Weird but interesting facts of life
Some are funny facts and some will make you say WTF. But being inconvenient and not useless, all those facts will enrich your knowledge base and help you pass through.
Paraffin wax was a common waterproofing method for circus tents but changed in 1944 after the Ringling Bros. Fire in Hartford, CT. The paraffin wax ended up accelerating the deadly fire & 1800lbs of hot wax "rained down from the roof"-killing 167 people; injuring 700, mostly women & children.
Theodore Roosevelt was shot before a speech in Milwaukee and refused to have medical treatment until he delivered his 90 minute speech, in which he showed off the bullet wound to the crowd
The Ernest Hemingway house is home to 40 - 59 cats. Over half of them have six toes and are descendants of his original cat.
A CT scan on the ancient statue of Buddha revealed a mummified monk.
A moment was a medieval measurement of time and corresponded to 90 seconds.
In 1838, Missouri fought a war against Joseph Smith and the Mormons. The Mormons burned an entire county to the ground, and Missouri's governor ordered the expulsion or genocide of all Mormons.
Your body automatically stuffs and un-stuffs alternating nostrils so you only use one nostril at a time. This is called the "nasal cycle."
There is one person still living who was born in the 19th Century - Susannah Mushatt Jones, born July 6, 1899
In 1986, a sysadmin looking into a $0.75 accounting error uncovered a KGB hacker that was stealing nuclear secrets
Adrien Brody, in order to star as Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist, "withdrew for months, gave up his apartment and his car, broke up with his then-girlfriend, learned how to play Chopin on the piano, and lost 29" pounds, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor at 29 years old.
After the invention of the Cherokee Alphabet by Sequoya in 1825, the literacy rate of the Cherokee people soon surpassed that of their European and American neighbors.
Peter McCathie survived being hit by lightning when he was a teenager and now he’s won the lottery — both events combined come to about a 1 in 2.6 trillion chance.
There's a huge reservoir of water in space that's 100,000 times the mass of our sun. It contains 140 trillion times the amount of water on Earth.
There have been 4x more people who have been to the moon than have been in the bottom of Marianas Trench
The American government poisoned alcohol during its prohibition causing a number of deaths