Angela Morley
Angela Morley, the first openly transgender woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, was John Williams’ primary orchestrator throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She helped write and arrange the scores for Star Wars, ET, The Empire Strikes Back, Home Alone, Superman, and Schindler’s List.
22. A zookeeper secretly grew a cannabis plantation inside the rhino enclosure at an Austrian zoo for years. He was the only one who had access to the enclosure and police made the discovery after a tip from a drug user.
23. Venus could have had habitable conditions for billions of years in the past, long enough for life to have developed.
24. Georgian swimming is a swimming style where swimmer's hands and feet are bound together. It was re-discovered in the '60s after a swimming enthusiast decided to fact-check a legend about ancient warriors training by swimming in this manner.
25. Iceland in 1940 passed a law that made swimming lessons mandatory in schools starting at grade 1 (age 6) to grade 10 (age 16). Lessons are held once a week. Historically, a lot of Icelandic seamen had met a tragic end because of the harsh sea and this law was an attempt at saving lives.
