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October 01, 2023

That’s a spicy fact-aball! Sorry. That was terrible. But we promise that these facts aren’t!

30

Eels have the weirdest sex life. European eels spend most of their lives without any reproductive organs - and when they finally develop them, their stomachs dissolve so they can no longer eat. Then they swim all the way to the Sargasso Sea, in the Atlantic Ocean, to bone (no one is sure how) and die. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

29

The HD remaster of Grim Fandango required stolen hard drives. The gaming industry already sucks at preserving old data, which was compounded by the fact that LucasArts was as dead as the game's characters. So remastering Grim Fandango required some underhanded methods, such as using old hard drives obtained through, ahem, unofficial channels. CRACKED COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

28

Maya the Bee

Maya The Bee was created to suck up to the Kaiser. Published in Germany in 1912, Waldemar Bonsels' book was pretty much a cautionary tale against unconformity and rebellion, which explicitly kissed up to Kaiser Wilhelm II. When the Nazis came goose-stepping years later, Bonsels started pandering to them in his writing. GRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

27

Lord Byron drank wine from a skull. Byron's gardener unearthed an old, intact skull, which the British poet and proto-Goth had converted into a goblet. Then he founded the Order of the Skull, which was mostly about drinking claret from the thing with his friends while cracking dark jokes. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

26

Lady Gaga slipped swear words past radio censors. Eight times in the recorded version of Poker Face, Gaga sneakily changes the line poker face to f- her face, just to mess with us all - meaning that radio stations everywhere broadcast the uncensored f-word thousands of times without ever realizing it. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

25

CRACKED.COM Sam Neill is a farmer. Everyone's favorite grumpy paleontogist runs Two Paddocks, a vineyard and farm where he doesn't raise dinosaurs, but the next best thing: animals named after his celebrity friends (so he won't be tempted to eat them). Appropriately, Jeff Goldblum is a horny ram. — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

24

CRACKED.COM Steven Spielberg refused for years to release E.T. on home video. In the mid '80s, home video was booming - but the decade's highest-grossing movie wasn't available. It took the industry six years to convince Spielberg to release his ugly alien on cassette. His more recent beef with streaming platforms isn't exactly unprecedented. — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

23

Fats Waller

A jazz prodigy was kidnapped to play for Al Capone. In 1926, Thomas Fats Waller was forced into a car at gunpoint, only to have him perform at Capone's birthday for three days straight while trying not to pass out from exhaustion. It's a story more Chicago than the musical Chicago. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

22

There are dolphins aboard the Enterprise. According to The Next Generation Technical Manual, the crew of Captain Picard's ship includes twelve bottlenose dolphins and two orcas in a section called Cetacean Ops. These wet crewmembers were too expensive for TV, but they were mentioned in passing on a couple episodes. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

21

Captive octopuses need puzzles to keep their minds busy. Being the smartest invertebrates, octopuses need mental challenges in addition to food and a clean environment. Some aquariums keep their eight-legged guests happy and healthy by giving them puzzle boxes they have to solve to get to a treat. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

20

CRACKED.COM A Spider-Man musical was the most expensive Broadway production ever. Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was hugely ambitious - and that was its downfall. With the convoluted story being rewritten all the time, and performers constantly getting injured from the elaborate stunts, it didn't last long before it had to be seriously scaled down. — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

19

A Nazi spy failed because he couldn't stop partying. In 1944, Germany sent Erich Gimpel and American-born William Colepaugh to the U.S. as spies. But Colepaugh wasted no time to start spending the funds for the mission on food, wine, and women. Не ended up leaving Gimpel behind and turning himself in to the FBI. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

18

CRACKED COM SEARS Sears was ruined by Ayn Rand's ideas. In 2008, Sears' CEO (and Rand fan) Eddie Lampert split the company into divisions ordered to selfishly compete against each other. The result was a steady death spiral that eventually led the century-old company to bankruptcy. — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

17

The more Brad Pitt eats on screen, the better the movie does. Mark Hofmeyer, notorious movie math guy on the internet, has calculated that movies where Pitt eats more than 200 calories have a better box office and a higher Rotten Tomatoes score. Has Hofmeyer cracked the code to Pitt success? Further nourishing research is needed. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

16

Fortunate Son is in way fewer Vietnam movies than you think. Movies about 'Nam are so unoriginal - they all play Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son, right fellas? Except that no, they don't. The only major movie to use the song in a Vietnam setting is Forrest Gump, which came long after Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Tasty Random Facts to Spice Up Your Online Scrolling

15

CRACKED.COM The TV version of The Thing is almost a different movie. The edit of John Carpenter's movie CBS debuted in 1986 was weird, even by TV edit standards. Not only was a lot of the gore cut out, but a voiceover narration was added in for some reason. Also, the ending is made much less ambiguous by heavily implying the Thing escaped. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

14

CRACKED.COM M John Steinbeck wrote an unpublished werewolf novel. Steinbeck is well known for The Grapes of Wrath, and tragically much less well known for Murder at Full Moon, a potboiler about werewolves he wrote with a pseudonym. Steinbeck's estate selfishly refuses to let us read it. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

13

Redshirts are actually less likely to die than other crew members. Yes, most of the dead on Star Trek wear red, but also red shirts greatly outnumber other shirt colors. Fan and mathematician James Grime calculated that about 10% of the Enterprise's redshirts died during the show, compared to 18% of goldshirts. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

12

Superheroes lost readers in the early '70s - but not the Hulk. After Marvel's massive success in the '60s, most of their heroes slumped in the new decade, except for Hulk, who actually gained readers. Hulk was seen more as a monster than a hero, and monsters were all the rage back then. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

11

CRACKED.COM The Soviets sent the first woman into space because of a misunderstanding. Skydiver Valentina Tereshkova was rushed into orbit in 1963, to beat the U.S. at the women in space game. Except that America wasn't training female astronauts - the Soviets were just misinterpreting a news report. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

10

* Bill Burr (not the comedian) came up with all those password rules you hate. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation marks, unholy glyphs from forgotten languages... Burr, a government IT specialist, created all those rules for passwords in 2003 - but he intended them for administrators, not regular users. Today he's sorry for all the pain he's caused. CRACKED COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

9

Garfield

CRACKED.COM That car window Garfield was a mistake. Not just in the obvious sense - the product wasn't supposed to be like that. Jim Davis' idea was to put velcro on the toy's paws to hang it on curtains, but the manufacturer used suction cups instead. Still, no one thought people would stick it to car windows. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

8

Americans are more susceptible to placebos. Extensive research has found out that the placebo response to sham treatments has risen dramatically in the last two decades - but only in the U.S. This is speculated to be caused by increasingly big and elaborate clinical studies, which may boost participants' expectations. GRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

7

CRACKED.COM Die Hard became a classic because of a cardboard box. A fridge box fell off a truck in front of screenwriter Jeb Stuart's car - and before he found out it was empty, he thought he was going to die and that he should have patched things up with his wife while he had the chance. Then he decided the movie should be about a guy trying to do exactly that. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

6

A Good Samaritan was seen as a contradiction. Israelites of the time were prejudiced against Samaritans. That's why the biblical parable underlines that this Samaritan was good-listeners wouldn't expect him to be. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

5

Some scientists want to do away with the concept of fish. Yes, all fish kinda look alike, but that doesn't mean they're all related - some are genetically closer to you than to other fish. That's why many experts have been advocating for replacing the category with others that make more biological sense. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

4

Pepsi briefly had the sixth most powerful navy in the world. As payment for a huge shipment of cola to the USSR in the '80s, Pepsi got $3 billion worth of warships and submarines. Fortunately, they didn't need to invade anywhere, having nowhere left to conquer. PS PEPSI CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

3

Disney

CRACKED.COM Disney workers were forced to share underpants. As regular underwear doesn't play well with the costumes, Disney's costumed characters are issued specially designed shorts and jockstraps - which until 2001, they had to share from a common pool. It took the unions intense negotiations to change that. — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

2

Elves get married by having sex. Tolkien's notes and rought drafts published after his death reveal that elves can't get naughty out of wedlock, as getting naughty results in wedlock. They do have wedding ceremonies, but those are a formality - it's the act of bodily union that seals the deal. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

1

The Mandalorian

Big Bird taught Giancarlo Esposito to work with Baby Yoda. Esposito has said that a Sesame Street gig early in his career prepared him for The Mandalorian. Big Bird taught me how to play with someone who was inside the suit, who was a real human being, which all led me to being able to work with Baby Yoda. CRACKED.COM — Source: 15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread

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