Do You Know? Strange Facts – December 2020: Here’s our latest collection of weird and wonderful facts to win friends and influence people:
- The speed of the wind has fallen by 60% in the last 30 years.
- Scientists discovered in 2015 that there are eight times more trees on earth than we previously thought.
- Despite spending half his acting career in the saddle, Clint Eastwood is allergic to horses.
- Instead of a Foreign Office, the Roman Empire had a “Bureau of Barbarians”.
- Judges recently disqualified a dozen camels from a Saudi Arabian beauty pageant because they had received Botox injections to make them more attractive.
- President Donald Trump asked the Guggenheim Museum to lend him a Van Gogh for the White House. Their counter-offer: a solid gold toilet.
- Research has uncovered that cheese triggers the same part of the brain as hard drugs.
- Alternative names proposed for Canada in 1867 were Borealia, Cabotia, Transatlantica, Victorialand and Superior.
- In Sweden, there’s a shopping centre dedicated entirely to repaired and upcycled* goods.
- In the 1800s, ducks were known as ‘arsefeet’ because their feet are so close to their bottoms.
- The world’s billionaires made enough money in 2017 to end extreme poverty seven times over.
- A male cheetah can make a female ovulate just by barking at her.
- In 1932, Winston Churchill went to a hotel in Munich two days in a row to have tea with Hitler. Hitler stood him up both times and the two men never met.
- There are enough nuclear shelters in Switzerland to house the entire population (8.5 million).
- Benjamin Franklin invented a mechanical arm for reaching books on high shelves.
- A 2018 law in France allows citizens to make mistakes in good faith on documents without being punished.
- The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of killing US President John F Kennedy, was the first known human killing seen live on TV.
- Rock band Oasis took their name from a leisure centre in Swindon.
- The US may have adopted kilometres and kilogrammes if pirates hadn’t kidnapped the scientist the French sent to help Thomas Jefferson persuade Congress to adopt the metric system.
- Star Wars composer John Williams has the record for most Oscar nominations for a living person. He has averaged one nomination a year since his first in 1967.
- The “Share a Coke” campaign – where Coca-Cola replaced its name on bottles with people’s first names – increased Coca-Cola’s US sales by more than 2%, reversing more than 10 years of decline in Coke consumption in the US.
- The film “The Matrix” took five years to write.
- U2‘s vocalist took his stage name from the Latin term “Bono Vox” which means “Good Voice”. His real name is Paul David Hewson.
- In much of the US, it is illegal to buy a new car from the manufacturer.
- Intel employs a “futurist” whose job it is to determine what life will be like 10-15 years in the future.
- According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims in his first year of presidency.
- Until three million years ago, whales were less than 30 feet long.
- 420,000 people die annually from tainted food.
- Eighty-five per cent of Vakkaru Island in the Maldives is made up of fish faeces.
- Fifty per cent of US territory is under the sea.
- England (50,346 square miles or 130,395km²) is smaller than the state of New York (54,556 square miles or 141,300km²). England’s population, however, is 67. 9 million whereas New York’s is only 19.4 million!
- After South Korean footballer Ahn Jung-hwan scored the goal that eliminated Italy from the 2002 World Cup, Perugia, the Italian club he played for cancelled his contract saying they “have no intention of paying a salary to someone who has ruined Italian soccer”.
- Prisoners on Death Row in America are given a physical beforehand to ensure they are fit enough to die.
- In the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, it is illegal to die.
- In 2010, a group of 15 monkeys escaped from a research institute in Japan using trees to catapult themselves over a 17ft high electric fence.
* Upcycling, also known as “creative reuse”, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless or unwanted products into new materials or products. Upcycled products generally have an artistic or environmental value.
We hope you enjoyed reading our ‘Strange Facts – December 2020’ article. Click here for more from our Do You Know? series.