Fun Facts
Vatican Bank ATMs allow users to perform transactions in Latin.
The US military document specifying procedures and requirements for the production of chocolate brownies is 26 pages long.
Qatar Airways allows each economy class passenger to carry on one live falcon, up to a maximum of six total falcons in the cabin. Each falcon must remain hooded and chained to its handler for the duration of the flight.
President Woodrow Wilson's 1915 wedding was catered by Chef Boyardee.
Pope Stephen VI hated the policies of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, so much that he had Formosus's corpse exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial.
President Benjamin Harrison kept two pet possums named Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection.
The last Civil War pension check was issued in 2003.
Clarence Thomas did not finish paying off his student loans until his third year as a Supreme Court Justice.
In 1943, the sale of sliced bread was banned in the United States.
Prior to leading the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan recorded several albums of calypso music under the stage name The Charmer.
Martin Van Buren's autobiography (822 pages long) does not mention his wife at all.
The final scene of the movie Casablanca was filmed on a sound stage too small to fit a real airplane, so the filmmakers built a half-sized prop plane and hired midgets to play the flight crew to ensure proper perspective.
In 1961, the New York Museum of Modern Art mistakenly hung a work by Henri Matisse upside-down for 47 days until a visiting stockbroker pointed out the error to a security guard.
Saddam Hussein's official campaign song in the 2002 Iraqi presidential election was "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston.
Miles Davis uses the word "motherfucker" 333 times in his autobiography.
From 1912-1948, the Olympics included medals for architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
About 10% of the electricity in the US comes from dismantled nuclear bombs.
24% of the laws passed by the 110th Congress concerned the renaming of post offices.
Former US President Gerald Ford was on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in 1942.
Elephants are typically right-tusked or left-tusked in the same way that humans are right-handed or left-handed.
The oath of office for the Kentucky General Assembly requires members to swear that they have never participated in a duel.
In 1996, FBI investigations into military surplus sales discovered that there were 23 privately owned Cobra attack helicopters in the U.S.
During the Cold War, every Minuteman long-range nuclear missile in the US was equipped with a launch code security device to prevent unauthorized or unintentional launches. However, due to concerns that real codes would interfere with wartime launch orders, the launch code for every missile was set to 00000000.
The first Democratic governor of Wyoming attended his inaugural ball in a pair of shoes made from the skin of a lynched cattle rustler.
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd has quoted all 37 of Shakespeare's plays on the Senate floor.
Liechtenstein added a crown to its flag after discovering during the 1936 Summer Olympics that its flag was identical to Haiti's.
The US Department of Agriculture banned the use of the word "tornado" in weather forecasts until 1938.
Pokemon is banned from Saudi Arabia for Zionist content.
The last execution by guillotine in France was in 1977.
The film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was funded entirely by the Quaker Oats Company in order to promote the launch of their new chocolate bar.
The first American penny, designed by Benjamin Franklin, bore the motto "mind your business."
The USDA allows the use of "wyngz" in the name of a wing-shaped poultry product that contains no wing meat, provided the packaging meets three additional labeling requirements. No other spelling variations are permitted.
The lowest temperature ever recorded in Singapore is 66.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
In 2011, Libyan rebels discovered a photo album in Moammar Gadhafi's compound that consisted of nothing but photos of Condoleezza Rice.
During Boris Yeltsin's 1995 visit to the White House, the Secret Service found him drunk in his underwear on Pennsylvania Avenue in the middle of the night, attempting to hail a taxi so he could get a pizza.
Gary Kremen, the founder of Match.com, was left by his girlfriend for a man she met on Match.com.
NASA intern Thad Roberts was sentenced to eight years in prison after stealing a safe full of moon rocks from Johnson Space Center and having sex on top of them.
Due to the rise in pro-democracy protests, the highest earner in South Korea in 1987 was the president of the country's only tear gas manufacturer.
In 1964, Mississippi's ABC affiliates protested the airing of the sitcom Bewitched, arguing that the depiction of a marriage between a man and a witch constituted a "veiled argument for racial intermarriage."
In 1963, a graduate student from the University of North Carolina unwittingly cut down the oldest tree on earth, a bristlecone pine tree in eastern Nevada. In 1973, a drunk driver crashed into and killed the most isolated tree on earth, an acacia tree in the Sahara desert located 120 miles from the next tree.
There are more captive tigers in Texas than wild tigers in the entire world.
The FAA recommends that pilots taking Viagra wait six hours before piloting an aircraft due to its side effect of blue-green colorblindness.
Dick Cheney has no pulse.
Sweden's TV1 airs a 1958 Donald Duck Christmas special every Christmas Eve at 3PM. It typically draws a viewing audience of between one third and one half of the entire Swedish population.
In 2002 the dictator of Turkmenistan renamed the month of April after his mother.
Johnny Carson's first three wives were named Joan, Joanne, and Joanna.
To join the central management of the Church of Scientology, you have to sign a one billion year membership contract.
President John F. Kennedy sent an aide out to buy him 1,000 Cuban cigars the night before he signed the Executive Order banning their sale in the United States.
In Brazil, the practice of forging land titles is known as "cricketing," because new documents are placed in a box full of crickets overnight to give them an aged appearance.
President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood bills for North and South Dakota before and after signing them so that no one would ever know which one became a state first.
More collect calls are made on Father's Day than any other day of the year.
In Colorado, Snickers, Butterfinger, and Hershey bars are subject to state sales tax, but Kit-Kats and Twix bars are not.
The German term Kummerspeck, or "grief bacon," refers to the excess weight one gains from emotional overeating.
During the Great Depression, Code 348 of the National Recovery Administration stipulated that burlesque dancers could only perform four strip teases per evening in an effort to spread the work around to less successful dancers.
During his 8 years as president, Bill Clinton only sent two emails.
In 1969, the Army Corps of Engineers "turned off" Niagara Falls for six months in order to study erosion of the rock bed underneath.
In 1916, a circus elephant that killed its trainer was publicly executed by hanging from an industrial crane.
John Quincy Adams had a pet alligator that he kept in a White House bathroom.
After Buddy Holly's death, the coroner took $11.65 in coroner's fees from Holly's personal effects.
Lake Baikal contains 20% of the world's surface fresh water (as much as all the Great Lakes combined).
Article 222 of the Turkish Penal Code bans the use of the letters Q, W, and X.
Michael Jackson composed music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
In the US, it is legal to send queen honey bees via air mail, but not drones or worker bees.
In Japan, inflatable sex dolls are known as "Dutch wives."
Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
New York state resident astronauts who die in the line of duty are exempt from state income tax for the year of their death.
On April 1, 1915, a French pilot flew over a German military camp and dropped a fake bomb with an April Fool's note attached.
A kidnapped child can be claimed as a dependent for income tax purposes, but only if the child is presumed alive, the prime suspects in the kidnapping are not family members, and the child was a member of the household for more than half the portion of the tax year prior to the kidnapping.
On the day of his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a pillow fight in his motel room.
The music video for the Michael Jackson song "Bad" was directed by Martin Scorsese.
The Philippines flies its flag upside down during wartime.
René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.
The following songs were all written by Jews: "White Christmas," "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree," "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)," "I'll Be Home For Christmas," "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Sleigh Ride," "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," "Santa Baby," "Holly Jolly Christmas," "Winter Wonderland," "It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year," "Silver Bells," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!"
In some cases, deaf-mute people with Tourette's Syndrome uncontrollably sign obscenities.
Centerpieces and other decorations at Amish weddings contain celery instead of flowers.
Abraham Lincoln signed the order creating the US Secret Service on the same day he was assassinated.
In Japan, fried chicken from KFC is a Christmas Eve tradition.
Playing with a laser pointer to distract a cat was patented in 1995.
Onions are the only commodity for which futures trading is banned.
A one-month-old orphan named Ernest was raffled off at the 1909 world's fair in Seattle.
After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Secret Service needed a way to protect FDR from possible assassins on short notice while he rode to address Congress. Federal law prohibited the purchase of an automobile costing more than $750, so they drove him to the Capitol in Al Capone's confiscated bulletproof limousine.
During World War II, the Nazi propaganda apparatus produced the children's board game Hunt The Coal Thief to teach the importance of wartime energy conservation.
The grand champion goat from the 2011 Colorado State Fair was stripped of its title after failing a drug test.
In 1975, the Alaska Board of Geographic Names changed the official name of Mount McKinley to Denali, the traditional Alaska Native name for the peak. Since then, the congressional delegation from William McKinley's home state of Ohio has blocked the change at the federal level by regularly amending appropriations bills with a requirement that the mountain not be renamed.
By the end of World War II, every German spy sent to Britain had been turned into a double agent by the British.
After being ousted as Prime Minister of Somalia in June 2011, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed returned to his previous job as a manager at the New York State Department of Transportation office in Buffalo, New York.
A single Wal-Mart grocery distribution center can store 4 million bananas.
Parking meters are illegal in North Dakota.
The US Navy proposed painting the Golden Gate Bridge with yellow and black stripes to improve visibility for ships.
Chicago Bears offensive lineman Herman Johnson weighed 15 pounds, 14 ounces at birth, making him the largest baby ever born in the state of Louisiana.
Scientists determine the age of blue and humpback whales by measuring the amount of accumulated earwax.
Moscow's subway station escalator repair department has 3,000 employees.
Rio de Janeiro was once the capital of Portugal.
In 1939, penicillin was in such short supply that patients on the drug had it filtered back out of their urine to be re-administered.
The common Japanese term for the uvula translates to "throat penis."
When a monkey with a bisected brain is given a nut, his two hands fight each other for it.
California's first state legislature was known as the "Legislature of a Thousand Drinks."
Eskimo hunters traveling alone are sometimes stricken by "kayak angst" - delusions that their boat is flooding or sinking.
Chicago and Oklahoma city both have airports named after people who died in plane crashes (Edward O'Hare and Will Rogers, respectively).
The word Taser is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle," a reference to a 1911 Tom Swift novel in which Swift invents an electric hunting rifle to take on safari.
Matthew Vassar, the founder of Vassar College, died while delivering his farewell address to the Vassar College Board of Trustees.
In 1975, BP produced a board game called Offshore Oil Strike, in which players compete to build and manage deep-sea drilling platforms. The game includes "hazard cards" with events such as "Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1 million."
In Tucson, Arizona east-west roads are called "streets," north-south roads are called "avenues," and diagonal roads that intersect both streets and avenues are called "stravenues." The official postal notation for a stravenue is STRA, but the US Postal Service also recognizes the abbreviations STRAV, STRAVEN, STRAVEN, STRVN, and STRVNUE.
New Zealand has an official wizard.
The NCAA gets approximately 98% of its revenue from the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
Florida State University and Illinois State University are the only two colleges in the U.S. to have their own circuses.
Denver International Airport is more than twice as large as Manhattan.
The pilot for the TV show "Nash Bridges" was written by Hunter S. Thompson.
Jon Bon Jovi's first professional recording was a duet with R2-D2 on the Star Wars Christmas album, Christmas in the Stars (1980).
The Iroquois Indian nickname for George Washington, Conotocarius, translates as "Town Destroyer" or "Devourer of Villages."
On December 2, 2009, the day that Tiger Woods said in a statement that he regretted his "transgressions," the #1 and #5 top trending Google searches were "transgressions" and "transgression definition," respectively.
Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Rob Kindler owns a Porsche Cayenne with the vanity license plate "2BG2FAIL".
As part of David Hasselhoff's divorce settlement, he received sole possession of the catchphrase "Don't Hassel the Hoff."
In 1911, Pablo Picasso was held and questioned by police for his suspected involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa.
Article 249 of the Haitian penal code prohibits turning someone into a zombie.
Since 1958, only 2 of Argentina's 18 presidents have served a full term.
The name of Portland, Oregon was decided on a coin flip (the other option was Boston).
Tree snakes cause an average of 87 major power outages a year in Guam.
In the Dyirbal tribe of Australian Aboriginals, members are forbidden from ever speaking to their mothers-in-law. If speaking in the presence of one's mother-in-law, all normal words are taboo, and the speaker must instead use an entirely separate vocabulary.
John Adams's inaugural address included a sentence more than 700 words long.
Grover Cleveland paid a Polish immigrant $150 to replace him in the draft.
Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister from 1983-1991, was previously the Guinness World Record holder for beer chugging (2.5 pints in 11 seconds).
The orange prison-issue sneakers at Rikers Island are known as Air Giulianis.
Syphilis was originally called "Spanish disease" by the Italians, "Italian disease" by the French, "French disease" by the English and the Turks, "Polish disease" by the Russians, "Portuguese disease" by the Indians and the Japanese, and "Haitian disease" by the Spanish.
The Queen Mother of Swaziland's title literally translates to "She-Elephant."
The official state sport of Maryland is jousting.
Tug-of-war was an Olympic sport until 1920.
Twice as many people were killed assembling V2 rockets as by being attacked with them.
The screenplay for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice was written by Roald Dahl.
The telephone excise tax passed to fund the Spanish-American War was not repealed until 2006.