Some facts don’t demand your attention-they simply wait for the right moment to surprise you. This mixtape gathers 50 fascinating stories, discoveries, and historical oddities that prove curiosity is always worth keeping on standby
Impostor Fooled Parents
1. Oskar Daubmann was a confidence man who persuaded people that he was the final POW from World War 1. The parents of the real Oskar Daubmann accepted the impostor as their son, even though his eye color was different and he had no known facial scar.
2. The Five-Percent Nation is a group within Islam. It teaches that Asian black people are the source of humanity and views Asian black men as embodiments of God.
3. By 1965, boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson was broke after spending all of the $4 million he made over his career. When he was given a huge trophy after his last fight, Robinson was so impoverished that his apartment had no piece of furniture sturdy enough to hold it.
4. The well-known British pub meal “Ploughman’s Lunch” was created in the 1950s as a marketing ploy. The Cheese Bureau, a marketing organization, started advertising it in pubs to help boost cheese sales after cheese had recently stopped being rationed.
5. NBC canceled Rob Lowe’s show “Lyon’s Den” after six episodes but required Lowe and the creator to film the remaining episodes for a DVD release. Because they controlled the creative rights, the creators shot the rest as absurdly as possible, even disclosing that the main character was a mass murderer.
6. In 2007, British comedian Bob Monkhouse appeared in a TV commercial for a prostate cancer research organization. The advertisement was made using a body double, a voice-over artist, and computer technology because Monkhouse had died of prostate cancer in 2003.
7. English comedian Russell Brand was originally a host for MTV UK, but he was fired for showing up at work dressed as Osama bin Laden the day after 9/11 and bringing his drug dealer to the studio.
8. Neanderthals experienced extremely high levels of traumatic injury, with 79-94% of known specimens showing evidence of healed major wounds, which may have resulted from frequent encounters with large animals.
9. In 1866, a schoolteacher named Mary Chase Walker was boycotted in San Diego, California, after eating lunch in public with a black woman.
10. Doug Hegdahl was a quiet American prisoner of war who was nicknamed “The Incredibly Stupid One” by his Vietnamese captors. When he returned to the United States, he gave the names of over 200 prisoners of war, which he had memorized to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
DNA Stretch Scale
11. If you stretched the DNA in a single cell all the way out, it would measure about 2m long, and the DNA in all of your cells combined would be about twice the Solar System’s diameter.
12. Metal falls as snow on Venus.
13. Mahatma Gandhi’s last words were “Oh God!” (“हे राम!”) shortly after he was shot by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse.
14. One species of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans, is so resistant to radiation that scientists have given it the nickname “Conan the Bacterium.”
15. Klerksdorp spheres are small objects, often spherical or disc-shaped, that miners and rockhounds have collected from 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits.
16. In the 1800s, mothers were posed as chairs and curtains so they could keep their children motionless during the exposure. These are now known as the “hidden mother” photos.
17. After a Serbian force shot down an American F-117 stealth aircraft in 1999, propaganda posters in Serbia mockingly said, “Sorry, we didn’t know it was invisible.”
18. Rowan Atkinson has a stammer, so he relies on over-articulation as a method for getting past difficult consonants, such as “B”.
19. The well-known pop song “Barbie Girl” was written after a member of Aqua viewed an exhibit about kitsch culture in Denmark that included Barbie dolls. The band described the song as a “social comment,” and critic Larry Flick said it “effectively rants about the inherent misogyny of Barbie with a subversive hand.”
20. Richard Feynman’s final words before death were “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”
ODB’s Tax Check Incident
21. When Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album became a commercial hit, one of the group’s members, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, was filmed cashing a welfare check. This happened because ODB had not yet filed his taxes, so the income he had just received did not affect his eligibility.
22. “Connections” was a science education TV series created by science historian James Burke. The series, which debuted in 1978, argued that no one can examine the development of any one part of the modern world in isolation, but instead that history and innovation are driven by interconnected isolated events.
23. During apartheid, South Africa gave certain East Asians “honorary white” status so they could receive privileges normally reserved for whites, mainly to keep trade and diplomacy moving. When South Africa extended that status to South Koreans during talks in 1961, South Korea refused to go along and turned down the arrangement. South Korea then severed relations with South Africa and kept full ties suspended until 1992, when apartheid ended and normal diplomatic relations resumed.
24. American trucking entrepreneur JB Hunt used to carry a clip of $100 bills and give them to people he believed could use them.
25. First published in 1982 under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Stephen King wrote The Running Man in a week, reportedly in just 72 hours. It was essentially issued as a first draft and was later eclipsed by the 1987 film.
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