26Silica Gel Packets
Silica gel packets aren’t poisonous. They are labeled “do not eat” because they are a choking hazard.
27. President Boris Yeltsin once on his visit to Ireland got so drunk on the airplane that it had to circle for an hour over the airport and when it finally landed Yeltsin would not come out of the plane to meet the Irish delegation.
28. When Secretariat (a horse that won the triple crown in 1973) died, his body was sent to the University of Kentucky for an autopsy. They found his heart weighed an astounding 22 pounds! The average weight of a mature thoroughbred horse’s heart is a mere eight pounds.
29. When King Leopold II of Belgium personally acquired the “Congo Free State” in 1885, it was 76 times the size of Belgium. He claimed the land at the 1884-1885 Berlin conference promising to improve the lives of the locals but ended up enslaving them to gather ivory and natural rubber.
30. In 1859, a 2-hour telegraph conversation between Portland and Boston was able to be had without the use of any battery power. This was due to an aurora borealis generating enough electric current in the telegraph wires.
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31Filipino Crucifixions
Every year on Good Friday, Filipino Catholic devotees are voluntarily, non-lethally crucified. Sterilized nails are driven through their hands and feet. One especially devoted man has been crucified 33 times.
32. Scientists have found microbes buried beneath the seafloor that divide once every 10,000 years and are as much as 100 million years old.
33. In the 1960s, the Dutch were so frustrated with the government's monopoly on TV that they built an artificial island in the North Sea to transmit uncensored television. Eventually, the Netherlands legally expanded its maritime claim and the military raided the island by air.
34. Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, once considered becoming an attorney but after scoring low on the admissions test decided to work at Disney World and do stand-up comedy. She later brainstormed her billion-dollar company because she disliked the look of pantyhose (seamed feet) in open-toed shoes.
35. Historically, polio was not widely fatal. 72% of all infections were asymptomatic; 24% resulted in mild illness; 1-5% resulted in more serious but short-term symptoms. But polio was still feared, due to the <1% of cases that led to permanent paralysis and death in a further 5-30% of them.
