Some facts are too strange, sharp, or unexpectedly useful to be forgotten after one read. This mixtape pulls together history, science, language, pop culture, sports, and true stories into a collection of facts that are easy to save now and bring up later.
Origins in Norse Winter Rite
1. At Yule, one of the festivals from which Christmas originated, the Norse god Odin is believed to lead a ghostly procession called the Wild Hunt across the night sky, and undead drought will rise and walk the earth.
2. A cat named Simon served aboard a Royal Navy ship in 1949 and was awarded a medal for boosting morale, eliminating a rat infestation, and surviving cannon shell fire during his service. Hundreds attended his funeral after he died from infected wounds.
3. To make sure Kendrick Lamar had not used a ghostwriter, Eminem cleared the studio of everyone and forced him to write a verse on the spot.
4. In 2017, a man in the UK described as a ‘cancer patient’ underwent surgery to remove a lump in his lungs that turned out to have been caused by a toy traffic cone he had inhaled 40 years earlier; he did not have cancer after all.
5. By 1930, drug use had become so common and accepted in the Tour de France that the organizers felt compelled to state in the official rulebook that drugs would not be provided to the cyclists.
6. Pork became widespread in Spain as a way to demonstrate one was neither Jewish nor Muslim during the Inquisition.
7. Tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis died at age 40 while staying at a friend’s house in Southampton, New York, after an incorrectly installed pool heater allowed carbon monoxide to enter the guesthouse where he was sleeping, resulting in carbon monoxide poisoning.
8. In many non-English languages there is no equivalent to a spelling bee because their spelling systems are so regular that correct spelling is not viewed as impressive.
9. Ignoring The Simpsons’ floating timeline, Mr. Burns would be 128 years old in 2020, having been born in 1892.
10. Sixty-one percent of U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War were under 20 years old, and the average age of those killed was 23.
Catfish brood parasitism in cichlids
11. A species of catfish deposits its eggs among those of a mouthbrooding cichlid. The catfish eggs hatch earlier inside the unwilling adoptive mother’s mouth, and the young then consume the cichlid eggs before the cichlid releases them.
12. Worker bees sleep roughly five to eight hours each day; some clasp one another’s legs while resting. The colony separates tasks into different roles: cleaners, nurses, guards, and foragers whose main job is storing nectar in the comb. Bees can be promoted to other duties as well.
13. A Voodoo superstition describes a woman putting her menstrual blood into a man’s food so that he will fall in love with her.
14. In 2017, hundreds of fossil pterosaur eggs were found in the Gobi Desert. The eggs belong to a pterosaur species already known that lived in China more than 100 million years ago. One fossil indicates a wingspan of 36 feet, making it one of the largest animals ever to fly.
15. Francis ‘Peggy’ Pegahmagabow, a Canadian First Nations soldier, was one of World War 1’s most effective snipers. He volunteered despite the Canadian government’s exclusion of Aboriginal people from the army. Credited with 378 kills, he once entered No Man’s Land to retrieve ammunition when his company had run out.
16. In Return of the Jedi, during the shot where Salacious Crumb is biting at C-3PO’s eye, Anthony Daniels experienced a panic attack while inside the C-3PO costume. During filming he did not actually speak his dialogue — his lines were dubbed later — and instead kept repeating “Get me up. Get me up.” The production used that take in the finished film.
17. The Star Wars opening crawl begins with the storybook-style line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” because George Lucas originally conceived the films as tales narrated by an ancient race of immortals. Those immortals were removed from the early movies, but this remnant remained.
18. In 1875, former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was committed to Bellevue Place in Batavia, Illinois after her only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, filed proceedings to have her confined. While institutionalized she secretly sent letters to her attorney James B. Bradwell, to Myra Bradwell, and to other supporters to contest her confinement. Their pressure succeeded, and she left the sanitarium after roughly three months, later moving into her sister’s care in Springfield, Illinois.
19. On September 11, 2001, guide dogs Salty and Roselle were with their blind handlers, Omar Rivera on the 71st floor and Michael Hingson on the 78th floor of Tower 1, when the first hijacked plane hit above them. As corridors filled with smoke, noise, and chaos, Roselle calmly led Hingson from his office to stairwell B and guided him and about 30 others down 1,463 steps, while Salty would not leave Rivera’s side and, aided by Rivera’s supervisor Donna Enright, helped steer him through the crowded stairwell to the exits. Both handlers and dogs reached the street shortly before the towers fell, with the animals remaining focused amid falling debris and panicked crowds and then continuing to lead their owners away from the dust and wreckage. For their actions, the British charity PDSA later awarded Salty and Roselle a joint Dickin Medal.
20. Al “Scarface” Capone received his notorious facial scars after, while working in a bar, he told a woman “You got a nice ass” in the presence of her brother.
2006 film with tiny earnings
21. The 2006 film Zyzzyx Road, starring Katherine Heigl, had a $1.2 million budget but made only $30 at the box office from six paying viewers.
22. A network of hilltop signal fires once allowed messages to travel hundreds of miles in under an hour, similar to the system shown in The Lord of the Rings.
23. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pay for Terminator 2: Judgment Day was provided largely by purchasing him a $12.75 million Gulfstream III jet.
24. The 79 C.E. eruption of Vesuvius devastated Pompeii and buried its library in ash. Manuscripts from that library are now being read for the first time in two thousand years.
25. In 1909 in Mexico, Taft and Díaz held the first meeting between a United States president and a Mexican president. Both were bilingual, so no interpreters were needed. No one else attended and they spent 20 minutes alone.
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