- Aw, yeah!
50 Amazing Facts, let's jump into it now,
dwell, snap, snap, ooh ooh!
(chains clinking)
Here are 50 Amazing Facts to blow your mind.
(mellow rhythmic music)
(explosion booming)
During World War II, the Dickin Medal of Honor
was awarded to Gustav the pigeon after he flew
241 kilometers to the British mainland, informing them
of the Normandy invasion.
The biggest bank robbery in English history
was committed by a group of men known as The Grandpa Gang.
The thieves, the oldest of which was 76 years old,
made off with over $200 million in cash and jewelry.
Now you know where your grandpa gets the money
for that $5 he gives you every time he sees you, mm-hm.
In 2002, researcher Andrew Balmford conducted a study
and found that eight-year-olds in Britain
were able to correctly identify 80% of all Pokemon,
but only around 50% of common species of wildlife.
To prove that he was receiving unfair marks
from a Harvard english professor, author Michael Crichton
once submitted an essay by George Orwell,
and claimed that it was his own.
The unknowing professor gave the essay a B minus.
After going bankrupt three times within 60 years,
Wensleydale cheese was on the brink of
going out of business, but caught a big break
when they were mentioned in an animated short film
featuring Wallace and Grommet.
Sales spiked, and the company was saved,
thanks to a cartoon.
In an effort to detect nuclear tests being conducted
by Soviet forces in the late 1940s,
the United States Air Force initiated Project Mogul.
The operation consisted of microphones
mounted on high-altitude hot air balloons,
which detected sound waves at long range.
Famous Mark Twain storybook character,
Huckleberry Finn, was actually based on
Twain's childhood friend, Tom Blankenship.
Tom, who was four years Twain's senior,
grew up with the author in Hannibal, Missouri.
The classic arcade game, Pac-Man,
was originally designed to never end.
However, if you were skilled enough to make it to level 256,
the game goes haywire and makes the level
impossible to actually conquer.
In an effort to raise money for an anti-poverty organization
known as Glide, a lunch with billionaire investing giant,
Warren Buffett, was auctioned off on eBay.
Bidding started at only $25,000, but closed at
a whopping 3.3 million.
Looking to add a little variety to its diet,
an orca at Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada,
has learned to regurgitate fish in order to attract seagulls
on the surface of the pool.
It then chomps down on the bird.
Seeing this, four other whales have begun
to imitate this behavior.
In 1784, a Japanese treasure hunter
named Chunosuke Matsuyama wrote a message
on some coconut wood, which said that his ship had wrecked
on an island in the South Pacific.
He placed it in a bottle and tossed it into the sea.
That bottle wasn't found until 1935,
when it finally washed ashore in the same village
that Matsuyama was born in.
Paul D'Amato's 1977 slap shot character, Tim McCracken,
was an inspiration behind legendary X-Man,
Wolverine's massive sideburns and facial hair.
After being eaten, some species of insect,
like the pea aphid, will actually self destruct,
exploding in an attempt to frighten,
or even kill their enemies.
Noela Rukundo, a Burundi woman, narrowly escaped death
after the hit-man hired to kill her by her husband
set her free, claiming that he did not
believe in killing women.
She then shocked her husband five days later,
when she suddenly showed up to her own funeral.
The genus Dieffenbachia, also known as
the mother-in-law's tongue, can render someone
who comes in contact with its poison temporarily speechless.
Before officially changing it to Lisbon,
Portugal's capital city was Rio De Janeiro.
It was the only European capital city
that was not actually in Europe.
During the 1960 Summer Olympics, Prince Constantine II,
who would later become Greece's last king,
won the first gold medal in sailing the country
that they had seen since 1912.
In 2013, an April Fool's prank took a bad turn
when two Florida deejays told their listeners
that their taps were dispensing dihydrogen monoxide.
The prank caused a panic,
which led to the deejays being suspended
in order to pay a fine.
Hilariously, dihydrogen monoxide
is meant to come out of the taps,
which is just another way to say water.
In 1993, while filming The Saint of Fort Washington,
actor Ving Rhames was introduced to a homeless man
who he quickly discovered
was actually his older brother, Junior.
The older Rhames had been missing, and his family
had been searching for him since he served in Vietnam.
To prove that the use of pretty women in his videos
was not the only thing that made his music popular,
Indian singer Daler Mehndi created a video
using only himself.
It went on to be a huge hit in India, and a viral meme.
("Tunak Tunak" by Daler Mehndi)
In 1984, Todd Berenger opened a restaurant
on the Upper East Side of New York called Twins,
which employed 29 sets of identical twins.
The reason Baloo from Disney's The Jungle Book
appears to be lazy, is because his attributes
are based on a sloth bear, a mopey looking animal
that primarily lives in India, in Nepal.
Due to their children's lack of access to cookies,
Sesame Street in Nigeria created their own version
of the Cookie Monster, known as Zobi the Yam Monster.
Mm, yam, yum, yum.
Research done in the late 1960s
revealed that people experienced a marijuana-like high
from catnip, but the results were dismissed
when it was discovered that in fact,
they had accidentally switched the plants
with actual marijuana.
Swedish furniture superstore, IKEA's name
actually stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.
That's the name of the company's founder,
the farm he grew up on, and his hometown.
John M. Allegro, one of the translators
for the Dead Sea Scrolls, was convinced
that Christianity was actually based
on a psychedelic mushroom and fertility cult.
The existence of atoms and the space between them
was supposed in 400 B.C. by the philosopher, Democritus.
The world's oldest continuously tended garden
is one of the classical gardens of Suzhou, in China.
It's 973 years old.
Der Sternewirth is a honored German tradition
that allows the employees of a brewery to consume
as much free beer as they want while they're working.
The worship of Sopona, or the god of smallpox,
was outlawed in Nigeria after news broke that a cult
was deliberately spreading the illness to increase power.
Roman soldier, Scipio Africanus managed to survive
his country's defeats at Trasimene, Cannae, and Ticinus.
However, he then led the Roman army as a general,
and went on to defeat Hannibal, one of the greatest
military commanders in history.
In Mbabarom, an extinct Australian language,
the word for dog is dog, and pronounced
almost exactly the same.
What makes this so strange is there was no relation
between English and that language.
In October of 2012, the Haida Salmon Restoration Company
in partnership with Russ George, an American businessman,
poured 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean
off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.
They did this in order to promote the growth of plankton
that are capable of absorbing carbon dioxide from the air.
In 2009, a 28-year-old Russian man named Sergey Tuganov
accepted a 3,000 pound bet from two ladies
that he could have sex with them for 12 hours straight.
Half a day, and a bottle of Viagra later,
he collected his 3,000 pounds,
and promptly dropped dead of a heart attack.
Unlike humans, seagulls are able to drink
both fresh water and sea water,
as they're capable of separating the salt,
and excreting it through their nostrils.
Though millions of people worldwide claim to possess one,
there's actually no scientific proof
that photographic memories exist in adult human beings.
Valeria Messalina, the third wife of Roman Emperor Claudius,
reportedly enjoyed moonlighting as a prostitute.
She once had a competition with another local woman
to see who could bed more men in one night.
The Empress won.
John Stonehouse, a British MP,
attempted to fake his own death,
only to be discovered in Australia after he was mistaken for
another famous missing person.
Actor Joaquin Phoenix's last name used to be Bottom,
however, after breaking free of the Children of God,
a cult in Huntington Beach, California,
his family changed all of their surnames to Phoenix,
to resemble rising from the ashes.
For the movie, Forrest Gump,
Tom Hanks was supposed to use his natural accent.
However, after Michael Conner Humphreys, the child actor
who played the younger version of Gump in the film
had trouble adapting his voice to the older actor's accent,
Hanks decided to adapt the boy's Mississippi one instead.
Around the end of 1803,
several people in the Hammersmith region of London, England,
began reporting seeing a ghost in the area.
On January 3rd, 1804, a bricklayer named Thomas Millwood
was dressed in all white work clothes
and was walking through the town,
when he came upon an armed patrol.
A member of the patrol mistook Millwood for the ghost,
and shot him in the face, killing him.
If you ever tragically lose a finger or thumb,
and there's no doctor, you can actually have
one of your toes transplanted to replace the digit.
The procedure is fittingly called a toe-to-hand transplant.
Storm babies are a real phenomenon
in which the barometric pressure built up during a storm
causes an expecting mother to go into spontaneous delivery.
A 2005 study revealed that when it comes to heavier women,
men are more attractive when they're hungry
than when they've recently eaten.
In 2007, a meteorite crashed down to Earth
in the Puno region in Peru.
Soon after, several locals began showing signs
of mysterious illness.
It was believed by some that an alien virus
had come to town, until it was discovered that the heat
from the impact had evaporated arsenic
in the area's contaminated ground water.
According to a report from July 2006,
sloppy doctor's handwriting has been attributed to
over 7,000 deaths, and 1.5 million injuries every year
in the United States alone.
There's a tradition amongst Russian cosmonauts
in which just before boarding the transfer bus
to take them to the space shuttle, they urinate
on the bus' right rear wheel.
Females are allowed to skip the ritual,
though many still participate, bringing their urine
in a cup or a vial.
What is wrong with people?
A 48-year-old schizophrenic computer programmer
named Terry Davis spent 10 years developing
an operating system called Temple OS.
He claims he made it so that people could talk to God.
Merida, the independent princess character
from the animated film, Brave, is the only Disney princess
to not sing in her movie, or at least have a love interest.
On May 18, 1980, American photographer Robert Landsburg
was documenting the eruption of Mt. St. Helens
when he suddenly realized he couldn't be able
to outrun the cloud of ash that was headed for him.
Wanting to preserve what he recorded,
Landsburg rewound the film,
put everything back in its proper case,
and then laid his body over it to protect it.
His body was found 17 days later,
but his work survived and provided key details
to geologists studying the eruption.
(mellow rhythmic music)