1Robert Mitchum
Actor Robert Mitchum proposed to his wife (Dorothy Mitchum) by saying "Stick with me, kid, and you'll be farting through silk." Their marriage lasted 57 years.
2. Drew Carey had eye surgery in 2001 and no longer requires glasses but continues to wear them as part of his celebrity persona.
3. If funding had remained at 1969 Apollo mission levels, NASA planned to develop such elements as a lunar orbit station in 1978, a lunar surface base in 1980, and a manned mission to Mars in 1981 or 1983.
4. It was widely assumed that infants felt no pain and they routinely underwent major surgeries without anesthesia up until infant pain was formally recognized in 1987.
5. A Charlie Brown Christmas was written in several weeks, and produced on a small budget in 6 months. It was completed just 10 days before the premiere. All involved believed the special would be a disaster, with director Bill Melendez remarking after a screening, "My golly, we've killed it."
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6USPS
The USPS used to burn letters sent to "Santa". Now non-profit organizations respond to children's letters on behalf of Santa.
7. Sugar can be dangerously explosive. In 2008, 14 people died and 40 were injured when sugar dust combusted at Imperial Sugar's refinery in Georgia. A U.S. Chemical Safety Board report found that the explosion was entirely preventable. The sugar industry has been aware of explosion risks since 1926.
8. When filming the original Borat film, Sacha Baron Cohen never washed Borat's suit or wore deodorant when in character. He said it gave Borat a "kind of dreadful Soviet-bloc smell the moment I walk in."
9. When an inmate enters San Pedro Prison they have to purchase a cell. They can purchase a cell from the prison mayor or freelance agents who typically advertises available cells in restaurants and bulletin boards. Housing in the prison varies between $20 and $5,000 depending on the quality.
10. Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, said the only animal he was uncomfortable working around were parrots.
11Vladimir Bukovsky
Russian born human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky spent a total of 12 years in psychiatric hospitals, labor camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union. During his time in prison, he co-wrote manual instructing victims of political psychiatry how to behave during interrogation to avoid being diagnosed as mentally ill.
12. Taxi Dance Halls of the late 1920s and early ‘30s were dance halls where lonely men looking for human contact paid 10 cents a song to dance with women for a few minutes. In 1931, there were at least 100 taxi dance halls in New York, visited by up to 50,000 men each week.
13. Several people walked out of every screening of Reservoir Dogs at the Sundance film festival because of its graphic violence, including horror movie director Wes Craven best known for his A Nightmare On Elm Street films.
14. Each US state manages a federally-allocated fund to support victims of crime. If you are the victim of a crime, you can apply for reimbursement for medical services, mental health counseling, lost wages, and other costs incurred as a result of the crime.
15. When he accepted the role of Scrooge in A Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine said he wanted to play it, "like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company," as if there were no puppets around him. On the set, he had to walk across narrow planks between the Muppets and their performers.
16Patrick Ferguson
During the Revolution, British Captain Patrick Ferguson refused an opportunity to shoot a passing American officer in the back. Historians say there is a very good chance that the officer was George Washington. Ferguson was later killed at the battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina.
17. The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. As more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, each participant tending to feel that their own effort is not critical.
18. There is a blood sport known as Spider Fighting, where two spiders are placed on opposite ends of a stick and pushed towards the middle to fight one another. In 2002, inmates in a Florida prison got into a fight resulting in life threatening injuries over the theft of a pet fighting spider.
19. Airplanes that fly the advertising banners do not take off with the signs. They lower a grappling hook and grab them from the ground.
20. Tom Hanks, who played Mr. Rogers in “ A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood”, is Mr. Rogers’ sixth cousin.
21Myers-Briggs personality test
The Myers-Briggs personality test was developed by a mother (Katharine Cook Briggs) and daughter (Isabel Briggs Myers) team, neither of whom had any formal psychology education. They studied agriculture and political science respectively.
22. Mercy Dogs or Red Cross Dogs would go out into the warzone to find wounded soldiers. They brought medical supplies for the soldiers to patch themselves up or if the soldier was mortally wounded, stay and comfort them in their final moments.
23. Domesticated blueberries are only just over 100 years old and were thought to be impossible to domesticate until it was discovered they thrive in acidic soil.
24. Beethoven loved his coffee so much that he had his own recipe. It consisted of 60 beans. Not 59, not 61, but precisely 60. He would drop them into a cup separately and sometimes do a second recount. He also had a special apparatus for preparing it.
25. The lyricist for the theme song of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Does whatever a spider can!) won three Academy Awards for Best Original Song and was nominated 16 times for the award.
