26Bogart's Chess Games during WWII
Humphrey Bogart was an avid chess player and often played correspondence chess with soldiers overseas during World War II. In 1943, the FBI told him to stop doing so after they intercepted his mail, believing the chess notations to be secret codes.
27. In 1941, Time originally intended to name Dumbo the elephant, whose film was released that year, as "Mammal of the Year" instead of "Man of the Year." After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly earned the title of "Man of the Year" for a record third time.
28. After being quoted as saying that being president was easy because he would just follow the orders of Congress, Admiral George Dewey withdrew his candidacy for the 1900 election.
29. The "earworm" phenomenon (having a song stuck in your head in a loop) can occur due to the brain's attempt to fill a gap in the auditory cortex.
30. There was a craze for emu meat in the early '90s, and a pair of emus sold for as much as $60,000 before the market crashed.
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31Federico da Montefeltro's Vision Solution
Federico da Montefeltro, fifteenth-century duke of Urbino, after having lost one eye in a tournament, had his surgeons successfully amputate the bridge of his nose to widen his field of view.
32. Lucasfilm hired YouTuber Shamook as their Senior Facial Capture Artist after Shamook dropped a deepfake video that went viral because many felt it improved the VFX used to de-age Mark Hamill in Season 2 of The Mandalorian.
33. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns around the world, Mexico had a 5-day nationwide lockdown in 2009 (with nearly identical rules to those seen during the COVID lockdowns) for the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
34. Indigenous Bolivians in the Andes have evolved to be arsenic-resistant due to the strong presence of the AS3MT enzyme in their bodies that can metabolize the toxic element naturally found in drinking water.
35. The 7-Eleven convenience store's name dates to 1946, reflecting the store's new 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. hours of operation, which were unprecedented at the time.
