26Deadly Football
In 1905, 19 people died playing football. Ten of those killed were aged 17 or younger. People, including President Teddy Roosevelt, called for changes in rules. They sought to remove slapping, nose pulling and biting, but critics thought it would make the players soft.
27. Beer was incredibly popular in ancient Egypt. The laborers, like those who worked on the pyramids of Giza, were given a ration of over 10 pints of beer a day.
28. Blackstone's ratio is the idea that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Blackstone’s principle influenced the 19th century development of “beyond a reasonable doubt” as the burden of proof in criminal law.
29. Sheep and goats are being used for weed control in difficult-to-reach areas, and to keep vegetation down from around runways, discouraging wildlife from gathering and causing danger to aircraft. They will eat noxious weeds as an environmentally friendly alternative to herbicides in city parks.
30. In 1802, American businessman Timothy Dexter wrote ‘A Pickle for the Knowing Ones’ that had 8,847 words without punctuation or capitalization. In the second edition, he responded to grammatical complaints by adding an extra 11 pages of punctuation instructing that readers could insert them wherever needed.
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31Robert Clary
Actor Robert Clary, who played a French prisoner of war in the show Hogan's Heroes, was a Holocaust survivor in real life. He spent 3 years in the Buchenwald concentration camp and survived by entertaining the SS guards every Sunday with a song.
32. The oldest known written complaint in the world is from around 1750 B.C. A man in Babylon named Ea-Nasir sold substandard copper ingots to a man named Nanni and treated Nanni’s servant rudely. The tablet is one of several found in the same building, all of which are complaints about Ea-Nasir.
33. Avocado Toast is not a new dish but has been consumed in San Francisco for 135 years.
34. Humans have a free floating bone (Hyoid bone) in the neck that anchors the tongue in place and is believed to greatly contribute to humans being able to talk in the sophisticated manner that we do today.
35. The ‘Portrait of Dr. Gachet’ is the last portrait painted by Vincent Van Gogh before his death. It was sold for the then-record sum of $82.5 million in 1990. It is one of Van Gogh’s most important works, but has been withheld from the public by its anonymous owner for almost 30 years.
