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.
In over 50 years and 10 billion passengers, the Japanese bullet train has never had a single passenger fatality caused by a derailment or collision.
A Dairy Queen in Franklin, PA, has one of only four surviving Apollo command module boilerplates displayed in it's front yard.
The War of the Worlds was re-broadcast in 1949 in Quito, Ecuador. It was fully believed, emergency vehicles drove to the landing site to fight/help, and people started fleeing in panic. When it was revealed as a hoax, the city rioted, and burned the radio station down (killing ~6 people).
Cartographers protect their intellectual property by slipping fake streets, or even entire towns, into their maps. If the street/town shows up on another map, they know it was stolen. Dictionary writers have been known to do the same thing with fake words.
Danny Trejo was addicted to Heroin by age 12 and served time in San Quentin prison until he was 25. He's now been over 70 films and has a brand of restaurants, bars, and donuts shops valued around $100 million. All his businesses hire what he calls "second chancers" like he was.
McDonalds once came up with bubblegum flavoured broccoli, in an attempt to get kids to eat healthier. It was never introduced as children found the flavour confusing.
About "lonely negatives," such as disgust, disheveled, inept and inert. These are words that, due to a prefix or suffix, appear as though they should have a positive root but none exists or it has vanished from usage.
In 1945, Army photography David Conover saw a young woman on the Radioplane assembly line whom he thought had potential as a model. He photographed her working on the OQ-3 model, which led to a screen test for the woman, who soon changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
Russian cosmonauts used to pack a shotgun in case they landed in Siberia and had to fend off bears.
About Liviu Librescu: a Romanian-born scientist, engineer, professor, teacher, and Holocaust survivor, who heroically held the door of his classroom closed during the Virginia Tech shootings sacrificing his life while the gunman continuously shot through the door, saving 22 of his 23 students.
There was a real-life gangster nicknamed Fat Tony who died in a Springfield.
Dr. Dre is donating all of his artist royalties earned from Compton, his first album in 16 years, to help fund a new performing arts and entertainment facility in Compton.
Before the Hummer, the US Army had over 15,000 of a little known vehicle called the "Gamma Goat". It was designed to look like a little jeep towing a trailer, but was actually a 7000lbs single vehicle with 6 wheel drive, 4 wheel steering, and had exceptional offroad ability. But terrible on road
"CAPTCHA" is an acronym: "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
Allison Janney was so convincing as White House press secretary in The West Wing that she has been offered work as a political pundit many times and turned them down, reminding them that she is an actor and not strong on politics.