Fired Over Childhood Dime
26. In 2012, Wells Fargo fired a customer service representative for placing a cardboard dime in a laundry machine when he was a child in 1963.
27. In June 2020, researchers in Japan used a drone that released soap bubbles coated with pollen to pollinate a pear orchard, and 95% of the flowers produced fruit, which was about the same success rate as hand-pollinating.
28. In 1986, a 22-year-old Indian air hostess named Neerja Bhanot helped conceal 41 American passports on board a hijacked plane. The plane was seized by 4 terrorists while it was on the ground in Pakistan during a scheduled stop. She died while shielding three children from gunfire and was later awarded bravery medals by India, Pakistan, and the United States.
29. The well-known B-17 crash landing scene in “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970) was not made from old stock footage. While filming, the aircraft suffered an actual landing gear failure, and the crew recorded the emergency landing. Because no one was hurt, they used the footage in the movie.
30. After hearing Kennedy’s “end of the decade” speech, an Englishman placed a 10 pounds bet with a bookmaker at 1000/1 that a man would walk on the moon’s surface before January 1, 1970. He considered it a “common sense bet.”
31. While Paris Hilton was hosting SNL, cast members made wagers over whether she would ask anyone a personal question. Seth Meyers answered yes and won after she asked Maya Rudolph if she was Italian.
32. Baun the Cat is a figure from Russian fairy tales that has a voice able to cure any illness. Still, the cat often uses that voice to put people to sleep and then eat them. The only way to defeat the cat is to wear an iron helmet to block its voice.
33. A penis panic is a condition in which men think their genitals are shrinking or vanishing, causing mass hysteria. These outbreaks have happened around the world, especially in Africa and Asia, with local beliefs claiming that such changes can be deadly. People have been injured in desperate efforts, including using needles and fishing line, to stop the penis from seeming to disappear. In 1967, Singapore dealt with a major epidemic, which led to a government effort to reassure men that retraction is anatomically impossible and to a media blackout on the condition’s spread.
34. Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” was finished in 1512, and 478 years later, a doctor in Indiana noticed that God’s shroud is shaped like the human brain.
35. A rare mutation in the LRP5 gene can lead to extremely dense bones, making them unusually strong and resistant to fracture. One man with this condition had bone density eight times above average, could not float while swimming, and walked away from a serious car crash without suffering a single broken bone.
Hidden Photo Arrest Case
36. Canadian child molester Christopher Paul Neil posted about 200 swirled images of his face online while molesting children in Cambodia and Vietnam. German investigators developed a method for unswirling the images, which led to his arrest.
37. In the 23rd century B.C., the Assyrians maintained the first large organized army. They also pioneered modern-day psychological terrorism, skinned people alive, and mutilated them if they did not believe their kings were one with God.
38. In 1997, comedian Dana Carvey had heart bypass surgery for a blocked coronary artery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong artery. Carvey, who later suffered from angina pectoris, sued for medical malpractice and was awarded millions in damages. He gave the money to charity.
39. Some anti-Castro activists say that the Cuban secret police sometimes used radioactive isotopes to cause cancer in “adversaries they wished to destroy with as little notice as possible”. In 1997, Cuban expatriate columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner referred to this approach as “the Bulgarian Treatment,” after its supposed use by the Bulgarian secret police.
40. A major factor behind the 1989 coup that brought down Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner was concern that either Stroessner’s cocaine-addicted son, Alfredo, or his gay son, Gustavo, would someday succeed him.
41. Actor Leonard Nimoy once drove John F. Kennedy in a cab. The future president told the aspiring actor, “Lots of competition in your business, just like in mine. Just remember there’s always room for one more good one.”
42. German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II was away on vacation when World War I started in 1914. After he got back to Berlin and saw how things had intensified following the ultimatum to Serbia, he angrily challenged German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, asking how the crisis had turned into war. Bethmann Hollweg responded to the emperor’s anger by offering his resignation. Wilhelm declined to take it and reportedly told him, “You’ve made this stew, now you’re going to eat it.”
43. VeggieTales never made any new testament stories from the bible again because the show’s creator, Phil Vischer, would not depict Jesus as a vegetable.
44. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a wizard portrayed by Ian Brown from the band “The Stone Roses” is shown reading Stephen Hawking’s book “A brief history of time” in the Leaky Cauldron, hinting at the time travel that happens later in the movie.
45. Cadaverine is a poisonous chemical produced as dead tissue decomposes. It creates the smell of corpses and also gives semen its taste.
Manual Ventilation Rescue
46. During Denmark’s 1952 polio epidemic, the death rate exceeded 85% because there were not enough respirators. Dr. Bjorn Ibsen created a new type of ventilator, demonstrated that it worked, and then enlisted thousands of volunteers to hand-pump them for weeks, since they were fully manual. Mortality fell to 26%.
47. Near the end of World War 2, US Army Captain Moffatt Burriss and two other men were riding in a Jeep when they accidentally came across a German Panzer Corps of 15,000 troops outside Berlin. He went to the enemy commander by himself and fooled him into surrendering his army and becoming a prisoner.
48. Near Frankfurt in central Germany, a kind of cheese is served with raw onions on top. Locals call it “hand cheese with music.” When visitors ask why it has that name, they are told, “the music comes later.” This is a running joke about the gas caused by the onions. The cheese is served in water and is pickled. It smells and tastes absolutely putrid.
49. To stop tourists from stealing their beer glasses, some bars in Belgium make customers leave one of their shoes as a deposit, and the shoe is then placed in a basket hung from the ceiling.
50. In January 1996, Jamaican police wrongly fired at Jimmy Buffett’s airplane because they thought it was tied to marijuana smuggling. Buffett, Bono, and their families were on the plane. The Jamaican government later admitted the mistake and apologized to Buffett, who wrote the song “Jamaica Mistaica” in reply.
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