The best conversation-starting facts are the ones that are surprising enough to make people stop and ask, “Wait, really?” This mixtape jumps through food, history, pop culture, politics, war, and odd human behavior to deliver exactly that kind of material.
Creation Story Of Butter Chicken
1. Butter chicken was developed in the 1950s by three Punjabi restaurateurs who made it “by chance” by mixing leftover chicken into a tomato gravy rich in butter and cream; the dish is India’s most popular curry both domestically and globally.
2. The total gifts in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” add up to 364, which equals the number of days in a year minus December 25.
3. Leonardo DaVinci, now celebrated as a great 16th century Italian artist and inventor, also worked as a party planner.
4. Elvis Presley and his entourage would rent roller skating rinks to set off $15,000 worth of fireworks at each other while wearing “air force jump-suits plus gloves, helmets, and goggles.”
5. Pedro Lascuráin Paredes was a Mexican politician who served as president for under an hour on February 19, 1913. His brief tenure was the result of a military coup led by a general. The general arranged for Lascuráin to assume the presidency, then had him named interior secretary, and then resigned so that Lascuráin would become president.
6. Just as smallpox wiped out as much as 90% of the population in the Americas, rinderpest outbreaks in the late 1800s killed up to 90% of cattle in Eastern and Southern Africa, destroying the economies of herding and farming communities.
7. Disney tried to turn ‘Dead Poets Society’ (1989) into a movie focused on dancing rather than poetry and suggested renaming it ‘Sultans of Swing.’
8. Coca-Cola has drained the water supply of an Indian village for 16 years.
9. Sylvester Graham, an early clean-eating proponent and vegetarian advocate known for the Graham cracker, shunned alcohol, sexual indulgence, meat, and even white bread. Ironically, he died at age 57 from complications after an opium enema.
10. Cats have whiskers distributed across their bodies that they use to gather information about their surroundings.
Twain’s Death and Comet
11. In 1909, Mark Twain predicted his own death by linking it to Halley’s Comet, saying he had been born when the comet passed in 1835 and expected to die when it returned the following year. Born in 1835, the year the comet came close to Earth, he tied his life to its reappearance. The comet returned in 1910 as he had anticipated, and Twain died on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet’s closest approach.
12. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the American oil company Texaco illegally supplied oil to Francisco Franco’s fascist forces. The U.S. government fined the company $20,000, but Texaco continued to provide oil until the war ended.
13. American singer Elvis Presley hated English musician John Lennon and reportedly wanted to beat him up because of Lennon’s anti-war stance.
14. The fear of the number 666 is called hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. In 1989, after the 1988 election when Nancy and Ronald Reagan moved into their Bel-Air home in Los Angeles, the house address was changed from 666 St. Cloud Road to 668 St. Cloud Road.
15. The PlayStation 2 stayed in production for almost 13 years, with new games released for it until about one month before the PlayStation 4 was announced.
16. Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams auditioned for the parts that ended up going to the other actress. The head of Paramount decided Lohan’s audience would not accept her as the villain, so she was cast as Cady instead of Regina George. McAdams was considered too old to play Cady.
17. Apart from France, only Uruguay is allowed to freely use the name “champagne.” That exception exists because of a debt France owed Uruguay after World War II. Producers in all other countries must label similar products as “sparkling wine” when selling them.
18. In 2017 Bud Light sent a cease and desist letter to a small brewer that had named one of its beers “Dilly Dilly,” a nonsense phrase Bud Light created and trademarked for a series of its advertisements. The notice was written on a scroll and announced by a town crier.
19. The Bela Lugosi-style cape and tuxedo first appeared on Count Dracula in the 1924 London stage adaptation of the novel. That costume was used so his charm and sophistication would be obvious from a distance.
20. To collect duties, King Christian IV of Denmark required captains passing through the Øresund to declare the value of their cargo, and that declared amount was used as the tax base without further inspection. The king also reserved the right to buy the entire cargo at exactly that declared price.
Jiang Qing’s Final Outcome
21. On October 6, 1976, following Mao Zedong’s death, the Gang of Four, a group of Communist Party officials led by Mao’s last wife who exercised complete control over the media and played a central role in the Cultural Revolution, were arrested. Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s widow, was tried and sentenced to death; her sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment, and she ultimately committed suicide.
22. While being evaluated to donate a kidney to her son, a 64-year-old woman discovered she had no spleen despite never having had it surgically removed. She was diagnosed with a rare congenital defect and was still able to donate her kidney.
23. Tutankhamun’s tomb is one of the rare Egyptian royal tombs found almost intact and complete. The tombs of other pharaohs were looted at some point in history. Although his tomb was robbed twice in antiquity, the seal on the tomb’s door remained unbroken and undisturbed for more than 3,200 years.
24. When Orange Crush was first produced, orange pulp was put into the bottles to create the impression of “fresh squeezed” juice, even though the raw pulp had merely been added during bottling rather than being the residue of freshly squeezed oranges.
25. About 94 U.S. World War II servicemen who were executed by the U.S. military are buried in “Plot E” of the Oise Aisne American Cemetery in France, in a section designated as “the dishonored dead.” All but one were convicted of rape and/or murder. Hedges screen it from view, no U.S. flag is permitted to fly over it, the graves lack headstones, and it is not publicly accessible.
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