69 Fun, Weird, Interesting & Cool Random Facts: Volume 3

Welcome to Volume 3 of Content Bash’s 69 Fascinating Facts series! Did you miss Volume 1 and Volume 2? Did you skip to Volume 4? If so, we’ve linked them for your convenience! We’ve also linked some pages related to some products that our trivia touches on, and in the interest of full disclosure, we might get a commission if you buy anything you click on. Happy trivia!

1. There are a few stories about how Apple got its name. One says that Steve Jobs chose to name his company Apple to get ahead of Atari in the phone book as part of their marketing strategy. Another, courtesy of the Walter Isaacson biography, claims that Jobs recalled his visit to an apple farm and thought the name would be “fun, spirited, and not intimidating.” 

Click on the book to buy Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson!

2. There is a spot in Canada where if you drive north, you’ll end up the United States. Just hop into your car from Windsor, Ontario, and cross the Detroit River into Michigan.

3. If you could use a mnemonic device to remember how many days a month has, try “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November.” All the rest have 31. Except for February, of course!

4. Believe it or not, no penguins live at the North Pole. Most penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere in places like South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. The Galápagos penguin is the only species that lives north of the equator.

5. There are two countries named after a woman: the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia — whom the French sailors that were shipwrecked here named after St. Lucy — and Ireland, named after Eire, the Celtic goddess of fertility.

6. We’ve all seen people post pictures of themselves sitting on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones on social media but one person who visited the throne was not allowed to sit on it: Queen Elizabeth. A ruling monarch cannot sit on a foreign throne — even a fictional throne.

7. Believe it or not, President Gerald Ford once worked as a fashion model. He even appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in 1942.

8. Did you know that spiders can walk on water? It’s thanks to surface tension, which affects the very top layer of water and causes it to act like an elastic sheet that’s stretched out, and balances the spider’s weight.

9. Facebook uses a lot of blue because founder Mark Zuckerberg suffers from red-green colorblindness.

10. You cannot hold your nose and hum at the same time. Go ahead and try!

11. The largest known eyes in the animal kingdom belong to the giant squid, which are eleven inches across — almost a foot long.

12. It takes Pluto 248 years to make one revolution around the sun.

13. “Video” is Latin for “I see,” and “audio” is Latin for “I hear.”

14. Cockroaches are believed to have been around since the Carboniferous era, about 280 million years ago.

15. There are a few famous lines from popular movies that actually do not appear in the movie at all. No one says “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, nor does Darth Vader actually say, “Luke, I am your father” in Star Wars.

Click on Casablanca to buy Casablanca!

16. Do you collect, buy, and acquire books — but never actually read them? That’s called tsundoku.

17. Tennis legend Andre Agassi had a father was a boxer for the Iranian Olympic team who participated in the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympics.

18. Have you ever suddenly and embarrassingly forgotten a person’s name when you’re introducing them to someone else? In Scotland, this bit of hesitation is called a tartle.

19. Farting is healthy! It can help reduce bloating and it can also help maintain digestive health by not irritating your colon when you hold in your farts.

20. According to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, there are 9 million barrels of bourbon in Kentucky, and there are 4.5 million people in Kentucky. That means there are basically two barrels of bourbon for every person in the whole state.

21. Somewhat fittingly, a group of hippopotamuses is called a bloat. Also, somewhat fittingly — since they say they never forget — a group of elephants is called a memory. Again, fittingly, a group of penguins is called a waddle.

22. Long before he starred as Michael Scott in The Office, Steve Carell was a mailman in Littleton, Massachusetts.

23. In 1992, Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture.

24. You know that part of your back that you want to scratch — but can’t quite reach? That’s called an acnestis.

25. A shrimp’s heart is in its head!

26. If you were to eat a new variety of apple every single day of your life, it would take you more than 20 years to try them all.

27. You’ve probably been pronouncing Dr. Seuss’s name wrong all along. It rhymes with “voice.”

28. A picosecond is one trillionth of a second. That’s quicker than a nanosecond (one billionth) and a microsecond (one millionth).

29. The smallest bone in your body is in your ear. It’s called the stapes, and it’s located in your inner ear and helps translates the sounds you hear into waves that your brain can understand.

30. Soon after president Martin van Buren took office in 1837, Kabul al Said, who was the Sultan of Oman, gifted a pair of tiger cubs to the 8th president. Congress wasn’t happy about the exotic pets, though, and had them confiscated and sent to a local zoo.

31. All your bones are connected to a joint, except for the hyoid bone in your throat. The hyoid bone is responsible for keeping your tongue in place.

32. Once upon a time, 400 million years ago, giant mushrooms called Prototaxites populated Earth and grew up to 24 feet tall.

33. The very first United States postage stamps were issued in 1847. There were two: a five-cent one featuring Benjamin Franklin and a 10-cent featuring George Washington.

34. The femur is the longest, largest, and strongest bone in your body. It runs from your hip to your knee.

35. There are over 7,500 varieties of apples that are grown throughout the world. About 2,500 of them are grown in the United States. The most popular apples include Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Honeycrisp, and Granny Smith.

36. That big white hat you often see chefs wear is called a toque, and it has exactly one hundred pleats, for the one hundred ways there are to cook an egg.

37. A male donkey is called a jack. A female donkey is called a jenny.

38. Human beings have been dreading their visit to the dentist for a very long time — since 7,000 B.C.

39. The first hot air balloon flight took place in 1783. The first passengers were not people, but a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The flight lasted about 15 minutes.

40. Jousting was developed in the Middle Ages, somewhere between 11th and 14th century, as part of combat training for the cavalry. It also became the official sport for the state of Maryland in 1962.

41. Polar bears do not have white fur. It’s actually see-through, and what we think is white is actually the reflection of the light. They also have black skin.

42. The highest peak above sea level on Earth is Mount Everest at 29,029 feet. It’s located in the Himalayas mountain range in Nepal.

43. A bee has five eyes.

44. The bird that is part of the famous Twitter logo is named Larry, after the famous basketball player Larry Bird.

45. The scent of a bloodhound is so reliable and has so much credibility that it can be used as evidence in court. They can follow tracks that are at least 300 hours old and follow trails for more than 130 miles.

46. When Japanese video game designer Tohru Iwatani was stuck in a creative rut in the early 1980s, he went to dinner with a group of friends and ordered a pizza. When someone grabbed a single slice, Iwatani was so fixated by the image of the pizza with a missing slice that he was inspired to create Pac-Man.

Click on the pizza to buy your own Pac-Man machine!

47. The Green Bay Packers logo is the letter “G,” but it stands for “greatness,” not “Green Bay.”

48. The coyote versus the roadrunner is a famous feud, but a coyote can actually outrun a roadrunner by 23 miles per hour.

49. Seahorses are monogamous mates for life. Male seahorses even give birth! While they produce the sperm, the female produces the eggs and deposits them into the male’s pouch. The male carries the eggs to term for up to 45 days until the baby seahorses are born and released.

50. John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, and he was also the first American astronaut to eat a meal. It was applesauce in a tube.

51. Pasta is often — if not always — associated with Italian food, but it’s likely derivative of Asian noodles. Marco Polo is sometimes credited with bringing spaghetti to Italy, but pasta was already becoming a thing before Polo was making his eastward journeys.

52. The sunniest place on Earth is Yuma, Arizona, which gets over 4,000 hours of sunshine a year.

53. Unlike English and pretty much every other language, there are 12 languages that are written from right to left: Azeri, Fula, Divehi, Arabic, Kurdish, Aramaic, N’ko, Rohingya, Urdu, Syriac, Persian, and Hebrew.

54. Sharks are older than trees! It’s true. Sharks have been around for 400 million years, but trees are about 350 million years old.

55. Charles Entertainment Cheese is the full name of Chuck E. Cheese.

56. Einsteinium, which is atomic number 99 and Es on your periodic table of elements, is a man-made radioactive element named after Albert Einstein.

57. New York City has lots of zip codes. In fact, the Empire State Building has its very own, and it’s 10118.

58. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller is estimated to have sold at least 66 million copies all over the world since its release in 1982.

59. Manon Rhéaume became the first woman to play in any of the major professional North American sports leagues when she appeared in an exhibition hockey game for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

60. Tiger cubs learn to hunt when they are around 6 months old. They tend to stay with their mothers until they’re 18 months old.

61. The average human heart will beat over three billion times in a single lifetime.

62. The sun is big. How big? One million Earths can fit inside it.

63. At any given moment, there are about 2,000 thunderstorms happening on Earth.

64. If you are afraid of hair, then you have chaetophobia.

65. If you were to save up all of your spit in a single day, you’d have about one liter.

66. The very first appearance of Spider-Man was in the August 1962 issue of Amazing Fantasy #15.

Click on the wall-climber to buy Amazing Fantasy #15 reprint!

67. The world’s smallest mammal is the bumble bat. It’s only one inch in length and weighs a single ounce. They are generally found in southeast Myanmar and western Thailand.

68. If you ever want to test an old typewriter with a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, try writing “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

69. When a honey bee makes the rounds and goes on their collection visits, they can visit between 50 to 100 flowers in one trip.

Read more fun trivia content at Content Bash!

Looking for more weird, cool, interesting random facts? Check out Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 4!

Check out our series on fascinating facts about literary superstars like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Anne Brontë, and Philip K. Dick!

Are you a freelance writer or journalist or student that does research and creates lots of written content? Then you’ll need a whole library of reference books that are essential to your trade, as well as style guides that different publications adhere to. Meanwhile, you may have trouble deciding which dictionary is best for you but if money and space is no object, definitely go with the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Cover Image Credit: Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay

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