It can be hard to maintain a reverence for a world that seems to be falling apart left right and centre. But, somehow, in light of all the recent bad news, people have found a way to stay curious, stay excited, and share their wacky finds. Enjoy these bizarre and fascinating stories, and remember to stay weird!
1. This week I learned that in 2014 people created fake 90$ Play Station 4 listings on Amazon and showed them to Walmart, thus getting a 90$ PS4 because of Walmart's price matching.
2. This week I learned that Simpsons Director David Mirkin tried to leak fake endings for the Two Part Episode Who killed Mr. Burns, but to his surprise all news outlets rejected him, stating it would be immoral to air spoilers.
3. Paris, France, was the first western capital to have a black mayor in 1879.
4. I learned that New York police officers used to carry an 11 inch club during the day, and a 26 inch club at night, when things were more dangerous. This is the origin of the term nightstick.
5. I learned this week that anyone from Canada can order a portrait of The Queen and have it shipped to them for free. Canadians, get on that!
6. This week I learned of the Ting Hai effect, a stock market phenomenon in which there is a sudden and unexplained drop in the stock market whenever a film or a television series starring Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng is released.
7. The Empire State Building generates more revenue from the observation deck than all the commercial tenants in the remaining 101 floors combined.
8. Dogs can smell their owners from 11 miles away.
9. Almost $1 out of every $2 spent online in the US is with Amazon.
10. This week I learned that in the book of "The princess bride" there's a missing chapter called "the reconciliation" William Goldman (the author) wrote that if you wanted to read it you had to (Continued)
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that if you wanted to read it you had send a letter to the publisher house, and they would mailed it to you.
11. The Union Jack is not symmetrical, to guarantee you can't hang it upside down.
12. Carrots are used in carrot cake because during the medieval period, sweeteners were scarce and expensive, and carrots contain more sugar than any other vegetable besides the sugar beet.
13. This week I learned that George Washington feared the growing influence of political parties in the US. He thought that it would lead to "the alternate domination" of each party, taking revenge on each other in the form of reactionary political policies, and that it would eventually cause the North and South to split.
14. Arizona iced tea hasn't changed its 99 retail price since 1992. I guess it probably helps that they print it on all their labels.
15. In 2001 a shark bit off a boy's arm in Florida. His uncle rescued him before wrestling the 200-pound shark to shore. The arm was retrieved from inside the shark and after an 11-hour operation was reattached.
16. In 1949 BB King re-entered a burning music hall to save his favorite $30 Gibson guitar. King later learned the fire was started when two men knocked over a burning barrel of kerosene while fighting over a woman named Lucille. King has named every guitar he's owned Lucille as a reminder.
17. Due to updates in technology, Stephen Hawking could have a more "modernized" voice, however he chooses to keep the robotic voice because (Continued)
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he chooses to keep the robotic voice because he says it is the voice he has come to identify with.
18. This week I learned that if you don't identify as an "extrovert" or "introvert," you might be an "ambivert." An ambivert is moderately comfortable with groups and social interaction, but also relishes time alone, away from a crowd.
19. Pluto is, by law, still a planet in New Mexico.
20. James Cameron got the go-ahead to make 'Aliens' by writing the word 'Alien' on a board, then adding an 's' and turning it into a dollar sign.
21. Queen Mary of England was gifted a 1:12 scale doll house in 1924. It had working lights, books that were specially written by writers for the library, bottles filled with the appropriate drinks in the wine cellar, and model cars made by Rolls Royce. Even the toilets had working plumbing.
22. In 1975 a man died of laughter while watching his favourite TV show. His widow later sent The programme a letter thanking them for making his final moments of life so pleasant.
23. When it was invented, the sewing machine was controversial because it was feared to be too sexually stimulating to (Continued)
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it was feared to be too sexually stimulating to women.
24. MIT-educated biologist, Katharine McCormick, inherited a substantial family fortune and funded the development of the first birth control pill in the 1950s.
25. The Sun is so loud that if space was filled with air it would be 125db on Earth, from 92 Million miles away, about the same as a loud rock concert.
26. This week I learned that an inventor trying to make a sock to prevent trench foot first produced modern water balloons. Having made a latex-coated sock and filling it with water to test for leaks, he found a rip and angrily threw it on his table. Pleased with the splash, he decided to market water balloons for children.
27. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died, he thought he was a failure, and his work forever forgotten. His novel, The Great Gatsby, was reviewed poorly and had only sold 20,000 copies. It's now considered the greatest novel in American history, and sells over 500,000 copies per year.
28. In 1975 Icelandic women "essentially shut down the country for a day" by starting a Women's Strike that led to Icelands parliament actually (Continued)
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passing a law guaranteeing equal rights for women and men: a large political step towards true equality.
29. Ohio State University is built on a century old system of tunnels hidden from the public. With the right knowledge, one can walk to every building on campus underground.
30. After Elvis performed Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Paul Simon, who attended the show, said "That's it, we might as well all give up now."
31. Ethiopia is home to the oldest most complete Christian bible.
32. USA is the ONLY developed country that provide no type of financial assistance to new parents.
33. Fidel Castro loved dairy products so much, he had an enormous ice cream parlour that seats 1,000 people built in 1966 to share his love with the people of Cuba. It still exists and became a state run ice cream chain. Yum!
34. This week I learned that Louis CK's first language was Spanish - he grew up in Mexico and still carries a Mexican passport along with his American one.
34. This week I learned that an 'extinct' tree frog has been rediscovered in India after 137 years. Unusually, the frogs (Continued)
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Unusually, the frogs feed mostly on vegetation, rather than insects or larvae. Neat!
35. There are 820 readable pieces of literature in Skyrim, including letters, journals, spell tomes, books that offer skill points, 5 books that add quests, and 307 books that serve no other purpose than lore.
36. There is a long-term care facility in the Netherlands that allows college students to stay for free in exchange for 30 hours of volunteer per month. When students come home from a class, concert, or party, they share those experiences with their elderly neighbors, some of whom are over 90.
37. There was once a 50 man pub brawl in a British pub over who would get the last bag of dry roasted peanuts.
38. This week I learned that "TV Pickup" is a phenomenon wherein people in Britain all simultaneously turn on their electric kettles during commercial TV breaks causing massive power surges countrywide.
39. Shakuntala Devi aka "the Human Computer" was able to Multiply 2 13 digit #s, picked at random. She answered correctly, 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. Damn.
40. Apart from humans, dogs are the only other known species that can understand finger pointing. Not even chimpanzees could manage it in one study.
41. A 45 year old Bosnian man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death back in 2007 because he wanted to see who would attend his funeral. Only his mother attended. After this debacle, he wrote dozens of angry letters to his so-called friends and what he thought of their friendship going forward.
42. The toothpick is known to predate the arrival of early modern humans. It is the oldest instrument for dental cleaning. The skulls of Neanderthals, as well as Homo sapiens, have shown clear signs of having teeth that were picked with a tool.
I'm on the fence about high school. I want to hate it, but nostalgia haunts me. I saw a lot of violence, there is that.
We were on CNN.
don lemon nodding GIF by Red Table TalkGiphy"They started charging us for ketchup in the cafeteria. Most of the school boycotted cafeteria lunch and brought all manner of condiments from home. We were on CNN. They eventually caved." ~ Ash3Monti
No one liked him.
"I was big into drama club and musical theatre when I was in high school. There was a girl in the drama club in her freshmen or sophomore year who was super nice and everyone loved her. Her older brother on the the other hand, was a complete and total douchebag. No one liked him."
"He always made inappropriate comments or jokes and no one liked to be around him. One night, he was driving him and his sister back from school when he took a steep curve going around 100 mph. He lost control and hit a telephone pole. His sister died instantly and he was in a coma for a few weeks but ultimately survived."
"Myself and my friends in the drama club were devastated. She was one of the sweetest girls you'll ever met and we all loved her. A year or two later, the brother messages my sister and tries to use his sister's death as leverage to get laid. F**k you, you piece of crap." ~ FearTheKeflex
Bribes
"Guidance counselor was taking bribes to change grades (Both money and sexual favors). Invited one male student over to his house. Had the student tie him up and hang him by chains in his basement "dungeon." Student was homophobic and while the counselor was tied up, bludgeoned him to death." ~ monthos
H2O Issues...
"This is not that extreme, but it's still disgusting. We have drinking water taps instead of fountains. One parent was suspicious of whether they were cleaning the tanks or not. So they made an announcement that the tank was being cleaned every single day."
"A lot of us didn't believe it, so a group of boys decided to see for themselves if it was true or not. So they put a dead frog in the tank when there was no one around. I don't even know where they found the frog but they swear they didn't kill it. Anyway the frog was there for a few weeks. And obviously the water started tasting weird."
"After the teachers got multiple complaints, they opened the tank and found the frog. The boys were punished, but they fired back with the fact that they lied about cleaning the tanks. They were still punished, because they proved it in a disgusting way. They could've put literally anything in the tank, but they chose a dead frog." ~ R00mTemperature
The Quad
Acds2 Look Away GIF by Anime Crimes DivisionGiphy"A worker doing stuff on the roof. He fell off. Landed in the 'quad' at lunch. A large piece of machinery fell and squished his head. Like a cartoon, only funny. Like 150 Kids saw this." ~ LordInventus
Threats
"The Latin kings gang threatened my cousin and his friends and they had 10 squad cars guarding the whole school and dismissed us the same day early." ~ Terrykrinkle
“it’s gonna blow”
"I had just moved in from Egypt to the states in my senior year of high school. A teacher thought it would be funny to fold a bunch of papers and wrap them in duck tape to make it look like a bomb and threw it my direction and went under his desk saying 'it’s gonna blow.' Everybody started laughing and I was so clueless then I just laughed along. It infuriates me to this day that I didn’t call him out on it or report him." ~ ezzabousaif
Go Fish
"Someone somehow made a bomb threat on a Swedish fish candy. Like one single piece. I don’t know how it happened but he got arrested." ~ ts_13_
Masternid
"A couple weeks before graduation, this kid hacked into the school system and put a Hitler quote and a Boston bomber reference in the senior quotes for the yearbook. One of the affected parties was a trans girl, and we're still not sure if it was a targeted act because of that."
"Administration didn't find out until the entire senior class had received their books. Some people turned theirs in to get their pages replaced, but some kept it because it was a 'limited edition item' or some stupid sh*t like that. Kid got arrested and charged with cybercrime, since he hacked everyone in our school system's school passwords."
"He was so close to graduating too, but got expelled like two weeks before he could. Looked like a rat too. It was all over the news, and everyone in the state of CT basically knows about this now. Got out on bail for $5000." ~ kocorpsie
Season 3 What GIF by On My Block"Apparently one student brought drugs to school and was selling it to her friends. A completely unrelated student caught on and stole the drugs while everyone else was in class. She was caught snorting the drugs in the bathroom by the group selling the drugs and got the crap beat out of her."
"We also had a recently graduated student murder his parents for insurance money . He hid the bodies in a chicken coop and told everybody they were on vacation. It wasn't until 7 months later the bodies were found by the landlord because the rent was late." ~ randomgenericcow
Enjoy high school, at least try too. Maybe if more kids do that, it wouldn't be so insane.
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