Casting for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown was done by Jaki Brown. Casting for Lee Daniels’s The
Butler was done by Leah Daniels-Butler. The total weight of pumpkins produced in the U.S. each year
is equivalent to the weight of about 12.8 billion standard Charleston Chews. In his will, William
Shakespeare left his wife “my second best bed.” Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and today’s episode of the
List Show is all about facts that will make you say “huh?” We’ll cover film adaptations
bankrolled by the CIA and some intriguing insights into Russian space porn. Let’s get started.
Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton was taller than Michael Jordan. Crichton,
who also wrote Congo and The Andromeda Strain, clocked in at around 6 foot
9. The greatest basketball player of all time was around 6’6”. If you’re wondering,
Crichton did play varsity basketball, but as far as we know Jordan has never dipped his toes into
the waters of speculative science-fiction. In the 10th century CE, King Harald Gormsson
spearheaded the widespread introduction of Christianity in Denmark. The king had a
discolored, dead tooth that earned him a rather undesirable nickname: Harald Bluetooth. About a
millennium later, Bluetooth technology was christened in his honor. As Intel’s Jim
Kardach remarked, “King Harald … was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended
to unite the PC and cellular industries …” Elijah Jefferson Bond, the first person to patent
the Ouija board, has a Ouija board etched into the back of his gravestone to commemorate his legacy.
In late 1800s America, many cities and towns lacked green spaces to gather. A fad started up of
picnicking in cemeteries. Around the same time, in England, people were afraid of being accidentally
buried alive. It’s not at all clear that this was an actual problem in need of a solution, but in
any case, one soon arose. The “safety coffin” or “coffin alarm” was a way for a prematurely
interred person to get the word out that they were still alive. Most of these devices used a bell or
some other type of noisemaker to communicate between the coffin and people six feet over.
We couldn’t find any fully attested cases of a coffin alarm fulfilling its intended purpose, but
if you or someone you love was saved by a safety coffin, please let us know in the comments below.
A less paranoid resting place was located at Atletico Madrid’s Vicente Calderon Stadium.
Departed fans of the football team could have their ashes put in a specially designated area
of the complex. When the team switched stadiums in 2019, the ashes were dutifully collected and
reinstalled in the team’s new digs. If you’d like to avoid being buried any
time soon—in a soccer stadium or otherwise—maybe pick up the phone and make some dinner plans. A
study from Harvard University finds that having no friends can be just as deadly as smoking. Both
affect levels of a blood-clotting protein that can contribute to heart attacks and strokes.
For a long life, you’ll also want to heed nature’s call. It was long rumored that Danish
astronomer Tycho Brahe may have died from poisoning. Some people even said the deed was
done by his onetime assistant Johannes Kepler. In 2010, though, Brahe’s body was exhumed,
and it was soon determined that there wasn’t a deadly level of mercury in his system, as
previously thought possible. Instead, he may have expired from holding it in too long. This theory
says that Brahe got a deadly bladder infection after his overly polite choice to not excuse
himself from a royal banquet. Brings a new meaning to the phrase “when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
On the opposite end of the restraint spectrum, we have Adolf Frederick, the onetime King of Sweden.
Just before his death in 1771, the King celebrated Fat Tuesday, a day when some observant Christians
get their vices out of their systems before Lent begins. Adolf Frederick’s vices seem to have
included gluttony: it’s said that he feasted on lobster, caviar, champagne, and 14 servings of a
sweet roll then known as “hetvägg.” The extremely rich meal probably wasn’t directly responsible
for his death, but it certainly didn’t help. The biannual awards for excellence in obituary
writing are called the Grimmys. The conference organized by The Society of Professional Obituary
Writers is, naturally, called ObitCon. The obituary for Mary A. Mullaney,
known as “Pink” to her loved ones, begins with the following sentence: “If you’re about to throw away
an old pair of pantyhose, stop.” The loving obituary celebrated the unique life lessons
Pink imparted on the people around her, including resourceful uses for old nylons, like tying toilet
flappers and hanging Christmas ornaments. NFL quarterback and commentator Steve
Young’s great-great-great-grandfather was Brigham Young, the second president of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Brigham Young once said of the Church’s founder,
Joseph Smith, “[he] told me that the garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri.”
Al Roker and Lenny Kravitz are distant cousins. Roker once visited the White House,
roughly a month after he had undergone gastric bypass surgery. He might’ve eaten something
there that he shouldn’t have. As the beloved weatherman told Dateline’s Nancy Snyderman,
“I pooped my pants. Not horribly, but enough that I knew.” The unfortunate event is actually a not
uncommon side effect of gastric bypass. Roker didn’t let the incident get in the way of his time
in our nation’s most hallowed home, though. He “ …threw out the underwear and just went commando.”
According to a book published in 2000, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik considered
“toe cleavage” a “a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe” but felt “you must only
show the first two cracks.” Blahnik has since backtracked on this crack fact. In 2012 he said,
“I’m tired of the whole toe-cleavage thing.” In the area of cracks, I will take this moment
to perform a public service and announce that most dermatologists do not recommend
an activity known as “perineum sunning.” This Instagram-fad suggested that sun exposure to the
area between the genitals and the anus would confer incredible benefits on participants,
from improved focus to enhanced health and longevity. Sunshine and Vitamin D are, to be sure,
good in moderation, but please wear sunscreen, and feel free to keep your underwear on.
Sloths can hold their breath underwater for 40 minutes. That’s actually considerably longer
than a dolphin. Many frog species, meanwhile, can breathe through their skin. Though they do
have lungs, when their skin is moist this unique ability provides another method to absorb oxygen.
Frogs also shed their skin, occasionally. Instead of leaving it behind, though, they “ … push the
shedding skin into their mouth and eat it,” in the words of Seattle’s Burke Museum.
All kittens are born with blue eyes. At around a month a half, the kitties start producing melanin,
causing the eyes of many breeds to darken. Maryland’s state motto, translated from the
original Italian, is “manly deeds, womanly words.” The state’s official
sport is jousting. It was the first state in the country to adopt an official sport.
In 1962, contractors who were looking to design spacesuits for NASA wrote to officials at the
Tower of London. They wanted insights into armor that had been designed for King Henry VIII,
which the Tower held in its collection. The one-time Tudor King had to have full
protection while remaining mobile when engaged in games of foot combat. At least one of the
spacesuit developers apparently felt this balance between protection and mobility
was similar to the challenges his team faced and requested photographs and “details of the
various joints” that comprised the armor. When NASA begin accepting female astronauts
into its space exploration program, engineers at the agency designed a
makeup kit to go into space. They also asked astronaut Sally Ride if 100 was “the right
number” of tampons for a one-week flight. Green potatoes can kill you. The green color
cast some old potatoes develop is an indirect indication of high concentrations of the toxin
solanine. Though solanine poisoning is rare today, there are documented incidents of people
dying from toxic potatoes. If in doubt, it’s probably best to throw out any green potatoes.
Sage Werbock, a.k.a. “The Great Nippulini,” earned a Guinness world record for pulling a nearly
1,000 kilogram vehicle 20 meters by his nipples. According to his website, Werbock has hung up his,
um, nipples, I guess? and no longer performs publicly.
From 1952 to 1957, the CIA launched balloons from West Germany into Iron Curtain countries,
including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Attached to some of these balloons were copies
of Animal Farm. The allegorical novella, often read as a criticism of Stalinist communism and
the results of the Russian Revolution, was banned in those countries. The idea
behind the operation was for Orwell’s satirical ideas to get into the hands
of people who might then start to question authorities and the Communist Party line.
The CIA also bankrolled the 1954 Animal Farm cartoon movie.
Turkeys (the birds) were named after Turkey (the country). Centuries ago, the English began to
import the helmeted guinea fowl. The people who ate the poultry evidently didn’t know it was from
Africa. Because it was imported to Europe from merchants in Turkey, the English believed the
birds were also Turkish.⁠ ⁠
According to one account of its etymology, when the Spanish arrived in the New World,
they encountered a new bird that was delicious and it too was soon being imported to
Europe. The English got it confused with the ‘turkey’ they had been enjoying. Eventually,
the name stuck to the New World bird. ⁠ When 19th-century artist Edward Burne-Jones
found out the “mummy brown” paint he was using was made from actual ground-up mummies, he held a
funeral for the tube of paint in his back garden. A young Rudyard Kipling was in attendance.
Each year, 40,000 tons of space dust settles in Earth’s atmosphere and surface.⁠ It’s
thought that the dust comes mostly from relatively nearby comets and asteroids,
though more recent research suggests that some of it could come from much farther,
including the Kuiper Belt, which starts at a distance about 4.3 billion kilometers from us.
Earth's plates move at about the same rate as growing fingernails. Please remember to
refrain from chewing on the Pacific Plate. Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn.
A number of other countries share the dragon as their national animal. Translated into English,
in fact, Bhutanese leaders are known as “Dragon Kings.”
Novelist Patricia Highsmith kept approximately 300 snails as pets and would regularly carry the slimy
critters in her handbag. According to a biography, the Talented Mr. Ripley author would bring her
little friends out if she got bored at dinner.⁠ The Goodyear Blimp is the official bird
of Redondo Beach, California.⁠ Barry Manilow wrote State Farm’s
“Like a Good Neighbor” and Band-Aid’s “I Am Stuck On Band-Aid” jingles.⁠
Elvis Presley won three Grammys—none of them for rock music. He got two for Best Inspirational
Performance and one for Best Sacred Performance. Some species of requiem sharks can grow and shed
tens of thousands of teeth over the course of their lives. And some types of sea slugs can go
through hundreds of thousands of radulae over the course of their lives—radulae are essentially the
gastropod version of teeth, which sit inside their perfectly natural, completely horrific mouths.
If you blink while on a plane traveling 500 mph, your eyes are closed for about 250 feet.
The average person blinks around 6 million times a year. Meaning their eyes are closed,
while blinking, for around 10 percent of the total time they’re awake.
In 2021, a 67-year-old man in Thailand was suffering from gastrointestinal distress. He
took a deworming medicine, and, in the horrific words of Mashable Southeast Asia, “ … woke up the
next morning to find an 18-meter-long tapeworm already exiting his rectum.” Some species of
tapeworms have specialized anatomy to hold on to animal intestines, even as the muscles of their
hosts contract during digestion. Some use spines or retractable hooks to get a grip, while others
have suction cup-like suckers to hold on. Kevin Williamson created the show Dawson’s
Creek and wrote the screenplays for Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4.
Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" was written by beloved children's author Shel Silverstein. After
penning a satirical comic for the military’s Stars and Stripes magazine in the 1950s,
Silverstein was warned not to make fun of army officers. Instead, he was told, his criticism
should be limited to civilians and animals. The average person shares a birthday with
about 20 million other living people. In a room with 75 people, there’s an over 99.9
percent chance that two will share a birthday. For a period in the late 1800s, it was believed
that milk was an adequate replacement for human blood in the body. After one human
milk transfusion gone wrong, the patient had to be resuscitated with a combination of morphine
and whiskey. A couple of decades later, a hotel in Australia offered an interesting treatment
for rheumatism. Whenever a dead local whale was spotted, the hotel gave patients the opportunity
to lay inside the carcass for a couple of hours, thinking it would reduce inflammation. The
short-lived, so-called treatment was apparently “discovered” when a drunk man “took a header
into the decomposing blubber” of a recently deceased cetacean and came out rheumatism-free.
Annie Withey and Andrew Martin developed Smartfood popcorn, which they sold to Frito-Lay
in 1989. Soon after, the pair introduced their second successful cheese-dust-based offering:
Annie’s Mac & Cheese. Jeannette Rankin was
elected to the House of Representatives four years before the 19th Amendment,
granting women the right to vote, was passed. For Kazakhstan’s first 27-plus years as an
independent country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it had a single president,
Nursultan Nazarbayev. In 2019, the country’s capital, Astana, was renamed to Nur-Saltan.
(It was changed back in 2022.) In most of the United States,
cannibalism isn’t explicitly outlawed (the exception is Idaho, and even in the 49 other
states you’d likely be breaking other laws in the process). For the record,
when Denver-based newspaper Westword looked into the illegal body trade in Colorado back in 2018,
they found that one purveyor charged $200 for an elbow. According to William Seabrook, an early
20th-century journalist who claimed to eat human meat, it tasted “like good, fully developed veal.”
Around 125 billion Jenga blocks would fit inside the Superdome, by volume.
Hippos can run up to 30 miles per hour for short spurts. It’s thought that each year
they kill hundreds of people. And though they’re well-adapted to the water (they can actually sleep
underwater, pop up for a breath, and sink back down without waking up), they don’t really swim.
Hippos’ relatively high body count is nothing compared to the more than 100,000 annual deaths
indirectly attributable to freshwater snails. Some species of the gastropod carry a deadly
parasite which they can pass on to humans. The resulting disease has been informally dubbed
“snail fever.” According to the United States’ Social Security Administration’s
actuarial life table, a 58-year-old man has about a 1 percent chance of dying within the
next year. …Not necessarily from snail fever. An ostrich kick can kill a lion. The big birds
have long sharp toenails and they’re stronger than those rather spindly-looking legs might
have you believe. According to a piece by Randy Sell of North Dakota State University,
“A mature ostrich is capable of delivering a kick of up to 500 psi.” That’s around the same pressure
delivered by a professional bantam weight boxer. The website WikiHow has an entry on “how to
survive an encounter with an ostrich.” It has instructions on what to do “if you have
a gun and need to use it,” and features some incredible drawings of human-ostrich combat.
Those instructions might come in handy; there have been reports of ostriches
raised on ranches seemingly being sexually attracted to humans—or at least no longer
seeing other ostriches as potential mates. 7Moving very, very far from ostriches: Russian
officials denied rumors that two cosmonauts had sex during a mission. But one half of that pair,
Dr. Valery Polyakov, did mention some, quote, “’colorful’ movies” that Russian officials sent
men in space to help them regain typical sexual functioning after a long (presumably celibate)
mission. Polyakov also apparently received suggestions from unnamed sources to use some kind
of sex doll in space. He came out against that idea, partially on the grounds that an astronaut
with such equipment at his disposal might develop something he called “doll syndrome.” Moving on!
The “scold’s bridle” was a rather horrifying item first appearing in the 16th century “used
to hurt and humiliate women whose speech or behaviour was thought to be too offensive or
unruly,” in the words of the British Library. In the 19th century, naturalist Peter A. Browne
collected albums full of hair—human and otherwise. His collection included samples from author James
Fenimore Cooper, animals from sheep to lions, and 13 of the first 14 U.S. presidents (it seems,
like so many of us, that he never got his hands on any locks from Millard Fillmore).
A leading cause of dandruff seems to be a particular type of fungus,
known as Malassezia. So if you find the itchiness and flaking uncomfortable, maybe meditate on the
fact that there’s fungi thriving on your scalp. There are around as many microbial cells in your
body as…your body. The average human is made up of about 30 trillion human cells,
and 39 trillion microbial cells of various types. Because the microbes are so small, they only
account for about 1-3% of a person’s body mass. In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared as a contestant on
The Dating Game. Unbeknownst to the show’s producers or that episode’s bachelorette,
Alcala had already committed at least four murders at the time. He’d eventually be convicted of more
than a half dozen homicides, but that day he was selected as the winning bachelor
for a date that luckily never transpired. In 1589, a German man named Peter Stumpp said
that he had made a pact with the devil to get turned into a werewolf. So far,
just some good clean lycanthropic fun. But Stump’s methods for fulfilling his supposed deal are about
as far from fun as you can get. He killed 16 people, including 13 children—one of whom was
his own son. He supposedly ate his own child’s brain. From there it somehow gets even worse,
but this fact is already more than wtf enough, so we’ll spare you the rest. There were actually
hundreds of werewolf trials in Germany, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the tens
of thousands of executions for supposed witchcraft that happened in Germany during the same era.
The Donner Party tragedy, which ended with the desperately hungry survivors
resorting to cannibalism of the non-homicidal nature, helped lead Gail Borden to develop
shelf-stable condensed milk. Before that invention, Borden had tried introducing the
somewhat less successful “condensed meat.” King Louis XIV was known as the Sun King,
but he once dealt with an issue where the Sun King don’t shine: an anal fistula. That,
in the words of the UK’s National Health Service website, is “ … a small tunnel that develops
between the end of the bowel and the skin near the anus (where poo leaves the body).”
Fistulas can cause discomfort and make sitting difficult, so Louis sought out
treatment to alleviate his royal pain in the butt. To prepare for the procedure,
surgeon Charles-François Félix practiced on dozens of healthy commoners. It’s thought
that many of these test patients died. After the surgery, it supposedly became
fashionable, in the French Court, to have a fistula; some people actually put fake
fistulas made of bandages around their butts. This was known as “le royale.”
When he wasn’t moving medical science forward with his butt, Louis was known to take on mistresses.
One of them, Madame de Montespan, ended up embroiled in a controversy known as “The Affair of
the Poisons.” It was essentially a series of witch trials centered around Madame Catherine Monvoisin,
also known as La Voisin, a potion maker who had the pejorative sobriquet “the witch of Paris.”
La Voisin’s partner said that the royal mistress had only achieved her position through the use
of special potions. La Voisin was eventually killed for her alleged crimes. Her daughter
then outlined an even more outlandish story about Montespan engaging in the dark arts and
even drinking baby’s blood. Montespan, for her part, ended up retiring to a convent.
Fourteenth century royals once hosted a very unplanned precursor to Burning Man. A banquet
hosted by Queen Isabeau of Bavaria featured a group of dancers in apparently flammable outfits.
When the Duke of Orleans got too close with a lit torch, it set off a fire that resulted in the
deaths of four men. Denmark’s King Christian VII exhibited a different kind of royal imprudence.
In the words of Denmark’s Copenhagen Post, “The King’s uncontrollable urge to masturbate [was]
a popular subject within the royal court …” Jim Steinman wrote songs for Meat Loaf and Air
Supply, among others. He also wrote “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” which Celine Dion made
famous. Steinman had an interesting perspective on the power ballad. On his personal website,
he noted that he wrote it “under the influence of Wuthering Heights”
and called it “an erotic motorcycle.” Over a billion tons of food are thrown
away each year. That’s about a third of all food produced for human consumption. According to the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, that includes over 3 trillion apples.
There’s a reason that Pringles packaging labels the addictive snack as “potato crisps,”
even here in the United States where we would typically call them chips. Rather than slicing
potatoes and frying them up, Pringles are a bit of a franken-chip made up of dehydrated
potato along with wheat starch, rice four, and other ingredients. They actually are only
42 percent potato. Back in 1975, the FDA ruled that Pringles could only be labeled
“chips” if they also prominently mentioned the dried potatoes. The company ultimately
decided to call them crisps here in the States. And I won’t count it for our tally, since I know
we’ve used it before, but I have to note that when the inventor of the Pringles can died, some of his
ashes were laid to rest inside a Pringles can. According to a New York Times piece from 1975,
“It’s believed Procter & Gamble … spent 10 years and $70 million to research, develop,
manufacture and market its first Pringles.” Using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consumer Price Index Inflation calculator, that’s equivalent to about 12 billion dollars today.
In 2005, a man in Bulgaria was found by doctors to have a .914 blood alcohol content,
meaning almost 1 percent of his blood stream was alcohol. That’s more than 18 times the legal
limit in the state of Utah, incidentally, and more than twice the level generally considered
fatal. Nevertheless, the man survived and was even awake and talking to police.
More than 40 percent of people in one study had a longer second toe
than “big toe,” according to a 2010 study. This condition is known as “Morton’s toe.”
In the space between the Sun and Pluto, you could fit about 400,000 Earths back to back.
Drop your favorite WTF fact in the comments below. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time!