- The composer Vangelis can’t read or write music.
- Frank Lloyd Wright was not a licensed, certified architect.
- HP Lovecraft didn’t graduate from high school or ever attend college.
- M&Ms were invented for and initially exclusively sold to the military as rations for soldiers. They were originally packaged in cardboard tubes.
- Three Musketeer candy bars originally came in 3 different flavors - strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.
- Vorarephilia (often shortened to “vore”) is a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or to personally consume, another person or creature.
- The name for the Pandas Python library derived from “panel data” - and not the black and white bears.
- When some US soldiers returned home from overseas at the end of WWII, they had never driven on the righthand side of a road (having learned how to drive only in other countries). Some states issued driver’s licenses to these returning veterans without given them any examination.
- At four and a half years, Graneledone pacifica (the deep sea octopus) holds the record for the longest incubation period of any animal on Earth. The mother slowly starves to death while protecting her eggs. All alone in total darkness, her brain withers away until there is nothing left but a tiny part that is just focused on protecting the eggs. She lives until they all hatch.
- The ancient Sumerian choice to use 10 and 6 as number bases - creating a sexagesimal system (one based on the number of 60, which can be subdivided many ways) - explains why years, days, hours, and minutes are still divided into 12, 24, and 60 throughout the world today.
- Early gramophone equipment could only make recordings that were no more than four and a half minutes long. Musicians began abbreviated their compositions to fit to the limitations of the phonograph. And today, the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes.
- In the samurai film “Sanjuro” a prop failure caused fake blood to dramatically spray rather than trickle. Akira Kurosawa kept the shot and the resulting effect became a staple of subsequent films and anime.
- Emperor Hirohito of Japan was buried wearing a Mickey Mouse watch that he was gifted during a visit to DisneyLand.
- Hurrian Hymn Number 6 is the oldest known piece of human music. It originates in Mesopotamia around 1400 BCE and is a hymn to the goddess Nikkal. Thanks to the detailed notes that were discovered, the hymn has been rerecorded and can be found on Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube, etc.
- Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have been eating popcorn for at least the last 20,000 years. We know that ancient Incans ate it.
- (and speaking of which) colonial housewives in the United States served popcorn with milk and sugar and made the first breakfast cereal.
- Epictetus’ Discourses and Enchiridion have remained continuously in print since 1535.
- Arbutus unede was burned by ancient Greeks and Romans to ward off evil and protect children. This is called a madrone tree in the United States.
- During the Blitz, London’s Natural History Museum was hit by bombs. After water from firemen’s hoses extinguished the fire, it also caused seeds within one of the collections to germinate. Among these was the Albizia julibrissin, the ancient Person silk tree, whose seeds were more than 147 years old at the time.
