Truth is stranger than fiction

There's currently a storm here today, and I think the winds have blown away most of my brain, so this week's post will be trivial. Or to be more precise, about trivia.

All facts are taken from www.kickassfacts.com so if you disagree with something, take it up with them.

The following facts are in random order, and are just stuff I find amusing and interesting.

Here we go:

1. A snipers bullet can travel so far that the earth's rotation moves the target.
   
   
2. Haiti's and Lichtenstein's flags were originally identical, by mistake. No one knew until they both competed in the 1936 Olympics.
   
   
3. The Mongols tried to invade japan twice in seven years, and both times a typhoon stopped them
   
   
4. The sun and moon appear to be of same size because of an astonishing coincidence. The moon is 400 times smaller but 400 times closer, which makes the eclipses possible. 
    
5. Actress Anne Hathaway’s husband Adam Shulman has an uncanny resemblance to William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare had a wife called Anne Hathaway. 
    
6. A blurry photo of a man stealing a wallet in a store ran on the bottom of the front page of the December 14, 2007, edition of Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune. Above it was an unrelated photo of a man painting a business. Readers noticed both men were wearing the same clothes and could be the same man and he was, leading to his arrest. 
    
7. On the Christmas Eve 1994, two cars collided near Flitcham, England. The drivers were twin sisters who were delivering presents to each other. Their names were Lorraine and Lavinia Christmas. 
    
8. The oldest recorded British joke dates back to the 10th Century A.D. It is “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.” 
    
9. The word ‘fuck’ was first used in 1568, but was most commonly used between 1700-1720. It disappeared from the English language for 150 years in the 1800s-1900s, but is now once again climbing in popularity. 
    
10. The terms “left” and “right” politics appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. 
     
11. For 200 years tomatoes were considered poisonous in Europe. In reality, their acidity was dissolving poisonous metals like lead from plates. 
     
12. A Japanese anime named Sazae-san is more than 46 years old and has been airing since 1969 with a total of 2330 episodes. It is one of the biggest ratings grabber on Japanese TV following simple plot lines.
    
    
13. The Mayflower voyage ended in Plymouth instead of its intended Virginia Colony destination because the Pilgrims ran out of beer. 
     
14. In 1962, LIFE magazine published an article about Lauri Rapala and his fishing lures. The cover featured recently deceased Marilyn Monroe and it became the magazine’s best-selling issue. Consequently, Rapala received millions of orders and is today the leading lure manufacturer in the world. 
     
15. In the wake of WWII, the combination of inexpensive geothermal power and high prices for imported fruit led to Iceland using the warmth from lava to grow banana trees. 
     
16. “Bellydance” was not a dance of seduction, and wasn’t done by harem girls for the sultan. It is a community folk dance with a rich and long history done by both men and women during family celebrations and gatherings. The two piece costume was invented by early Hollywood, and adopted by Egyptian dancers in nightclubs to cater to Western tourists. The term “bellydance” was invented at the 1893 World’s Fair by Sol Bloom because it sounded salacious, would attract scandalized Victorian patrons, and sell a lot of tickets. 
     
17. Diamonds can in fact be shattered with a hammer. There is a difference between how strong something is and how hard it is. Diamonds are one of the hardest minerals (certainly the hardest gemstone), but their toughness is only middle of the road. The toughest gemstone is nephrite jade and that toughness is part of what makes it such a good carving material. 
     
18. The amount of times you need to push down per minute during CPR is the beat of Staying Alive or Another one Bites the Dust. 
     
19. The USSR was to first to launch a satellite into orbit, launch a man into space, launch a woman into space, the first spacewalk, put the first manmade object on the moon, made the first soft landing on the moon, the first landing on another planet, had several probes transmitting from Venus, had the first space station and the first long duration space station. For a country that supposedly lost the space race those are a lot of firsts. 
     
20. During the Civil War, upon being told General Grant was a drunkard who enjoyed Whiskey, President Lincoln said “I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, have an interesting week!