25 Kickass Random Facts List #296

Here is 25 Kickass Random Facts List #296.

1-5 Kickass Random Facts

1. While gold has been mined for 6,000 years, 75% of all extracted gold was mined after 1910 – Source

2. In the Catholic sainthood process “the Devil’s advocate”, was a canon lawyer appointed to argue against the canonization of a candidate. They would take a skeptical view of the candidate’s character, look for holes in the evidence, and argue that attributed miracles were fraudulent. – Source

3. The word ‘Retarded’ was once championed to more accurately describe the (now dubbed) intellectually disabled , and replace its then synonyms, which had all become colloquialisms for being stupid; but today it’s considered offensive after having fallen prey to the same fate. – Source

4. The word “idiot” came from Ancient Athens and originally meant people who don’t care about or participate in public affairs or politics. – Source

5. James Sligo Jameson, heir to Irish whiskey manufacturer Jameson’s, bought an 11-year-old girl in 1886 and offered her to cannibals to document and sketch how she was cooked and eaten. – Source

6-10 Kickass Random Facts

6. Black rain is a form of precipitation caused by the immediate aftermath of a nuclear detonation, in which the water is black and sticky due to radioactive materials in the air. – Source

7. 20th Century Fox still owns Star Wars episodes 1-6 until 2020, except for A New Hope (4), which they will own forever – Source

8. South Koreans are required by law to use Internet Explorer for shopping and banking. – Source

9. North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, stolen by a Union soldier in 1865, was recovered by an FBI sting operation in 2003. – Source

10. The White House didn’t have a 4th of July celebration until 1801. Cherokee chiefs were invited and cockfighting was part of the celebration. – Source

11-15 Kickass Random Facts

11. Stevie Wonder is blind because doctors gave him too much oxygen as a baby. – Source

12. The largest cavalry charge in history occurred during the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. Spearheaded by 3000 winged knights, 20,000 Polish and German cavalrymen charged and routed the Ottoman line and decisively ended the Ottoman threat to Christian Europe. – Source

13. Nike founded and oversees an ultra-elite running group, with state of the art equipment such as underwater treadmills and whose athletes live in a specially designed house where filters remove oxygen so the athletes develop more red blood cells in a simulated high-altitude environment. – Source

14. The five deadliest animals in Australia are, in order: horses, cows, dogs, kangaroos, and bees. – Source

15. The traditional way to pronounce Julius Caesar, is (yewl-yoos kay-i-sarr), showing that the imperial titles of Russian ‘Czar/Tsar’ or ‘Kaiser’, in German, had their origins in Classical Latin more than 2000 years before as a legacy to Caesar’s family name. – Source

16-20 Kickass Random Facts

16. The rarest Olympic Medal is the Pierre de Coubertin (aka True Spirit of Sportsmanship) medal. It has been awarded less than once per Olympics. – Source

17. The NHL was started because five of the six team owners in the National Hockey Association didn’t like the sixth guy and wanted to start a league without him. – Source

18. In 1986, the United States suspended New Zealand from the ANZUS treaty after New Zealand declared a section of their waters a nuclear free zone. – Source

19. The Beatles stopped touring partly because their speakers could no longer compete with their fans’ screams. – Source

20. Comedian Albert Brooks changed his name when he entered show business. His real name is Albert Einstein. – Source

21-25 Kickass Random Facts

21. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of the plane that landed in the Hudson River was an industry-renowned expert in aviation safety before it happened. – Source

22. South Africa has no legally defined capital city. Power is shared between Cape Town (Parliament), Bloemfontein (Administrative), Pretoria (President & Cabinet) and Johannesburg (Constitutional Court). – Source

23. If you receive merchandise (for example: from an online vendor) that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a “free gift”, and you aren’t even legally obliged to notify the seller you’re going to keep it. This is in US-only. Just to be clear, this does not mean that you are entitled to keep any packages that were delivered to you accidentally. If it is addressed to your neighbor and you keep it you broke the law, even if it was left on your doorstep. A lot of people confuse the two scenarios and think that anything that shows up in their mailbox legally belongs to them. This fact is referring to items that are explicitly sent to you but which were unsolicited. – Source

24. Following the death of Elvis, his record label made millions with Orion, a masked performer who sounded like The King, leading many to believe he never really died. – Source

25. The KGB spy assigned to George Orwell later lost his faith in Communism, after reading Orwell’s books. – Source