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Casting for Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown was done by Jackie Brown
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Casting for Lee Daniels' The Butler was done by Leah Daniels Butler
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The total weight of pumpkins produced in the U.S. each year is equivalent to the weight of about 12.8 billion standard Charleston shoes
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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
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make you say, huh? We'll cover film adaptations bankrolled by the CIA and some intriguing insights into
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Russian space porn. Let's get started. Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton was taller than Michael Jordan
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Crichton, who also wrote Congo and the Andromeda Strain, clocked in at around 6'9"
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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
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Jordan has never dipped his toes into the waters of speculative science fiction. In the 10th century CE, King Harold Gormson spearheaded the widespread introduction of
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Christianity in Denmark. The king had a discolored dead tooth that earned him a rather undesirable nickname
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Harold Bluetooth. About a millennium later, Bluetooth technology was christened in his honor
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As Intel's Jim Kardak remarked, King Harold was famous for uniting Scandinavia
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just as we intend to unite the PC and cellular industries. Elijah Jefferson Bond, the first person to patent the Ouija board
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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
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A fad started up of picnicking in cemeteries. Around the same time in England, people were afraid of being accidentally buried alive
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It's not at all clear that this was an actual problem in need of a solution, but in any
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case, one soon arose. The safety coffin, or coffin alarm, was a way for a prematurely interred person to get
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the word out that they were still alive. Most of these devices used a bell or some other type of noisemaker to communicate between
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the coffin and people six feet over. We couldn't find any fully attested cases of a coffin alarm fulfilling its intended
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purpose, but if you or someone you love was saved by a safety coffin, please let us know in the
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comments below. A less paranoid resting place was located at Atletico Madrid's Vicente Calderon
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Stadium. Departed fans of the football team could have their ashes put in a specially designated area
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of the complex. When the team switched stadiums in 2019, the ashes were dutifully collected and
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reinstalled in their new digs. If you'd like to avoid being buried anytime soon, in a soccer stadium
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or otherwise, maybe pick up the phone and make some dinner plans. A study from Harvard University
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finds that having no friends can be just as deadly as smoking. Both affect levels of a blood clotting
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protein that can contribute to heart attacks and strokes. For a long life, you'll also want to
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heed nature's call. It was long rumored that Danish astronomer Tycho Bra may have died from
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poisoning. Some people even said the deed was done by his one-time assistant, Johannes Kepler
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In 2010, though, Bra's body was exhumed, and it was soon determined that there wasn't a deadly
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level of mercury in his system, as previously thought possible. Instead, he may have expired
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from holding it in too long. The theory says the Bragg had a deadly bladder infection after
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his overly polite choice to not excuse himself from a royal banquet. Brings a whole new meaning
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to the phrase, when you gotta go, you gotta go. On the opposite end of the restraint spectrum
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we have Adolf Frederick, the one-time king of Sweden. Just before his death in 1771
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the king celebrated Fat Tuesday, a day when some observant Christians get their vices out of their
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system before Lent begins. Adolf Frederick's vices seem to have included gluttony. It's said
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that he feasted on lobster, caviar, champagne, and 14 servings of a sweet roll then known
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as hitbag. The extremely rich meal probably wasn't directly responsible for his death
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but it certainly didn't help. The biannual awards for excellence in obituary writing are
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called the Grimmies. The conference organized by the Society of Professional Obituary Writers is
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naturally, called ObitCon. The obituary for Mary A. Mullaney, known as pink to her loved ones
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begins with the following sentence. If you're about to throw away an old pair of pantyhose
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stop. The loving obituary celebrated the unique life lessons Pink imparted on the people around
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her, including resourceful uses for old nylons like tying toilet flappers and hanging Christmas
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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
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said of the church's founder, Joseph Smith, he told me that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson
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County, Missouri. Al Roker and Lenny Kravitz are distant cousins. Roker once visited the White
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house, roughly a month after he had undergone gastric bypass surgery. He might have eaten
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something there that he shouldn't have. As the beloved Weatherman told Dateline's Nancy
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Snyderman, I pooped my pants. Not horribly, but enough that I knew. The unfortunate event
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is actually not an uncommon side effect of gastric bypass. Roker didn't let the incident
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get in the way of his time in our nation's most hallowed home, though. He threw out the
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underwear and just went commando. According to a book published in 2000, shoe designer Manolo
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Blahnik considered toe cleavage a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe, but felt
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you must only show the first two cracks. Blahnik has since backtracked on this crack fact
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In 2012 he said I 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
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incredible benefits on participants, from improved focus to enhanced health and longevity. Sunshine
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and vitamin D are, to be sure, good in moderation, but please wear sunscreen and feel free to leave
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your underwear on. Sloths can hold their breath underwater for 40 minutes. That's actually
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considerably longer than a dolphin. Many frog species, meanwhile, can breathe through their
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skin. Though they do have lungs, when their skin is moist, this unique ability provides
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another method to absorb oxygen. Frogs also shed their skin occasionally. Instead of leaving
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it behind, though, they push the shedding skin into their mouth and eat it, in the words
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of Seattle's Burke Museum. All kittens are born with blue eyes. At around a month and a half, the kittens start producing
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melanin, causing the eyes of many breeds to darken. Maryland's state motto, translated
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from the original Italian is, manly deeds, womanly words. The state's official sport
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is jousting. It was the first state in the country to adopt an official sport
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In 1962, contractors who were looking to design spacesuits for NASA rode to officials at the
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Tower of London. They wanted insights into armor that had been designed for King Henry
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VIII, which the tower held in its collection. The one-time Tudor king had to have full protection
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while remaining mobile when engaged in games of foot combat. At least one of the spacesuit
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developers apparently felt this balance between protection and mobility was similar to the
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challenges his team faced and requested photographs and details of the various joints that comprise
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the armor. When NASA began accepting female astronauts into its space exploration program, engineers
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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
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Green potatoes can kill you. The green color cast some old potatoes develop is an indirect indication of high concentrations
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of the toxin solanine. While solanine poisoning is rare today, there are documented incidents of people dying from
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toxic potatoes. If in doubt, throw those green potatoes out. Sage Werbach, aka The Great Nippalini, earned a Guinness World Record for pulling a nearly
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1,000-kilogram vehicle 20 meters by his nipples. According to his website, Werbach has hung up his, um, nipples, I guess, and no longer
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performs publicly. From 1952 to 1957, the CIA launched balloons from West Germany into Iron Curtain countries
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including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Attached to some of these balloons were copies
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of Animal Farm. The allegorical novella, often read as a criticism of Stalinist communism and
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the results of the Russian Revolution, was banned in those countries. The idea behind the operation
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was for Orwell's satirical ideas to get into the hands of people who might then start to question
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authorities and the Communist Party line. The CIA also bankrolled the 1954 Animal Farm cartoon movie
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Turkey's The Birds were named after Turkey the country. Centuries ago, the English began to
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import the helmeted guinea fowl. The people who ate the poultry evidently didn't know
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it was from Africa. Because it was imported to Europe from merchants in Turkey, the English
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believed the birds were also Turkish. According to one account of its etymology, when the
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Spanish arrived in the New World, they encountered a new bird that was delicious, and it too
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was soon being imported to Europe. The English got it confused with the turkey they had been
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enjoying. Eventually, the name stuck to the New World bird. When 19th century artist Edward Byrne Jones found out that the mummy brown paint he was
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using was made from actual ground-up mummies, he held a funeral for the tube of paint in
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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
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thought that the dust mostly comes from relatively nearby comets and asteroids, though more recent
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research suggests that some of it could come from much farther, including the Kuiper Belt
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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
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refrain from chewing on the Pacific Plate. Scotland's national animal is the unicorn
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A number of other countries share the dragon as their national animal. Translated into
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English, in fact, Bhutanese leaders are known as dragon kings. Novelist Patricia Highsmith kept approximately 300 snails as pets and would regularly carry
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the slimy critters in her handbag. According to a biography, the talented Mr. Ripley author
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would bring out her little friends if she got bored at dinner. The Goodyear blimp is the official bird of Redondo Beach, California
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Barry Manilow wrote State Farms Like a Good Neighbor and Band-Aids I Am Stuck On Band-Aids
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jingles. Elvis Presley won three Grammys, none of them for rock music. He got two for best
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inspirational performance and one for best sacred performance. Some species of Requiem
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sharks can grow and shed tens of thousands of teeth over the course of their lives. And some
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types of sea slugs can go through hundreds of thousands of raguli over the course of their lives
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Raguli are sort of the gastropod version of teeth. If you blink while on a plane traveling 500 miles
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per hour, your eyes are closed for about 250 feet. The average person blinks around 6 million times
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a year, meaning their eyes are closed while blinking for around 10% of the total time
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they're awake. In 2021, a 67-year-old man in Thailand was suffering from gastrointestinal distress
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He took a deworming medicine and, in the horrific words of Mashable Southeast Asia, woke up
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the next morning to find an 18 tapeworm already exiting his rectum Some species of tapeworms have specialized anatomy to hold onto animal intestines even as the muscles of their hosts contract during digestion Some use spines or retractable
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hooks to get a grip, while others have suction cup-like suckers to hold on
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Kevin Williamson created the show Dawson's Creek and wrote the screenplays for Scream
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Scream 2, and Scream 4. Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue was written by the beloved children's
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author Shel Silverstein. After penning a satirical comic for the military's Stars and Stripes
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magazine in the 1950s, Silverstein was warned not to make fun of army officers. Instead, he was told
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his criticism should be limited to civilians and animals. The average person shares a birthday with
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about 20 million other living people. In a room with 75 people, there's an over 99.9% chance that
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two will share a birthday. For a period in the late 1800s, it was believed that milk was an
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adequate replacement for human blood in the body. After one human milk transfusion gone wrong
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the patient had to be resuscitated with a combination of morphine and whiskey
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A couple of decades later, a hotel in Australia offered an interesting treatment for rheumatism
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Whenever a dead local whale was spotted, the hotel gave patients the opportunity to lay
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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
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the decomposing blubber of a recently deceased cetacean and came out rheumatism-free
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Annie Withy and Andrew Martin developed smart food popcorn, which they sold to Frito-Lay in 1989
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Soon after, the pair introduced their second successful cheese dust-based offering, Annie's
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Mac and Cheese. Jeanette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives four years before the 19th
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Amendment, granting women the right to vote was passed. For Kazakhstan's first 27-plus years as an independent country after the dissolution
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of the Soviet Union, it had a single president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. In 2019, the country's capital, Astana, was renamed to Nursultan
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It was changed back in 2022. In most of the United States, cannibalism isn't explicitly outlawed
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The exception is Idaho, and even in the 49 other states, you'd likely be breaking other laws in the
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process. For the record, when Denver-based newspaper Westward looked into the illegal
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body trade in Colorado back in 2018, they found that one purveyor charged $200 for an elbow
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According to William Seabrook, an early 20th-century journalist who claimed to have eaten human meat
12:02
it tasted like good, fully developed veal. Around 125 billion Jenga blocks would fit
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inside the superdome by volume. Hippos can run up to 30 miles per hour for short spurts
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It's thought that each year they kill hundreds of people. And though they're well adapted to the
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water — they can actually sleep underwater, pop up for a breath, and sink back down without waking
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up — they don't really swim. Hippos' relatively high body count is nothing compared to the more
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than 100,000 annual deaths indirectly attributable to freshwater snails. Some species of the
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gastropod carry a deadly parasite which they can pass on to humans. The resulting disease
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has informally been dubbed snail fever. According to the United States Social Security Administration's
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Actuarial Life Table, a 58-year-old man has about a 1% chance of dying within the next year
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not necessarily from snail fever. An ostrich kick can kill a lion. The big birds have long
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sharp toenails, and they're stronger than those spindly-looking legs might have you believe
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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
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pressure delivered by a professional Bantamweight boxer. The website WikiHow has an entry on how to
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survive an encounter with an ostrich. It has instructions on what to do if you have a gun
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and need to use it, and features some incredible drawings of human ostrich combat. There have been
13:19
reports of ostriches raised on ranches seemingly being sexually attracted to humans, or at least
13:24
no longer seeing other ostriches as potential mates. Moving very, very far from ostriches
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Russian officials denied rumors that two cosmonauts had sex during a mission
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But one half of that pair, Dr. Valery Polykov, did mention some, quote
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colorful movies that Russian officials sent men in space to help them regain typical sexual
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function after a long, presumably celibate, mission. Polykov also apparently received suggestions from unnamed sources to use some kind of sex doll in space. He came out against that
13:52
idea, partially on the grounds that an astronaut with such equipment at his disposal might develop
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something he called doll syndrome. Moving on! The Skold's bridle was a rather horrifying item
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first appearing in the 16th century, used to hurt and humiliate women whose speech or behavior was
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thought to be too offensive or unruly, in the words of the British Library
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In the 19th century, naturalist Peter A. Brown collected albums full of hair
14:14
human and otherwise. His collection included samples from author James Fenimore Cooper
14:19
animals from sheep to lions, and 13 of the first 14 U.S. presidents. It seems, like so many of us
14:25
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
14:33
So if you find the itchiness and flaking uncomfortable, maybe meditate on the fact
14:36
that there's fungi living on your scalp. There are around as many microbial cells in your body as
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your body. The average human is made up of about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial
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cells of various types Because the microbes are so small they only account for about 1 of a person body mass In 1978 Rodney Alcala appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game Unbeknownst to the
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show's producers or that episode's bachelorette, Alcala had already committed at least four murders
15:04
at the time. He'd eventually be convicted of more than a half dozen homicides, but that day he was
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selected as the winning bachelor for a date that luckily never transpired. In 1589, a German man
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named Peter Stump said that he had made a pact with the devil to get turned into a werewolf
15:18
So far, just some good, clean, lycanthropic fun. But Stump's methods for fulfilling his supposed
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deal are about as far from fun as you can get. He killed 16 people, including 13 children
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one of whom was his own son. He supposedly ate his own child's brain. From there
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it somehow gets even worse, but this fact is already more than WTF enough, so we'll spare
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you the rest. There were actually hundreds of werewolf trials in Germany, which sounds like a
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lot until you compare it to the tens of thousands of executions for supposed witchcraft that
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happened in Germany during the same era. The Donner Party tragedy, which ended with the desperately hungry survivors reserting
15:53
to cannibalism of the non-homicidal nature, helped lead Gail Borden to develop shelf-stable
15:58
condensed milk. Before that invention, Borden had tried introducing the somewhat less successful
16:03
condensed meat. King Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, but he once dealt with an issue where the
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the Sun King don't shine, an fistula. That, in the words of the UK's National Health
16:13
Service website, is a small tunnel that develops between the end of the bowel and the skin
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near the anus, where poo leaves the body. Fistulas can cause discomfort and make sitting difficult, so Louis sought out treatment to
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alleviate his royal pain in the butt. To prepare for the procedure, his surgeon practiced on
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dozens of healthy commoners. It's thought that many of these test patients died
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After the surgery, it supposedly became fashionable in the French court to have a fistula. Some
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people actually made fake fistulas of bandages around their butts. This was known as Le Royale
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When he wasn't moving medical science forward with his butt, Louis was known to take on mistresses
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One of them, Madame de Montspan, ended up embroiled in a controversy known as the Affair
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of the Poisons. It was essentially a series of witch trials, centered around Madame Catherine
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Moivoisin, also known as La Voisin, a potion maker who had the pejorative nickname The Witch
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of Paris. La Voisin's partner said that the royal mistress had only achieved her position
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through the use of special potions. Lavoisin was eventually killed for her alleged crimes
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Her daughter then outlined an even more outlandish story about Manspan engaging in the dark arts and even drinking baby's blood. Manspan, for her part
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ended up retiring to a convent. 14th century royals once hosted a very unplanned precursor
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to Burning Man. A banquet hosted by Queen Isabu of Bavaria featured a group of dancers
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in apparently flammable outfits. When the Duke of Orleans got too close with a lit torch
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it set off a fire that resulted in the deaths of four men. Denmark's King Christian VII exhibited
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a different kind of royal imprudence. In the words of Denmark's Copenhagen Post
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the king's uncontrollable urge to masturbate was a popular subject within the royal court
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Jim Steinman wrote songs for Meat Loaf and Air Supply, among others. He also wrote It's All
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Coming Back to Me Now, which Celine Dion made famous. Steinman had an interesting perspective
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on the power ballad. On his personal website, he noted that he wrote it under the influence
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of Wuthering Heights and called it an erotic motorcycle. Over a billion tons of food are
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thrown away each year. That's about a third of all food produced for human consumption
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According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, that includes over 3 trillion apples. There's a reason that Pringles packaging
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labels the addictive snack as potato crisps, even here in the United States where we would
18:23
typically call them chips. Rather than slicing potatoes up and frying them
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Pringles are a bit of a frankenchip made up of dehydrated potato along with wheat starch
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rice flour, and other ingredients. They're actually only about 42% potato. Back in 1975, the FDA ruled that Pringles could only be labeled chips if they also prominently
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mentioned the dried potatoes. The company ultimately decided to call them crisps here
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in the States. And I won't count it for our tally since I know we've used it before
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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
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piece from 1975, it's believed Procter & Gamble spent 10 years and $70 million to research
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develop, manufacture, and market its first Pringles. Using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
19:09
Consumer Price Index inflation calculator, that's equivalent to about $12 billion today
19:14
In 2005, a man in Bulgaria was found by doctors to have a .914 blood alcohol content, meaning
19:20
almost 1% of his bloodstream was alcohol. That's more than 18 times the legal limit
19:24
in the state of Utah, incidentally, and more than twice the level generally considered fatal
19:29
Nevertheless, the man survived and was even awake and talking to police
19:33
More than 40% of people in a 2010 study had a longer second toe than Big Toe
19:38
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
19:45
Drop your favorite WTF fact in the comments below. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time
