50 Fun Facts To Distract You From Our World Falling Apart

1. Play-Doh was originally designed to remove soot from wallpaper. The only reason it became a toy was because vinyl wallpaper became a thing, making his product obsolete. The creator needed to save the company and accidentally found that kids loved the stuff. After making it safe to play with, it was then marketed for kids.

2. When smoking went out of fashion and was demonized by anti-smoking adds, Disney had a major issue on their hands in the fact that there was never a photo of Walt Disney without a cigarette in his fingers (he was a heavy smoker), so they resolved it by airbrushing all the cigarettes out of every picture of Walt Disney so the question arose of why was Walt pointing with two fingers and they disguised it as “Walt would point with two fingers because it isn’t rude to point with two fingers as opposed to pointing with one” and on top of that they made their staff point with two fingers because they’re all trained to present themselves as Walt would.

3. Grey Goose was intentionally made with exceptionally tall bottles, so that it would have to be top shelf liquor and wouldn’t fit on lower shelves.

4. The reason why it is the ‘top 40’ is that jukeboxes could fit 40 records, and the owners would use the top 40 list as a way to know which records to buy (as the more popular ones would get played more, and thus get more money).

5. Before bears hibernate, they eat a bunch of twigs and grass to plug up their butts so that they don’t have to wake up in the middle of the winter to shit. Then when they do wake up in the spring, they have these really rough massive shits.

6. Tim Burton’s inspiration for The Nightmare Before Christmas was seeing retail stores setting up their Christmas displays before Halloween had finished.

7. The reason why you flip the first cigarette in the packet upside down and leave it until you’ve finished the packet is because it’s “lucky.”

But it’s not the cigarette that’s lucky, the custom came during WW2, and if you lived long enough to smoke the cigarette, YOU were lucky.

8. Ever seen a pet bird trying to pull their owner’s jewelry (earrings, bracelets, metal things mainly) out/away from them? It can be annoying and painful but it’s actually a sign of affection – they think the owner has things stuck in their feathers and are trying to preen/groom them!

9. Vikings thought if they smithed weapons with animal bones in it the spirit of the animal would make the weapon stronger. The weapons were in fact stronger because the carbon on the bones was mixed with the iron making a primitive version of steel.

10. Erasers stop working because the whiteboard gets porous with age. So instead of replacing erasers, use ethyl alcohol to re-dissolve the pigment and then wipe it away.

11. DumDum’s mystery flavor lollipop is made when they change from producing one flavor to the next. Instead of throwing the contaminated mixture away, they labeled it as the Mystery Flavor. That’s also why they’ll usually always taste a little different each time

12. The myth that eating carrots helps you see better was actually started by the British in World War II to cover the fact that they had installed radar systems in their aircraft. The British needed a way to explain why their pilots were seemingly spotting enemy aircraft in the dark without exposing that they had developed radar small enough to install in aircraft. Thus they started saying they were feeding their night pilots a special diet that included a lot of carrots. A surprising number of people still believe this myth today.

13. A woman once jumped off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building but the wind pushed her back and she fell on a ledge on the 85th floor. She survived.

14. The S in Harry S Truman’s name doesn’t stand for anything. His middle name was just the letter S.

15. A flock of crows is known as a murder.

16. The reason old animated characters wore gloves is in short because it’s easier for them to wear them. Easier to draw, animate, and do color differentials.

17. Cleopatra lived closer the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Pyramids of Giza.

18. If aliens that were 65 million light years away looked at our planet through a very powerful telescope they would see dinosaurs. THEORETICALLY.

19. A second is called a second because it is the 2nd division of the hour by 60, the 1st division being a minute.

20. The interrobang is punctuation used when you are both surprised and confused. It is a combination of the question mark and exclamation point. Most people use both exclamation points and question marks side by side, but the interrobang is the grammatically correct symbol. What the heck‽

21. If ancient Egyptians got divorced they would throw a massive party and invite everyone they knew to celebrate how close they all were to each other.

22. A palindrome is a word that can be read the same both ways, like level or race car. The fear of palindromes is called aibohphobia, which itself is a palindrome

23. Albatrosses can sleep when they fly.

24. Theres an island littered with landmines that is only inhabited by penguins. Nobody has ever poached a penguin on this island and the penguins are too lightweight to trigger the landmines so they just walk all over them.

25. Giraffes are the only animals born with horns. Other animals grow horns when they are older.

26. The cross sum of the numbers of a roulette wheel is 666.

27. Dragonflies have the highest successful kill rate of any creature on earth.

28. When dogs are acting in movies, and they have to be tough/scary/scared etc, a lot of the time their tails have to be CGId in because their REAL tails are wagging. They’re SO HAPPY to be doing a GOOD JOB and getting BIG TREATS that their tails wag, even when they’re supposed to be tucked in from fear or still etc. So when you see a real doggo in a movie doing a big emotion like fear or anger, their tail is more than likely fake.

29. Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth were born in the same year

30. A snail can hibernate for 3 years at once.

31. When Europe first found coffee during the crusades it was brought to the Pope because people were worried if they drank a “heathen drink” they would go to hell. The Pope tried it and was like, “Yo. This is fucking lit,” and baptized it.

That’s why Europe has coffee and why Italy has such a strong culture built around it. Because the pope thought the bean juice that made him go fast was great and dunked a bag of it in holy water.

32. Dogs never get insomnia.

33. A blue whale’s fart bubble is large enough to encase an entire horse.

34. Babies are born without kneecaps. It’s just cartilage that turns into bone when they’re around 4 years old.

35. The reason “Kansas” and “Arkansas” are pronounced differently is because “Kansas” has Native American roots, where “Arkansas” has French roots.

36. The Macarena is about a woman cheating on her boyfriend in a threesome with his two best friends while he’s away in the army.

37. Cockroaches are notoriously clean critters. When you spray them with bug spray, they will freak out and try to groom themselves like a cat. They ingest the poison which ultimately ends up killing them.

38. Almost exactly 90 years ago, Pluto was discovered (Feb 18, 1930). Since its discovery, it has not completed a single orbit around the sun. In fact, it’s only gone about 1/3rd of the way around in all that time.

39. Alaska’s state website includes a video regarding moose safety. It’s made for middle schoolers, by middle schoolers.

40. There’s an area of land between Egypt and Sudan that could technically be regarded as belonging to either country but both claim belongs to the other.

41. The genitalia on a female hyena looks almost like the male’s. Researchers thought hyenas were hermaphrodites for quite a long time before realizing otherwise.

The female hyena’s ‘penis’ is actually an elongated clitoris. It’s referred to as a pseudo-penis. Female hyenas pee, mate, and give birth through it.

Also… even though the female hyena’s penis isn’t an actual penis, it’s longer than the male’s.

42. A giraffe has the same number of bones in their neck as humans.

43. Lego produces more tires than any manufacturer in the world.

44. The chainsaw was invented as a tool to assist in giving birth.

45. Clown fish will change sex if their partners die to mate with their children to survive.

46. Cheetahs can sprint for about 17 seconds straight. After that they have to stop because they generate so much heat from the exertion that if they continued running they would literally cook their own brains.

47. Rabbits grind their teeth in happiness similar to how cats purr when they’re content.

48. It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain the average human of blood.

49. William Henry Harrison gave the longest US presidential inauguration speech but served the shortest term of one month before dying in office.

50. Wyoming only has two escalators.