December 2011
22 posts
Montana had FEWER traffic accidents when they had NO speed limits! It’s called the Montana Speed Limit Paradox. Data collected by the state of Montana showed that when driving on highways with no posted speed limits, drivers actually drove safer and slower!
The number of deadly car accidents doubled (increased by 111%) when Montana enforced strict speed laws! How is this possible? Further...
When the US space station Skylab crashed in Australia, the municipality fined the US for littering! In 1979, pieces of the US space station Skylab fell from the sky and littered the Australian municipality of Esperance. The craft had broken apart over the Indian Ocean.
Esperance fined the United States $400 for littering! It wasn’t until 2009 that they were paid, though. A radio show host, Scott...
A family in Colorado lost their cat in 2007 and it was found 5 years later in New York! That’s over 1800 miles away. The cat had a microchip implanted when it was a kitten, so when an animal shelter in New York had it checked, they were able to contact the family, who couldn’t believe they had found their cat after such a long time!
The cat was in such good health that the animal...
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was almost cancelled before it aired! The special, which is a staple of the Christmas season nowadays, was the very first animated work from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts strip.
When CBS TV executives saw the special they were dismayed. It was slow, it had no action, there were no professional voice actors (they were all kids!) and they did things that...
In the early days of Disney Studios, in a staff party, a cartoon short was shown of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in an x-rated scene. Afterwards, Walt chuckled along with everyone else, invited them up on the stage to be recognized, fired them both on the spot, and ordered the film to be destroyed.
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Ernest Duchesne discovered penicillin 32 years before Alexander Fleming, but he was ignored because he was only 23! Duchesne was a French physician who noted that certain moulds killed bacteria. This was 32 years before Alexander Fleming found the antibiotic properties in penicillin. Duchesne enrolled at the Military Health Service Schools of Lyons in 1894 and documented his findings in his thesis...
John Stump is credited for creating ridiculous, unplayable music! John Stump is credited with the invention of the ridiculous music genre after composing a piece entitled “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”. After looking at the sheet music for a second, you can see that something is not right.
There are giant clumps of notes everywhere and skilled music readers will see that the notes do not make...
How did Harriet Tubman trick a former slave owner? Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave who fled to the North in 1849. After this, she started helping her family escape the South, and eventually other people too. She ended up saving over 70 people in 13 trips. She was sometimes called Moses because she was freeing her people. In all her trips, she had a few really close encounters with people who...
Ghengis Khan killed 11% of the world’s population!
Ghengis Khan reached power by uniting the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia. He founded the Mongol Empire and began invading other tribes. This resulted in the eventual conquest of most of Eurasia.
While most conquests like this are usually pretty bloody, no one holds a candle to Khan. He killed with such savagery that it is estimated that...
Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings using only 2 fingers! The novel took him over 14 years to write. After he wrote the Hobbit in 1937, it wasn’t until the mid 1950s when the first volume “The Fellowship of the Ring” was actually published.
When all was said and done, the book was over 1200 pages that he typed himself! It is said that when he needed a copy of the manuscript, he...
The opposite of ‘sparkle’ is ‘darkle’! While most of us have seen things shimmer with light and described it as sparkling, there is an equal opposite to sparkle. The word, darkle, means to become cloudy, gloomy, dark, or be concealed in the dark!
Another interesting fact about darkle is that it is a relatively new word in comparison to its antonym, sparkle! In fact, the first use of sparkle dates...
Microsofts “I’m a PC” Ads were created on a Mac! This campaign was a response to the highly successful Apple campaign that featured Justin Long and John Hodgman that (favorably) compared Macs to PCs. However, in a struck of irony, clever internet users figured out that the campaign had actually been created in Macs!
What they did is they looked at the ‘metadata’ or...
In 1979, people called in sick to work with a case of “being homosexual”!
This happened in Sweden. The event was a protest, because in the country, homosexuality was classified as a sickness at the time. After this happened, there was also a protest outside the National Board of Health and Welfare to try and get them to change this classification. Sweden had been one of the first countries to...
Canada is the only country in the world to sell ketchup flavored potato chips! Lay’s potato chips are known around the world, yet have different names in different regions. They make chips of all different flavors, and one claim Canada has is that Lay’s makes ketchup flavored chips. Other flavors available are Smokey Bacon, Dill Pickle, Flamin’ Hot, and Limon.
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A pigeon saved 194 soldiers in World War I! The bird, Cher Ami, delivered 12 important messages during the war. He was shot through his breast and managed to land. American soldiers found one of Cher Ami’s decapitated legs with a message! The message on the bird’s leg was from Major Whittlesey, whose battalion was isolated from the other American soldiers. Based on that information,...
The echidna and platypus are the only mammals that lay eggs! The echidna is found in Australia and along with the platypus lays eggs and produces milk for its young. They are considered mammals, though, and are the only of their kind. The echidna is also known as the “spiky anteater” and looks roughly like a hedgehog. The animal can survive an array of temperatures and is nocturnal.
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If the Lion King were to happen in real life, the lions would have naturally choosen Scar over Simba It’s because of the color of Scar’s mane. The mane in each adult lion is a telling sign of its strength and sexual maturity. The fuller and darker a Lion’s mane is the more attractive it is to the lionesses.
A dark and full mane in a lion indicates:
Higher testosterone...
You only have two fears when you are Born When you are first born your only fears were of falling and of loud noises. They are built into your DNA and have been passed down from generation to generation as a survival mechanism
Their sole purpose is to keep you alive, and create emotion that will motivate you to avoid danger.
Every other fear you face you have learned throughout your life.
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A woman made a replica of Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper” using nothing but lint from her dryer Laura Bell, from Michigan, spent 800 hours of laundry to create enough lint and 200 hours to put it together. The artwork ended up measuring 14 feet wide and 4 feet tall!
She had to buy towels according to the colors she wanted on her work, but she had to wash and dry them...
During World War I, France built a fake Paris to fool Germany France decided to make a fake city of Paris to keep German planes from bombarding the real city. The fake city was built just north of the real one. There were electric lights, replica buildings, and even a copy of the Gare du Nord—the station from which high-speed trains now travel to and from London.
The plan would have worked...
Have scientists discovered a cure to aging? These cells, known as senescent cells, have been shown to help the body age so scientists are trying to get rid of them to fight aging! After testing on mice, the one treated did not develop the aging disease cataracts and was able to exercise on a treadmill for much longer than the mice with its senescent cells remaining. The mouse with the aging cells...
A man woke up from surgery to find doctors removed his penis Hurshell Ralls went in for bladder surgery after developing cancer but unfortunately, the doctors had removed something besides the infected cells. Ralls’ doctors and surgeons never mentioned to the man that removal of the penis and testicles was a possibility and because of it, Ralls sued.
His doctor said that the cancer from Ralls’...