Here is 25 Kickass Random Facts List #290.
1-5 Kickass Random Facts
1. The oldest known surviving pair of socks were designed to be worn with sandals. – Source
2. There’s a poem called “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité which was written to show differences in pronunciation of English words spelled similarly and only rhymes if you know how to pronounce them correctly. – Source
3. In Italy, it is not a crime to steal food if you are hungry and have no other means of nourishment. – Source
4. Light in itself isn’t special. According to Einstein, the fastest speed reachable in the universe is 300 million meters/second. It just happens that light is the only thing we have detected that travels without limitations in vacuum, which is why we associate the speed limit of the universe with it. – Source
5. There is a prequel to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” called “Halloween is Grinch Night”, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program in 1977. – Source
6-10 Kickass Random Facts
6. Around half of all clinical trials by drug companies go unpublished, which leads to overestimation of drug efficiency and an underestimation of dangers. A movement called AllTrials supported by hundreds of organizations, has been fighting for all trials to be released. – Source
7. Phones have an asterisk and pound sign because when Bell Labs designed the first touch-tone phone, their system had two tones which were not assigned values. So, they threw in * and #. – Source
8. The penalty for killing an elephant in Sri Lanka is death. – Source
9. Red Cross raised half a billion dollars in donations for the Haiti earthquake recovery, but only built 6 houses. – Source
10. Boston Law Enforcement agencies asked Dunkin Donuts to stay open while the city was on lockdown during the search for the second Boston Marathon Bomber. They did, and provided food and coffee to officers for free. – Source
11-15 Kickass Random Facts
11. The Australian Night Parrot is the most elusive and mysterious bird in the world. Only three people have had a confirmed sighting in over a century. – Source
12. Norway actually introduced Salmon Sushi to Japan. – Source
13. Captain Christopher Jones of the Mayflower forced their ship to land early at Plymouth Rock because of the ship’s dwindling supply of beer. Before pasteurization was discovered in 1864, beer through the process of fermentation was safer to drink than water. – Source
14. A tradition of High Wycombe, UK, involves its Mayor being weighed annually in public on a specially erected scale, and their weight compared with the previous year. If it has increased, it means they have been indulging in too much good living at taxpayers’ expense, and the crowd jeers and boos. – Source
15. In 1954, famous rhythm-and-blues singer Johnny Ace died after jokingly pointing a gun toward himself and accidentally shooting himself with it. His last words were “It’s okay! Gun’s not loaded… see?” – Source
16-20 Kickass Random Facts
16. 1.2 million golden orb spiders were individually collected to weave the largest piece of golden spider silk cloth in the world. – Source
17. The SS officer who arrested Anne Frank and the other inhabitants of the secret annex later bought her book to see if he was in it. (He wasn’t). – Source
18. James Cameron took good friend Guillermo del Toro to a bank one day and withdrew $1 million in cash to pay the ransom for the safe return of his kidnapped father. – Source
19. Sheep farming accounts for 80% of all agriculture in Wales. – Source
20. A study showed that 2.6% of Ants in a colony are always active. Over 25% are observed to never be working, and 71.9% are inactive half of the time. – Source
21-25 Kickass Random Facts
21. The water at the Lake McDonald in Montana is clear and the bed is covered with multi-colored pebbles made of clay containing iron. – Source
22. Folk-hero John Henry (who according to legend, beat a steam drill in a tunnel-digging contest, and who died soon after from exhaustion), may have actually been a real person. – Source
23. Many tech companies stayed away from the use of male computerized voices because of HAL-9000 (from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’). – Source
24. Sauron has a rich backstory in Lord of the Rings, and at one point turned into a Vampire and hid in the woods. There were also Werewolves. – Source
25. 98% of all adoptions in Japan are of adult men. – Source
The Red Cross fact is misleading – they built over 6,000 transitional homes in Haiti, as well as providing temporary shelters for over 130.000 people. The reason the Red Cross did not build more permanent homes was due to competing land title claim and ownership issues with the land they planned to build new communities on, along with the fact that culturally almost no one they were assisting wanted to move into a new community. Likely corruption among the zoning and governmental authorities impeded them in other ways too. Additionally not all the funding raised was going to new homes – the vast majority was to emergency relief efforts unrelated to building new homes, such as cholera prevention, sanitation and other healthcare concerns.