Random Revelations: Article #64- 45 Spellbinding Random Facts

Smokers who quit before 40 were found to live just as long as non-smokers. The average smoker who doesn't stop will lose 10 years on their life. A smoker who stops between the age of 35 and 40 can regain 9 of those years. Older smokers gained back 6 of those years.

2. While his opponent (William Jennings Bryan) traveled all over the country campaigning, William McKinley won both the 1896 and 1900 presidential elections by staying at his home in Canton, Ohio and giving speeches off his front porch to whoever showed up to listen.

3. Macaulay Culkin was the first child actor to earn $1 Million for a movie

4. In medieval years, an hour was divided into 4 puncta (quarter-hours), 10 minuta, or 40 momenta. So if you asked someone to "wait a moment", turns out that you really asked them to wait for about 90 seconds.

5. Southwest Airlines flew a plane full of puppies to help them escape from Hurricane Harvey.

Politician William M Tweed (widely known as "Boss" Tweed) was brought down by Thomas Nast's cartoons, which painted him as the embodiment of corruption. Tweed said to his aides, “Let's stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can't read but damn it, they can see pictures.”

7. Psy of ‘Gangnam Style’ fame once rapped about torturing and killing American soldiers and their families.

8. Sir Alec Guinness, Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars, disliked his character so much that he advised George Lucas to kill him off under the guise of "making him a stronger character".

9. A study found that having a regular bedtime during early childhood has a significant positive influence on children's behavior while having an irregular bedtime is associated with behavioral difficulties.

10. Ashpan Annie survived the catastrophic explosion in Halifax, Canada in 1917 as a baby, protected from the explosion by an iron stove and kept warm for over 24 hours by the ashes. Annie lived to be 95.

Not only do 1 in every 10 people have a tiny second spleen called an accessory spleen, but also that if the main spleen is removed, the tiny second spleen can grow to function as a new spleen.

12. People are more likely to donate to a sick dog than a sick child. A charity ran an experiment where they asked for money and exchanged the picture of a child for that of a dog. More people chose to donate to the dog.

13. In 2000, an off-duty Vancouver police officer and his dog found $1 million in a trash dumpster, who gave it to 'Lost & Found'. Nobody claimed it so he got to keep it.

14. In 1994, Cleveland Indian’s relief pitcher Jason Grimsley crawled through the Comerica Park air duct with a flashlight in his mouth to get into the umpire’s room so he could switch out Albert Belle’s confiscated bat because he knew it was corked.

15. There are two birth anomalies - superfecundation (twins with separate fathers) and chimerism (absorbed twins), that if combined, will create a single human with two biological fathers.

The CIA admitted to the existence of Area 51 in 2013, eight years after a Freedom of Information Act request was filed.

17. Van Gogh sold a total of one painting (The Red Vineyard) during his lifetime.

18. In 2015, the director of Paranormal Activity produced "Area 51", about four friends sneaking into the secret base. The movie budget was $5 million, but it grossed only $7556, losing 99.8%.

19. Those responsible for the hack of Target's customers' credit card data entered through the HVAC system's internet connection which was serviceable via the web and connected to the same server as the credit card data.

20. The very first photo to have a human in it wasn't intended to be a portrait and ended up taking several minutes for the exposure. Anything that was moving was not visible.

In 2002, a woman named Barbara Hanson won £13,000 in compensation from an airline after she was squashed by an obese woman during an 11-hour flight. When the plane landed, she had internal bleeding, severe bruising and torn leg muscles.

22. The Shriners (known for the Shriners Hospitals) is a body of Freemasons dedicated to fun, brotherly love, relief, and truth.

23. In 1996 Tonya Harding, by then already a scandalous figure from the 1994 skating incidents, gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an 81-year-old woman who collapsed at a bar in Portland and was credited with saving her life.

24. Aldrich Ames was an alcoholic and average CIA agent, who sold out CIA secrets to the Soviets. At the time of his arrest, he had compromised more CIA assets than any other mole in history and had even passed two polygraph tests.

25. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", took a flat fee of $100,000 and refused to take percentage points on record sales which would have earned him about $500,000. He considered it to be immoral and "an insult to the artist".