1.8K
Do you know Sweden has a ski-through McDonald’s?
Title photo by Per-Olof Forsberg on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Here’s our latest collection of strange facts to impress your mates:
- When you first meet people, it is common to forget their names. This phenomenon is the ‘next-in-line’ effect. It happens because people worry about what they’ll say next rather than concentrating on the names of people they’re meeting.
- Until 1948, 7-Up contained “lithium citrate”, a mood stabiliser used to treat bipolar disorder!
- The actor Frankie Muniz who played Malcolm in Malcolm in the Middle suffers from transient ischemic attacks – long-term memory loss brought on by a series of concussions and mini-strokes. He no longer remembers being in the show.
- Pirates probably didn’t wear eyepatches because of a missing eye. It’s much more likely that they were keeping one eye ready to see in darkness so that they could quickly adjust when going below deck.
- Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, known as Annie Londonderry, was a Latvian immigrant to the United States who in 1894-95 became the first woman to cycle around the world. She only learnt to ride a bike a few days before she set off.
- A cyberchondriac is someone who scours the internet looking for details of their illnesses.
- A study using MRI scans showed that the brains of people who exercise moderately look 10 years younger than those who don’t.
- Scientists at the University of Alberta spent seven years working out that human urine contains 3,079 different chemical compounds.
- Research has shown that dogs actually like the silly, high-pitched voice their owners use to talk to them.
- Sweden has a ski-through McDonald’s. Here are 75 other facts about McDonald’s.
- One in three children can use a tablet before they can speak, a survey found.
- ‘Kennedy’ means “ugly head” in Gaelic.
- You can get a stand-up comedy master’s degree at the University of Kent.
- The term “pipe dream” is a reference to the insane dreams people have when smoking opium.
- Eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.
- Before he was a famous musician, Johnny Cash was a military code breaker for the US Air Force.
- The Guinness Book of World Records recognised Don Gorske in 2016 when he ate his 28,788th Big Mac!
- A whole orange will float on water, but a peeled orange will sink.
- The Mandarin word for ‘film’ literally translates as ‘electric shadow’.
- John F Kennedy’s Eternal Flame in Arlington National Cemetery has only gone out twice since 1963.
- While filming the movie “Entebbe,” about a hijacked plane, an actual hijack took place and the aeroplane landed at the airport. They filmed the real hostages exiting the plane and put it into the movie.
- Nearly 2.7 tons of meteor debris hit the Moon each day.
- On average, the Japanese sleep two hours a night less than the Chinese.
- Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album was in the Billboard charts for 943 weeks. To put this into context, the runner-up is Legend by Bob Marley and the Wailers, which was in charts for 588 weeks!
- A study found that those who consider their spouse or partner to be their best friend get about twice as much life satisfaction from marriage as others.
- Prisoners on Alcatraz always had hot showers so they didn’t get acclimatised to cold water and try to escape by swimming.
- The only difference between fog and mist is visibility: if you can’t see more than 100 metres ahead, it’s fog, not mist.
- Before 1868, eating meat from four-legged animals was illegal in Japan for more than a thousand years.
- Al Pacino turned down the role of Han Solo.
- Russell Crowe turned down the role of Morpheus in The Matrix.
- The Dutch army had only one tank during WWII.
- Japanese manufacture Toto built a motorcycle that runs on excrement!
We hope you enjoyed our article “Do You Know? January 2021”. Click here for more strange facts.