Some facts are memorable because they are useful, and others because they sound completely made up until you check them. This mixtape leans into the second category, pulling together strange history, science, crime, war, and human behavior into a collection of details that are guaranteed to derail a normal conversation.
Observers Working on Distant Vessels
1. Trained observers inspect activities aboard commercial fishing boats to confirm rules are being followed. They operate alone far out at sea, often several thousand kilometers from the nearest port. The work is hazardous, and a number of them go missing.
2. In 1995, New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott proposed an amendment that would have required psychologists to wear a wizard hat when giving testimony in court.
3. Neil DeGrasse Tyson briefly thought about working as a male stripper to earn money for graduate school. On a visit to the club, performers emerged wearing jockstraps soaked with lighter fluid and lit them on fire while performing to “Great Balls of Fire.” He ultimately opted to give math tutoring instead.
4. Eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991 and was only located in 2009 when her abductor entered a school accompanied by two young girls he presented as his daughters. Those girls were his children, and their mother was Jaycee, who had been held captive by him for 18 years. She had given birth to her daughters when she was 14.
5. Mexican diplomat Gilberto Bosques Saldivar helped 40,000 people, primarily Spaniards and Jews, escape from Nazi-occupied France during World War II. His courageous actions were not widely known for roughly 60 years.
6. William Herschel, 2nd Baronet was the first person to use fingerprints on contracts. He was the son of astronomer John Herschel, who invented photography and was himself the son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus among other things.
7. During a studio soundcheck, the rock band Iron Butterfly recorded “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” spontaneously while singer-organist Doug Ingle slurred the title because he was drunk or high. The band let the jam continue until it ran to about seventeen minutes, then decided the take worked and kept it as the final master, which became one of rock’s most famous long tracks.
8. Cats do not need to blink regularly to keep their eyes lubricated. Not blinking often is likely advantageous when hunting. Cats will, however, squint their eyes, usually as a way to communicate affection and comfort toward another cat or a human.
9. Admiral J. Stockdale was shot down in Vietnam and held prisoner for seven and a half years, four of them in solitary confinement. He endured captivity by drawing inspiration from Epictetus, a Stoic and former slave who shrugged off even his own condition of slavery as a natural inconvenience that should not concern him.
10. Robert Liston is the only surgeon in history to have performed an operation with a 300% mortality rate: his patient died of infection, he accidentally amputated his assistant’s fingers and that assistant also died of infection, and he slashed a spectator who later died from shock.
Long History Of Glass Recycling
11. Glass has been recycled for almost 3,000 years. It does not wear out as a raw material. Recycling one clear glass bottle saves enough manufacturing energy to power a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
12. The Arabian Desert used to be a green savanna that supported large lakes and plentiful wildlife. Although the Sahara is commonly known to have gone through wet and dry periods, strong evidence now suggests the Arabian Peninsula experienced similar cycles.
13. In 2009 a group of Shia LaBeouf fans established a religion called The Church of Shiantology. Adherents of the religion call him the MesShia.
14. In the Great Papago Escape, 25 German prisoners of war, mostly naval personnel, tunneled out of a Phoenix POW camp intending to ride the Gila River down to Mexico. They did not realize that most rivers in Arizona run dry.
15. During the American Civil War some soldiers’ wounds produced a blue glow. Those with glowing wounds had a higher chance of survival, and the phenomenon was called “Angel’s Glow”. It is now known that the luminescence comes from bacteria that live in nematodes and produce antibiotics.
16. People who ride motorcycles are nearly 30 times more likely to be killed than other drivers.
17. In 1872, Henry Taylor, who was helping carry a coffin at Kensal Green Cemetery in London, was crushed by it after he stumbled on a stone. Reports say the deceased man’s widow almost went into hysterics.
18. In 1938 in Los Angeles, Helen Hulick Beebe was called as a witness and was criticized by the judge for wearing trousers instead of a dress. Although she was ordered to return “properly attired,” she came back in pants and was jailed for contempt.
19. During World War II, German prisoners of war held in the United States were shocked by how African Americans were treated. Because the prisoners worked alongside them in the fields, they became closer through their shared labor.
20. When you shake a container of mixed nuts, the largest pieces, such as Brazil nuts, oddly end up at the top instead of sinking. Physicists call this surprising phenomenon the “Brazil nut effect,” a form of granular convection in which vibration lets smaller nuts filter downward through gaps. As the container keeps vibrating, those small pieces effectively push the big ones upward, so the heaviest nuts come to rest at the surface, where intuition says they should not.
Einstein’s Missing Brain Story
21. After Einstein died, his brain disappeared and was found 23 years later in a pathologist’s basement, stored in Tupperware containers.
22. During the 1970s and 1980s, murder levels in Miami, Florida were so high that the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office had to rent a refrigerated trailer from Burger King to deal with the overflow of corpses.
23. By a strange coincidence, Finnair Flight 666, operated with a 13-year-old Airbus aircraft, landed safely at HEL (Helsinki) Airport on Friday the 13th at 13:00 (1:00 PM) in 2017.
24. Ben L. Salomon, a dentist serving in the US Army during World War 2, was shot 24 times while defending an aid station against the Japanese. Although he killed up to 98 attackers, enabling the wounded to be evacuated, awarding him the Medal of Honor was delayed because medical officers were not supposed to bear arms against the enemy.
25. During Mao Zedong’s rule, a dentist was executed for malicious slander after comparing a mango to a sweet potato.
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