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Don’t leave these facts here. Pack ‘em in your brain and take them with you!

35 Bits of Trivia Someone Left at the Royal Ball, Which His Highness the Prince Is Now Using as an Excuse to Touch Everyone’s Feet

December 29, 2023

Can you believe that someone could learn that Stone Cold Steve Austin got his ring name from a cup of tea, then just drop that fact right here on our pristine floor? What kind of person wouldn’t tuck that tidbit safely in their back pocket to regurgitate thrice a day? Not you! You’ll carry that and the rest of these with you forever, right?

35

William Shakespeare was a price-gouging businessman. When he wasn't revolutionizing English literature, the Bard liked to keep himself busy by buying huge stocks of grain, which he'd then sell at inflated prices. Не was eventually prosecuted for tax evasion and hoarding food during a time of shortage. CRACKED.COM — Source

34

One third of Pakistan's pilots have been faking it. Just one false pilot is worrying-and in 2020, it came out that 262 of Pakistan's 860 airplane pilots had dubious licenses, which they got by cheating. These were all grounded, which is fine, but maybe entirely too many fake pilots kind of late. CRACKED.COM — Source

33

Comic book artists are awfully underpaid. Almost nothing of Marvel and DC's mountains of money go to the artists who make the comics-in fact, it's one of the worst fields to make a living with ink and pencil. You'd almost have an easier time becoming Spider-Man than fully paying your bills drawing him. CRACKED.COM — Source

32

0000 FOX CHOICE AWARDS Stone Cold Steve Austin got his ring name from tea. Hot leaf juice is the last thing you'd expect any wrestler to drink, but that's what Stone Cold was having as he tried to come up with a badass name. Then his wife told him to leave names for later and finish his tea before it got stone cold. CRACKED.COM — Source

31

You're picturing Neanderthals wrong. The image of Neanderthals as hunchbacked brutes comes from the very first specimen that was ever found, which happened to be a geriatric man riddled with bone diseases. This conception has been debunked decades ago - Neanderthals were as good at walking upright as we are. CRACKED.COM — Source

30

Baby, It's Cold Outside helped usher in Islamic fundamentalism. Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb arrived in the U.S. in 1948- only to leave two years later with a raging hatred of American debauchery, which he felt was best summed up by the depraved Baby, It's Cold Outside. Qutb's writings were influential in the creation of Al Qaeda. CRACKED.COM — Source

29

Your avocados may be grown by a drug cartel. Since trade restrictions were lifted in the '90s, avocados from Mexico became more and more popular in the U.S. while Mexican cartels were hit by the escalating War on Drugs. So what did the hardened narcos do? Exactly- they branched out into the lucrative avocado business. CRACKED.COM — Source

28

Pikachu could have had big boobs. Nintendo of America thought that the Pokémon were too cute for U.S. children, and proposed alternative designs. They turned Pikachu into something like a tiger with huge breasts, said Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company (sadly, with no accompanying pictures). CRACKED.COM — Source

27

A game studio has been working for two decades with no bosses. Motion Twin, the French studio behind the successful Dead Cells, describes itself as an anarcho-syndical workers cooperative where there are no bosses and everyone gets paid the same. And they've been making games since 2001, so it's hard to shrug them off as some hippie experiment. CRACKED.COM — Source

26

CRACKED.COM Halifax, England was terrified of a criminal who didn't exist. For two weeks in 1938, Halifax was haunted by a knife-wielding maniac, and Scotland Yard offered a reward for the Halifax Slasher. Plot twist: the Slasher wasn't real. The whole thing was born from a few, unrelated incidents - and then people started faking attacks following the press coverage. — Source

25

24

CRACKED.COM Nut theft is big in California. Stealing electronics? Booze? Nope - the really high-yield crime in California is nut-napping. International crime rings run sophisticated operations, complete with false shipping papers. Nuts are notoriously hard to track, and a truckload can be worth as much as $500,000. — Source

23

An entire bank in Utah was sent by mail. In 1916, bank director William Horace Coltharp realized that bricks to build a new bank in Vernal, Utah were cheaper to ship by mail than by truck. Through a series of sneaky loopholes, he got 1,500 parcels (each containing 50 pounds of bricks) delivered all the way from Salt Lake City. CRACKED.COM — Source

22

Dogs can tell when you're lying. Researchers found that trained dogs would often not follow their handler's indications about where to find food, if the indications were intentionally misleading (as opposed to just wrong). The experiment has been conducted on chimpanzees as well, who failed miserably. CRACKED.COM — Source

21

A volcano can turn your brain into glass. When the super-hot murdercloud gets into you, it can vaporize your organs and blow them out - or as it happened to this one guy at the Vesuvius site, it can vitrify your brain (and blow it out). Researchers were probably freaked out when they learned what those glass shards they found lying around actually were. CRACKED.COM — Source

20

MIT intentionally irradiated children (with Quaker's help). In the 1940s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to study how the body absorbs nutrients by feeding disabled and abandoned children radioactive oatmeal. The experiment was government-sanctioned and sponsored by Quaker Oats, who even supplied the tainted cereal. CRACKED.COM — Source

19

overeager investors bought shares for the wrong Twitter. Some time before Twitter went public in 2013, investors spotted some very cheap shares with the code TWTRQ, and snapped them up thinking they were out early. As it turned out, those were for a company called Tweeter Audio and Video - and were dirt cheap because the outfit had just gone bankrupt. CRACKED.COM — Source

18

Psychologists and psychiatrists are not the same thing. A psychologist will give you your weekly therapy, while a psychiatrist will prescribe you any medication you need. Despite what you see on TV, these are not the same person, and haven't been in decades. (It can happen, but it's very rare.) CRACKED.COM — Source

17

INGREDIES THE Tomato Spice ge - STORA whete PROH 57 ketchup was a medicine. In 1834, Ohio physician John С. Bennet began selling tomato ketchup as a medicine for all kinds of ailments. The condiment was a medical fad until around 1850, when studies showed that its miraculous healing properties were (amazingly) not real. CRACKED.COM — Source

16

The discoverer of Halley's comet originated the Hollow Earth theory. Trying to explain shifts in the Earth's magnetic field, Edmund Halley speculated in 1692 that the planet contained three nested, smaller spheres, rotating in different directions. And for some reason he added that whole civilizations lived there, like in so many floors of a tenement building. CRACKED.COM — Source

15

Jim almost cheated on Pam. During Season 8 of The Office, the writers planned to escalate the tension between Jim Halpert and Cathy Simms into a full-blown makeout sesh. The plotline was stopped by John Krasinski's refusal - the only time he remembers putting his foot down while on the show. CRACKED.COM — Source

14

One of the Titanic's survivors was dubbed The Unsinkable Molly Brown. After the Titanic's disaster, she got highly involved in women's and worker's rights, and acquired a reputation. CRACKED.COM — Source

13

In an Indian park, rangers are legally allowed to shoot people hunting rhinos. Which led to rangers killing 20 people in Kaziranga park in 2015 - fewer rhinos got killed by poachers that year. CRACKED.COM — Source

12

Bees are known as hive animals, but there are also species of solitary bees. These bees sting only rarely, and male solitary bees can't sting you at all. CRACKED.COM — Source

11

The heir apparent of the Ottoman Empire fought in the Normandy landings. Не had studied at Princeton, and joined the US military, where he went on to have a 22-year career. CRACKED.COM — Source

10

One guy spent seven hours skiing down from the world's second highest mountain peak. Не climbed for three and a half days to get up there - without any additional oxygen, which is pretty badass. CRACKED.COM — Source

9

The Germans nearly destroyed the Animal Farm manuscript before publication. ORWELL ANIMAL FARM Not on purpose, though - it's just that a Nazi bomb hit George Orwell's house, but he found the manuscript in the ruins. CRACKED.COM — Source

8

12 American POWs were being held in Hiroshima when the nuclear bomb went off. And 9 of them were crewmembers of the same plane, the B-24 bomber Lonesome Lady. CRACKED.COM — Source

7

A band gamed Spotify's low payments (with silence). Michigan-based funk band Vulfpeck released an album with ten short tracks of utter silence, and encouraged fans to stream it while they slept. That way, they made $20,000 instead of the diddly-squat independent artists usually get. Spotify took down the album after two months Spotif CRACKED.COM — Source

6

Glaciers are plundered for luxury ice cubes. Ice from glaciers is highly valued by whisky snobs, which makes it a valuable trade good - great for a time when glaciers are retreating. This has led to hijackings - in 2012, a man was arrested in Chile with about $6,000 worth of ice from a Patagonian glacier. CRACKED.COM — Source

5

Groucho Marx began his career with a murderer. 14-year-old Groucho started out as part of a group called The Leroy Trio, headed by one Eugene Leroy - who became a wanted man years later for brutally murdering his wife. (Young Groucho was lucky - Leroy and his partner just left him stranded in Colorado.) CRACKED.COM — Source

4

Finland's military used swastikas until 2020. The Finnish Air Force adopted the swastika in 1918 - and they kept it for decades, even after the symbol got the worst PR campaign ever in the '30s and '40s. It took about 80 years for them to realize it wasn't a good look and drop the thing. CRACKED.COM — Source

3

Duke Nukem got to keep his name because of an oversight. The most '90s video game hero debuted a couple years after Captain Planet, which had a villain with the exact same name. Luckily for Duke, the Captain Planet production company never bothered to file a trademark. CRACKED.COM — Source

2

D.B. Cooper wasn't called D.B. Cooper. The mysterious hijacker gave his name as Dan Cooper when he bought his plane ticket. Still probably fake, but he never used the initials D.B. - those came from Oregon journalist James Long, who misheard the name over the phone. CRACKED.COM — Source

1

Daredevil almost got a dog. A 1980s cartoon which was never produced planned to give Matt Murdock a seeing-eye dog, which also helped him in his superhero forays as... Lightning, the Super- Dog! (Не wasn't actually super, though-just a regular good boy.) CRACKED.COM — Source

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