26Bitter Sweet Symphony
The royalties for The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” now go to its songwriter Richard Ashcroft, after Mick Jagger and Keith Richards finally agreed in 2019 to grant him the authorship of the song and all the future royalties it generates.
27. Key Limes were considered a weed until The Great Freeze of 1894-95 destroyed Florida’s lemon groves. Farmers replanted “Mexican” limes and they became known as “Florida Key Limes, a beloved regional crop.”
28. The inside of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is completely empty.
29. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just 2 of dozens of Japanese cities subjected to massive incendiary attacks. Firestorms leveled almost 100 square miles in Japan's three largest cities (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya) alone. Hundreds of thousands were killed and millions were forced to evacuate.
30. There is a breed of horse called the Yakutian that is native to Siberia. Bulkier than other horse breeds, it has extremely long hair for its coat and can withstand temperatures as low a -70°C (-94°F).
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31Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty was a recycled idea originally meant for Egypt. The original statue was to be called “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia” and the statue was to sit at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The project was rejected due to its cost and the idea was recycled to be “The Statue of Liberty.”
32. The Sunshine 60 building is a skyscraper in Japan, which is considered haunted in modern folklore. It was built over the former Sugamo Prison, the place where many high-ranking Japanese war criminals, the most famous of which was Hideki Tojo, were held and eventually executed.
33. The School of the Americas has had more graduates become dictators than any other school in history.
34. Pete Goss is a British yachtsman who turned back during the 1996 Vendee Globe race to save a fellow competitor, Raphael Dinelli. Goss sailed into hurricane-force winds for two days to reach Dinelli; who was said to have been clutching a bottle of champagne when he was pulled from the sea.
35. The last surviving palace eunuch of the Chinese Empire only died in 1996. His family was desperate for money and he was castrated at the age of 9 in 1911, and the last Emperor of China abdicated only a few months later.
