1"Stop me! I am a runaway!" Tattoo
In ancient Rome, masters discouraged slaves from running away by putting a tattoo reading "Stop me! I am a runaway!" on their foreheads. At a temple of the Greek god of healing, thousands of tablets from escaped slaves asking the god to make the tattoos on their forehead disappear have been found.
2. In 1921, spiritualists Thomas Lynn Bradford and Ruth Doran decided to test whether it was possible to communicate with the dead. Bradford killed himself by sealing his apartment and turning on his gas stove and planned to appear as a ghost to Doran after his death. He didn't.
3. Bruce Willis turned down the role of Sam in the movie Ghost. He said he didn't understand how the movie would work with the main character being dead for the majority of the movie, and the role went to Patrick Swayze. Nine years later Willis would star in The Sixth Sense.
4. Humans will walk in circles when lost unless there is some sort of external reference point.
5. Laws in USA that restricted Chinese people from getting special merchant visas caused a boom in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. These visas were only for fancy shops and the person had to run it for a year. Some groups used all their cash to open a nice restaurant and then switched who ran it each year so that they’d all get visas.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Dean Martin
Dean Martin refused to attend JFK’s inauguration because Sammy Davis, Jr (who helped Kennedy campaign) wasn’t allowed to attend because he was black.
7. Uday Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein, was named the Chairmain of the Iraqi Olympic Committee in 1984. Athletes who disappointed him were subject to torture and imprisonment.
8. Late actor Robert Forster, perhaps best known from "Jackie Brown" and "Breaking Bad," was a member of the "Triple Nine Society," which is reserved for people whose IQ is in at least the 99.9th percentile (which equates to a score of 146 or above on the widely-used Wechsler tests).
9. The baggers that work at Grocery Stores on USA Military Installations, only get paid in tips. They do not get an hourly rate.
10. The United States has a 1.4 billion pound stockpile of cheese stored in caves in Missouri.
11Oldest Elvis Autograph
In 2012, a librarian at a high school in Tupelo Mississippi discovered a library card in the back of an old book signed in 1948 by a then 13-year-old Elvis Presley. It is the oldest known autograph by Elvis.
12. Classical music and metal fans have the most similar personalities, based on a study of 36,000 people in more than 60 countries. "Both have the same basic motivation: to hear something dramatic and theatrical, a shared 'love of the grandiose.'"
13. An average house in Japan depreciates to almost ¥0 after 25 years.
14. Dory from "Finding Nemo" is deemed one of the most neuropsychologically accurate movie portrayals of the amnesic syndrome and the considerable memory difficulties faced daily by people with it.
15. Henry VIII traveled with a locksmith and changed the locks on his rooms when he visited other estates.
16Kestrels
In the UK, kestrels were once called “windf*ckers.”
17. Apollo astronauts did not have a space toilet. They had a plastic bag with an adhesive rim which they stuck to themselves. After relieving themselves, they had to add disinfectant to the bag and knead it by hand until thoroughly mixed.
18. Since 1953, every King of Saudi Arabia has been the son of the first king, Abdulaziz. His oldest son was born in 1900 and the youngest in 1952. He has roughly 1,000 grandchildren.
19. Hospital patients recover quicker when they are able to see a park/vegetation from their window.
20. When he was the president, John F. Kennedy asked his mother not to contact heads of state without asking him first, after she had asked Nikita Khrushchev to send her his autograph.
21Octopus City
There is a place off the coast of Australia where octopus, who are mostly solitary creatures, have made a small “city” of sorts.
22. 75–80% of Olive Oil sold in the US is adulterated, including major brands. Organized crime's profit margin on adulterated olive oil is 3 times that of cocaine. Olive oil fraud has gone on for 4000 years.
23. The Pokemon Kadabra stopped appearing in the trading card games due to a lawsuit filed by magician Uri Geller in the early 2000s. Geller claimed that Nintendo based Kadabra on him because he also has a spoon-bending act and its Japanese name Yungeller sounds similar to his own.
24. When people were burnt at the stake, bags of gunpowder were sometimes tied around the victim’s necks to shorten their suffering.
25. Groundhog Day was introduced to America by German settlers who originally used a hedgehog to predict the weather, switching to the groundhog as they were easier to come across in the Keystone State.
