33 Wild Facts That Will Make You Sound Smart In Front Of Your Friends
These facts from Ask Reddit might sound fake, but are completely true.
1. President Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving one year, but instead of eating it, he granted it a pardon because it was “cute”.
2. The day Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire was the exact middle of his life, to the day.
3. A Russian luxury SUV Manufacturer attempted and failed to use whale penis skin for their SUV interiors.
4. When compasses were first used on ships, sailors were afraid of them because they thought they had evil powers. Compasses were stored in boxes called a “binnacle”.
5. It takes 2 years for a pineapple to grow.
6. There isn’t a single bridge across the Amazon river.
7. Netflix was founded before Google.
8. The Ethiopian calendar is seven years behind the rest of the world.
9. The 10th president of the US, John Tyler (1790-1862), has 2 living grandchildren.
10. Pocahontas and Shakespeare lived during the same time.
11. Stop signs used to be yellow.
In 1922, the American Association of State Highway Officials met to determine a standard design for stop signs, and that’s where they decided on the color: yellow (because they thought that would grab drivers’ attention).
They’d also considered red, but there was no dye available at the time that wouldn’t eventually fade. By 1954, sign-makers had access to fade-resistant porcelain enamel, and could finally start making stop signs the red color recognized today.
12. A lyrebird’s imitations will seriously sound exactly like the thing they’re trying to imitate. If they imitate a chainsaw, you will think it’s a chainsaw. It sounds like a perfect recording.
13. The founders of Adidas (Adi Dassler) and Puma (Rudolf Dassler) are brothers.
…and their HQs are literally next door to each other in Germany.
14. The guy who sang Peanut Butter Jelly Time died in a police shootout. Also, his brother in law was there trying to talk him out of shooting himself.
You know who that stepbrother was?
Fucking Snoop Dogg.
15. Mercury is the closest planet to every other planet.
16. The United States has no federal law that forbids owning a tiger.
17. Male giraffes will head butt a female in the bladder until she urinates, then it tastes the pee to help it determine whether or not the female is ovulating.
18. El Paso Texas is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Beaumont Texas.
19. The yearly risk in the US of dying from a shark bite is around 1 in 250 million and the yearly risk of dying from a vending machine accident is roughly 1 in 112 million. Therefore, vending machines are about twice as deadly as sharks.
20. Dinosaurs never ate grass because it didn’t exist yet.
21. During WWII, the Polish Army had a brown bear in their ranks. The bear was really helpful to the force, particularly for carrying heavy artillery.
22. Most of the oxygen on earth doesn’t come from trees. It comes from plankton in the ocean.
23. The previous owner of the company Segway died from driving a Segway off a cliff.
24. One ten inch pizza is more pizza than two seven inch pizzas.
25. There used to be a species of parrot native to what is now Kentucky and Tennessee.
26. A common ingredient in Chemotherapy is horse sperm… of course listed under some long medical term.
27. Jack the Ripper was still active when Nintendo was founded.
28. Ancient sailors believed that cats were magic and would often risk their own lives, even in an “every man for himself” situation, to save a cat from a sinking ship. All ships had at least one ship’s cat as cats would eat the rats that have always plagued ships. The ship’s cat would often be given a rank and sailors would generally take excessively good care of their cats.
29. Cheetahs can’t roar. They meow like house cats.
30. Chickens are one of many species of birds that don’t have penetrative genitalia. Read; cocks are cockless. The method of reproduction they use is commonly called a “cloacal kiss” and you can think of it as chickens scissoring, because “bumping holes” is the grossest possible way to phrase chicken sex.
Also chickens are not a flightless species like lots of people think and are generally totally capable of short flight.
31. A barnacle has a penis up to 10 times the length of its body.
32. The entire state of Wyoming only has 2 sets of escalators.
33. A typical cumulus cloud actually weighs 1.1 million pounds (498,951 kg). 
