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42 Incredibly Weird and Obscure Facts

1. The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days.

2. The world's deepest postbox is in Susami Bay in Japan. It's 10 meters
underwater.

3. In 2007, an American man named Corey Taylor tried to fake his own
death in order to get out of his cell phone contract without paying a fee.
It didn't work.

4. The oldest condoms ever found date back to the 1640s (they were
found in a cesspit at Dudley Castle), and were made from animal and
fish intestines.

5. In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race at Belmont Park in New York
despite being dead — he suffered a heart attack mid-race, but his body
stayed in the saddle until his horse crossed the line for a 20–1 outsider
victory.

6. Everyone has a unique tongue print, just like fingerprints.

7. Most Muppets are left-handed. (Because most Muppeteers are right-
handed, so they operate the head with their favoured hand.)

8. Female kangaroos have three vaginas.

9. It costs the U.S. Mint almost twice as much to mint each penny and
nickel as the coins are actually worth. Taxpayers lost over $100 million
in 2013 just through the coins being made.

10. Light doesn't necessarily travel at the speed of light. The slowest
we've ever recorded light moving at is 38 mph.

11. Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots. The
maggots can jump up to five inches out of cheese while you're eating it,
so it's a good idea to shield it with your hand to stop them jumping into
your eyes.

12. The loneliest creature on Earth is a whale who has been calling out
for a mate for over two decades — but whose high-pitched voice is so
different to other whales that they never respond.

13. The spikes on the end of a stegosaurus' tail are known among
paleontologists as the "thagomizer" — a term coined by cartoonist
Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side drawing.

14. During World War II, the crew of the British submarine HMS Trident
kept a fully grown reindeer called Pollyanna aboard their vessel for six
weeks (it was a gift from the Russians).

15. The northern leopard frog swallows its prey using its eyes — it uses
them to help push food down its throat by retracting them into its head.

16. The first man to urinate on the moon was Buzz Aldrin, shortly after
stepping onto the lunar surface.

17. Some fruit flies are genetically resistant to getting drunk — but only
if they have an inactive version of a gene scientists have named "happyhour."

18. Experiments show that male rhesus macaque monkeys will pay to
look at pictures of female rhesus macaques' bottoms.

19. In 1567, the man said to have the longest beard in the world died
after he tripped over his beard running away from a fire.

20. The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-long plague of inexplicable
dancing in Strasbourg, in which hundreds of people danced for about a
month for no apparent reason. Several of them danced themselves to
death.

21. Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley.

22. In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over whether a police
officer called Bob Geary was allowed to patrol while carrying a
ventriloquist's dummy called Brendan O'Smarty. He was.

23. Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl of Orkney, was killed
by an enemy he had beheaded several hours earlier. He'd tied the man's
head to his horse's saddle, but while riding home one of its protruding
teeth grazed his leg. He died from the infection.

24. The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads; its buildings are connected
entirely by canals and footbridges.

25. A family of people with blue skin lived in Kentucky for many generations.
The Fulgates of Troublesome Creek are thought to have gained their blue skin
through combination of inbreeding and a rare genetic condition known as
methemoglobinemia.

26. Powerful earthquakes can permanently shorten the length of Earth's day,
by moving the spin of the Earth's axis. The 2011 Japan earthquake knocked
1.8 microseconds off our days. The 2004 Sumatra quake cost us around 6.8
microseconds.

27. The first American film to show a toilet being flushed on screen was
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

28. Melting glaciers and icebergs make a distinctive fizzing noise known as
"bergy seltzer."

29. There is a glacier called "Blood Falls" in Antarctica that regularly pours
out red liquid, making it look like the ice is bleeding. (It's actually oxidized
salty water.)

30. In 2008 scientists discovered a new species of bacteria that lives in hairspray.

31. The top of the Eiffel Tower leans away from the sun, as the metal facing
the sun heats up and expands. It can move as much as 7 inches.

32. Lt. Col. "Mad" Jack Churchill was only British soldier in WWII known to
have killed an enemy soldier with a longbow. "Mad Jack" insisted on going
into battle armed with both a medieval bow and a claymore sword.

33. A U.S. park ranger named Roy C. Sullivan held the record for being struck
by lightning the most times, having been struck — and surviving — seven times
between 1942 and 1977. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot in 1983.

34. The longest musical performance in history is currently taking place in the
Church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance of John Cage's
"Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)" started on Sept. 5, 2001, and is set to
finish in 2640. The last time the note changed was October 2013; the next change
isn't due until 2020.

35. There's an opera house on the US–Canada border where the stage is in one
country and half the audience is in another.

36. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can only breed sexually when in the guts
of a cat. To this end, when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour to make them
less scared of cats.

37. The katzenklavier ("cat piano") was a musical instrument made out of cats.
Designed by 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher, it consisted of a
row of caged cats with different voice pitches, who could be "played" by a
keyboardist driving nails into their tails.
Cat Piano Photo

38. There is a single mega-colony of ants that spans three continents, covering
much of Europe, the west coast of the U.S., and the west coast of Japan.

39. The largest snowflake ever recorded reportedly measured 15 inches across.

40. An epidemic of laughing that lasted almost a year broke out in Tanganyika
(now Tanzania) in 1962. Several thousand people were affected, across several
villages. It forced a school to close. It wasn't fun, though — other symptoms
included crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.

41. The Romans used to clean and whiten their teeth with urine. Apparently it
works. Please don't do it, though.

42. There are around 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. If you
took them all out and laid them end to end, they'd stretch around the world
more than twice. But, seriously, don't do that either.
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