- James Cameron came up for the idea for the Terminator screenplay after his Audi 5000 was recalled for unintended acceleration.
- One in five American domestic house cats are unable to digest aspartame.
- Fiber supplements containing more than 9 grams of insoluble fiber are illegal without a doctor’s prescription in Sweden.
- Serial killer Richard “the Nightstalker” Ramirez briefly worked in the Sunnyvale, California factory that produced the original “6-switch” Atari 2600 video game system.
- The Empire State Building was originally constructed with only men’s bathrooms. The female bathrooms were added in 1947.
- It is impossible for a person who weighs less than 125 pounds to be killed by quicksand.
- The state of Rhode Island has no laws regulating the sale of explosives.
- The Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin’s fourth cousin is Jeffry Ross Hyman, better known as Joey Ramone.
- It takes over 800 pounds of cobalt, mined from the republic of Zambia, to form the enamel used to paint a single Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The UNIP-attempted coup of Zambia in 1997 almost halted production of Harley motorcycles in the US.
- People with ulcerative colitis are unable to visualize 3D films produced by the IMAX Fusion Camera System.
- General Foods attempted to buy the home computer division of Tandy-Radio Shack in 1982. Their Tarrytown, New York-based R&D division produced a report on fast food franchise-based computing which was later used as the basis for McDonalds’ 2004 nationwide WiFi rollout.
- Levi P. Morton was the first US Vice President to not be involved in a duel.
- Food trucks were first called “chuckwagons” after Charles Wesley Emerson, the founder of Emerson College in Boston, because of his fondness for dressing up as a cowboy and serving lunch to undergraduates at the school’s cafeteria.
- If you fill a Mason jar with gasoline and drop a lit Bic lighter from a height of three feet, a safety mechanism in the lighter will prevent it from ever catching the gas on fire.
- No commercially-available laminate flooring products are made without animal byproducts.
- The Bluetooth protocol was originally implemented by Ericcson as a method of centrally controlling plumbing fixtures in Norwegian apartment buildings.
- Over 130,000 people are killed every year worldwide by defective footwear.
- In his later life, Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel studied abstract impressionist painting with Charles Pollock, brother of Jackson Pollock.
- Kansas City, Missouri has the highest number of mosques per capita of any city in North America.
- In the early 60s, Hunter S. Thompson ghost-wrote five Louis Lamour novels, which were not published until after his death.
