December 2010
A dog skydived from a height of 15,000 feet.
Brutus the dachshund is the only dog to be certified as a skydiver (accompanied by his faithful human, Ron Sirull, of course!). This wonderdog has fallen out of the sky at speeds of 128 mph and from heights of 15,000 feet above the ground! As of 2002, Brutus had logged 100 total jumps, about which his owner joked, “That’s equal to 700 jumps in dog...
The first microwave oven was nearly the size of a refrigerator.
The original microwave began in 1946 as the “Speedie Weenie Project,” a secret effort by Dr. Percy Spencer and Roly Hanson, a pair of engineers at the Raytheon Company. The next year, the finalized product hit the market, but was over 5 ½ feet tall and weighed over 750 pounds! At around $5000, this newfangled “luxury” did not come...
George Washington has a pair of library books that are 221 years overdue.
Our boy George checked out a couple volumes from the New York Society Library on October 5th, 1789. This was about five months into Washington’s presidency, back when New York was still our nation’s capital. The ledger showed no return date, and they were borrowed by a patron who signed his name simply as “President.” ...
In 1964 a referee’s call during a soccer match in Peru caused a riot that killed over 300 people!
Another 500 people were injured in that riot in Lima, Peru. The match was a qualifier for the 1964 Olympics. The refs disallowed a goal for Peru, resulting in the riot.
There was an even worse soccer disaster in Moscow in 1982. A late goal resulted in a stampede. People who had tried to...
November 2010
Twinkies were originally filled with banana cream.
James A. Dewar, one of the bakers for the Continental Baking Company in Indianapolis, came up with the idea for the snack cake while delivering a similar strawberry shortcake filled with creme. His idea was particularly clever because the new banana cakes made use of the shortcake machines outside of strawberry-picking season - a time in which...
A blind man regained his vision by having a tooth implanted in his eye.
Martin Jones of Rotherham, England had NEVER seen his own wife! This was because, eight years prior to his marriage, a tub of white hot aluminum had exploded in Jones’s face while he was working in a scrapyard. As a result, Martin suffered 37 percent burns and lost both his left eye and the vision in his right one.
...
Octopuses have three hearts.
An octopus has one main heart called the systemic heart and two smaller ones that are located near the its gills. These two smaller hearts function much like the right side of the human heart. They pump oxygen-depleted blood to the gills, where it exchanges carbon dioxide for oxygen, and then pump this refreshed blood to the systemic heart.
The systemic heart then...
A man claimed to have been President of the United States for a day.
Democrat David Rice Atchinson served as a U.S. Senator from 1843 to 1855. It was normal at the time for the Senate to elect a ‘president pro tempore’ to serve in the absence of the vice president, and Atchinson was elected to this position on 13 separate occasions. The president pro tempore also followed the vice...
Bamboo can grow at a rate of 2 inches per hour.
With the modern ‘green’ movement calling for better sources of renewable energy, bamboo is a very strong candidate in many ways. When you consider that it takes some oak trees 120 YEARS to reach full maturity, you can see why this sort of rapid growth could prove invaluable in the near future.
Bamboo is not the perfect solution,...
Ladybugs are technically carnivores.
Ladybugs may look pretty, but they are actually aphid-killing machines! Aphids are small destructive insects that feed by sucking the vital juices out of the leaves and stems of plants.
A ladybug is a gardener’s best friend because they love to eat these ruinous pests. One thing to remember, however - if you choose to release ladybugs into your garden...
The Constitution of the United States does not contain the word ‘democracy.’
(source)
SpongeBob SquarePants has worked at the Krusty Krab for over 31 years.
This is indicated in The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie by our hero’s 374 consecutive Employee of the Month awards. That may seem like a long time, but the funny thing is, for SpongeBob it isn’t. Sponges can live to be 500 years old!
(source)
While the company searched for the right set of characters, many Chinese shopkeepers began producing their own “ko-ka-ko-la” signs. Because the character “la” means wax, many hilarious phrases were formed, such as “female horse fastened with wax,” “wax-flattened mare,” and “bite the wax tadpole.”
The company finally settled on the...
No one was injured when a Nebraska church exploded in 1950 because all the members of the choir were late to rehearsal.
The West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska held their choir practices at 7:20 pm on Wednesdays. At 7:25 pm on the evening of Wednesday, March 1, 1950 (just five minutes into the scheduled rehearsal), the West Side Baptist Church EXPLODED!
Miraculously, not...
The youngest pope was only 20 years old when he was installed.
Pope Benedict IX was the nephew of his predecessor, Pope John XIX. Some historians claim that he was 12 years old, but this is highly improbable. Little is known about his papal acts, except that he held two or three synods (assemblies) in Rome and catered to several prominent churches and monasteries.
Benedict was apparently a...
Frankie from Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends wears a shirt with silhouettes of the Powerpuff Girls.
This image was placed on Frankie’s shirt by Craig McCracken as an homage to his earlier cartoon. McCracken is the creator of both The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends!
(source)
The father of the periodic table also established the formula for distilling vodka.
Dmitri Mendeleev is best known for developing our modern periodic table of the elements. However, most people do not know that his work was also integral to Russia’s vodka industry!
Vodka became a staple as a Russian beverage back in the 1300s. However, there was no standard for distillation for 500...
A Coca-Cola advertisement in the mid-80’s was banned because it clearly depicted a sexual act.
The offending poster was part of Coke’s $200,000 “Feel the Curves” campaign to promote the reintroduction of the company’s original contoured bottle shape. The graphic artist had hidden an image depicting oral sex among the advertisement’s ice cubes as a joke.
This was...
The fastest wind speed ever recorded was 318 miles per hour.
This record-setting gust occurred in a tornado that hit the suburbs of Oklahoma City on May 3, 1999. The funnel cloud struck near the town of Moore, OK at about 7:00 pm, killing about four residents and destroying a total of 250 homes!
The speed of 318 mph was only 1 mph short of classifying the tornado as an F-6 on the Fujita...
The odds of a professional golfer making a hole in one are 3000 to 1.
(source)
“Smiles” is listed as one of the ingredients on a package of Goldfish crackers.
(source)
The word “verb” is really a noun, and “indescribable” is actually a descriptive word.
Sources: verb, indescribable
There’s more where those came from: “Adjective”, “adverb”, “preposition” (all parts of speech actually) are all nouns as well. “Infinite” is actually a finite word. “Unpronounceable” is a pronounceable word....
There are NO natural lakes in Maryland.
Despite the fact that some of its bodies of water have been named “lakes” (Lake Habeeb, Deep Creek Lake) ALL of Maryland’s lakes are manmade! They have all been created by damming up preexisting rivers. Technically, that makes them reservoirs. Most of them are actually called reservoirs as well (e.g. Loch Raven Reservoir).
The reason that some of these...
The deepest part of the Gulf of Mexico extends downward for a distance of over 10 Empire State Buildings.
The Gulf is rather shallow in its coastal segments by the continental shelves. However, it dips drastically in a southwestern section called the Sigsbee Deep. This underwater abyss sinks to an estimated maximum depth of over 13,123 feet! That’s more than 10 times as tall as the Empire State...
Diphallus is a rare condition in which a man’s penis is duplicated.
The first known case of this condition was reported in 1609. Typically only one of the organs is fully formed, but there have been occurrences in which both penises are fully functional! This strange disorder affects an estimated 1 in 5.5 million men.
It’s very uncommon for both penises in diphallus to be fully...
It took a South Korean woman 960 tries to pass her driving test.
69-year old Cha Sa-soon took her driving test once every weekday for 3 years, beginning in April of 2005! Over the following two and a half years, she slowed down to two attempts a week. She finally succeeded over five years later! Her driving instructor does not consider the number of failed attempts because she kept failing the...
Director George Lucas had trouble getting funding for Star Wars because most studios thought that people wouldn’t want to see it.
All the major Hollywood studios passed on Lucas’s script until 20th Century Fox gave in to his final desperate attempt (even though they also thought the film would flop!). Star Wars went on to become the highest grossing film ever at the time! Shows how much studio...
The red juice in raw meat isn’t blood.
Almost all of the blood is removed from the meat during slaughter! The red liquid you see is mostly water mixed with a protein called myoglobin. Myoglobin’s function is to store oxygen in muscle cells, much like its counterpart hemoglobin does in red blood cells. The myoglobin is a distinct reddish color, so the more myoglobin in your meat, the redder it...
In 1998, lightning killed an entire soccer team.
This tragedy occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a match between the villages of Bena Tshadi and nearby Basangana. Strangely, the lightning annihilated all eleven members of the home team, while all of Basangana’s players were spared with severe burns at worst! This disparity caused many locals to blame the event on some sort...
Kurt Cobain’s suicide note was addressed to his childhood imaginary friend “Boddah.”
You can read the full transcript of the note here. Or you can read a scan of the note here.
Frank Sinatra allegedly attempted suicide twice.
According to a recent biography about Sinatra the famous crooner had been going through a tumultuous relationship with his second wife, Ava Gardner. He allegedly cut his wrists in his friend’s apartment in 1953. His friend found him when he came home, and saved him from bleeding to death. Earlier he had also reportedly attempted suicide by...
The state of Michigan threatened a group of beavers with a $10,000 fine for not moving their dam.
An angry property owner reported that his neighbor’s dam had caused flooding into his property. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality responded by sending a letter to the neighbor, Stephen Tvedten, telling him that the construction of a “wood debris dams” on his property...
Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment (prohibiting slavery) until 1995.
The amendment itself was adopted back in 1865 in the United States. 3/4 of the states were needed to ratify the amendment, so the U.S. did not need Mississippi’s approval to add the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1994, a clerk in the Texas legislature had discovered that Mississippi hadn’t...
An anti-seat belt law advocate died because he didn’t wear a seat belt.
In a tragic, yet ironic, turn of events, a 21 year old student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln died in a car accident in January 2005. He was a passenger in a Ford Explorer that flipped over. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was ejected from the car. The driver and front-seat passenger were both wearing seat...
A sloth takes a week to digest its food.
In fact, they actually only defecate (poop) once every 8 days! Sloths rely on bacteria in their stomachs to digest their food. Also, their rate of digestion is dependent on the temperature. If it’s night time, or they’re in the shade, their digestion rate slows.
The rainy season can be especially rough for sloths. Most dead sloths can be...
The phrase “Don’t worry, be happy” is printed at the bottom of receipts from the Cheesecake Factory.
(source)
A golfer died from chewing on his tee.
In 1982, Navy Lt. George Prior was playing golf at the Army-Navy Country Club in Arlington, VA. He played 36 holes, and by the end of it he was feeling sick. He died 10 days later.
How did he die? He had a 104 degree fever, his body was covered in blisters, and eventually 80% of his skin burned off and his major organs failed. A toxic substance was found...
Oysters can change genders.
They do this at least once throughout their lives. They also have a strange way of taking care of their kids. When the water warms they reproduce by broadcast spawning, ejecting their sperm or eggs into the ocean, all over the place. When the eggs get fertilized to produce new oysters, their parents have nothing to do with them. No pregnancy, no child rearing,...
A woman has a waist that is about as wide as a jar of mayonnaise.
Cathie Jung of Old Mystic, Connecticut has a waist that is only 15 inches wide! Her strange body type stems from the fact that she has worn corsets every days for over 12 years. She claims now to wear corsets 24 hours a day and boasts a collection of over 100 varieties!
She’s not a naturally small person either. Her hips...
There are POISONOUS BIRDS!
This bird, called the Hooded Pitohui, was discovered back in 1990. It has since been named the “most poisonous bird” by the Guinness Book of World Records! Its feathers and skin contain the powerful nerve toxin homobatrachotoxin, which is the same poison secreted by the famous dart frogs of South America! Touching the bird can cause numbness and tingling.
Scientists...
Earth’s rotation is slowing down.
Our planet’s rotational momentum is gradually being transferred to the moon as orbital momentum. This also results in the moon drifting about 4 cm further from Earth each year. This slowed rotation leads to our days and months gradually growing longer!
Once the length of a day and a month on Earth become equivalent (billions of years in the future, don’t...
Special guest: WheezyWaiter! Subscribe to OMG Facts on YouTube for short, one-minute video facts!
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
The first lighter was produced in 1816 by a German chemist named Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner. “Döbereiner’s lamp,” as it was called, was a (highly dangerous) cartridge filled with hydrogen and triggered by a platinum catalyst. Lighters didn’t really start to take off until Zippo began mass producing more practical models in the 1930s. (The...
The Bahamas once boasted the world’s first undersea post office.
John Ernest Williamson was an American photographer whose father invented a tube that could stretch to depths of 200 feet below the surface. Williamson himself added a round chamber with a thick glass window, which he called the “Williamson Photosphere.” Williamson used this chamber to capture rare photographs of undersea creatures...
Residents of a village in France are not allowed to die.
The cemetery in Sarpourenx, France is full. This prompted the mayor of the 260-person village, Gerard Lalanne to take action. Lalanne adopted an ordinance which states that “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish - offenders will be severely punished.”
...
You weigh less at the Equator.
The reason for this is that Earth bulges outward at the Equator because of the planet’s rotation and its tendency to stay in a straight line while moving. This creates a gravitational field that is uneven, with more pull on the poles than in the middle. Because of this bulge, a person standing at the Equator is really further from the majority of Earth’s mass than...
Rainbows always form opposite the sun in the sky.
Rainbows are formed when light from the sun (or the moon!) interacts with raindrops. The drops refract the light, splitting the different wavelengths of light (which we see as colors). If you’ve ever used a prism, the same principles apply.
In order to see a rainbow, the sun has to be at the correct angle for you to see it. The sun is...
Sunlight takes 5 ½ hours to reach Pluto.
The speed of light is 186,287 miles per second. It only takes 499 seconds (a little over 8 minutes) for light to travel from the Sun to Earth. You get a broad idea of just how large our solar system is when you think about it in this way:
186,287 miles/second x 5 ½ hours (330 seconds) = 61,474,710 miles to Pluto from the Sun!
(NASA)
Nearly all of the lakes in Ohio are man-made.
Besides Lake Erie, virtually all of Ohio’s 50,000 lakes and ponds have been artificially created. Most are reservoirs that were dammed up in order to provide flood control or an additional water supply. According to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s list of “natural” lakes, only about 33 of these bodies of water are legitimate!
(source)
Men and women were offered separate toilets for the first time in at a ball in Paris in 1739.
More fun facts about toilets:
Women take a minimum of 60 seconds to use a toilet, while men need an average of 35 seconds to use a urinal. Also, since women’s and men’s bathrooms tend to be the same size, and toilets take up more space than urinals, men’s bathroom can accommodate...
