YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaYCNo2xW-A
Previous: Misconceptions About Social Media
Next: Food History: Dumplings

Categories

Statistics

View count:203,468
Likes:2,688
Comments:140
Duration:27:10
Uploaded:2023-06-14
Last sync:2024-04-02 15:30
Did you know that rats... can't vomit? Or that there's roughly 500 million pounds of hair across the world? Or how about Michael J. Fox's middle name REALLY stands for? Those are just three of 100 WEIRD facts about the world we're going to be sharing today. No theme, just strange facts that will make you go "Huh..." Let's get weird, shall we?

Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss
Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine
Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss

 (00:00) to (02:00)


1. Rodents can't vomit. According to a 2013 study in PLoS One, this can be attributed to some missing brain circuitry that other mammals have; What the researchers called an “absent brainstem neurological component.” This unique physiology is part of why poison can be an effective way of dealing with mice and rats. The little guys can't throw up the toxic materials, which is good or bad news depending on your point of view.

Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, and on today's episode of the List Show we're sharing 100 weird facts. There's a lot of ground to cover so let's hit three more before the intro.

2. Michael J. Fox's middle name is Andrew. He chose the middle initial “J” as an homage to character actor Michael J. Pollard, and presumably to avoid confusion.

3. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was shot in black and white even though color films have become popular years earlier, but the film pushed the medium forward in other ways. It was the first American studio film in the so-called Code Era, a period of cinematic self-censorship under the Hays Code, to show and present the sound of a flushing toilet, blood-curdling stuff. 

4. And blood curdling isn't just an evocative phrase. Research shows that watching horror movies can increase a certain clotting protein in our blood. The protein is known as Factor VIII, which is also a good name for a dystopian horror movie.

We've got much more to cover from Dildo Days to the Great Oyster Craze. Let's get started.

[Intro]

5. There's a small area of Newfoundland known as “Dildo.” If you're interested in visiting, I recommend the end of July 2023 when the local service district will be hosting its annual Dildo Days celebration. It includes a parade led, of course, by Captain Dildo. While the name's origins are uncertain, your mind shouldn't go too far into the gutter. In 1995, the assistant postmistress told The Independent, “I feel sure that we've been here a lot longer than artificial penises have been around.” That's almost definitely not true though.

6. Numerous pieces of art from Ancient Greece, around 2000 years ago, depict what appear to be artificial phalluses. 

 (02:00) to (04:00)


7. And by the 5th century CE, there may be records of something called an olisbokollix. We could translate that as "bread's small local service district in Newfoundland." Yes, these purported sex toys were made out of bread. As Peter James, Nick Thorpe, and I.J. Thorpe wrote in their book, Ancient Inventions, "They were easily made at home, though perhaps an order was put in at the bakers if you were holding an orgy." I should say this theory is not universally accepted. Some experts think the would-be bread dildos might actually be phallus birds. But that's a story for another time. 

8. Winston Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born in Brooklyn.

9. Though we might think of the former Prime Minister as the personification of the United Kingdom, the British Bulldog died an honorary American citizen. In 1963, the US government granted him the honor, making Churchill one of only eight people to have received that distinction in United States history.

10. Churchill's maternal grandfather, Leonard Jerome, once sat at a window of the New York Times offices, perched behind a gatling gun. Jerome was a partial owner of the paper at the time, and was concerned that the Civil War draft riots breaking out might make their way to the press.

11. If that information made you say "OMG" you're part of a proud lineage of Churchil's and the phrase, "OMG." In fact, the first documented instance of the initialism was sent from a British Naval officer to Winston Churchill. The letter was written by Lord John Fisher, who wrote, and then hilariously explained, "OMG. Oh! My God!" 

12. In other notable letter news, Walt Whitman was the recipient of a particularly ardent missive from a woman named Susan Garnet Smith. She really liked "Leaves of Grass." Among other enthusiastic proclamations, she wrote, "My womb is clean and pure. It is ready for thy child my love. Angels guard the vestibule until thou comest to deposit our and the world's precious treasure." Garnet Smith was in good company.

13. Bram Stoker, who would one day write the novel Dracula, also wrote Whitman an effusive fan letter. It actually took him four years to work up the nerve to send his message, which included lines like, "I only hope that sometime I may meet you face to face and perhaps shake hands with you. If I ever do, it will be one of the greatest pleasures of my life."

 (04:00) to (06:00)


14. Roughly the same amount of first-class mail was sent in the United States in 2022 and in 1972. The volume of such mail peaked in the year 2001 and has been on the decline ever since.

15. One missed opportunity for the US Postal Service? Babies.  In the early 20th century, the post office instituted Parcel Post, but forgot to specify that you couldn't use it to mail children. And while rare, stories did emerge of people doing precisely that. Like the tale of young Mary [sic] Pierstorff, who was shipped to her grandparent's home for a tidy 53 cents. That particular practice was soon banned. For the record, it's not like they slapped a stamp on her forehead and hoped for the best. May travelled with a family member who worked on the mail trains. 

16. People have been eating oysters in what is now the United States for at least 9,000 years. When harvesting technology improved in the 19th century, the price of the bivalves dropped at one point to half the price of beef per pound. As W.E. Woodward wrote in The Way Our People Lived, "No evening of pleasure was complete without oysters." The country was swept up, he declared, in a great oyster craze. 

17. The medical term for ice cream headaches, or a brain freeze, is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. 

18. Johnny Cash's brother was also a musician. In 1965, he released a song called "I Didn't Walk The Line."

19. In 1674, the women's petition against coffee claimed the beverage was turning British men into "useless corpses" and proposed a ban on it for anyone under the age of 60. 

20. There are 293 ways to make change for a US dollar. Let's see... you've got 4 quarters, 10 dimes, 3 quarters 2...

21. In the Eurozone, incidentally, the 2-cent coin ups the possible combinations that add up to one euro all the way to 4,563. The proof is here, and it's really quite simple to understand. 

22. Punxatawny Phil, of Groundhog Day fame, lives in a library. In addition to the company of literature, Phil can enjoy the company of his wife, Phyllis. 

 (06:00) to (08:00)


23. If you account for the fact that it crosses the 180th meridian, you can say that Alaska has both the easternmost and westernmost spots in the entire country. Personally, this fact just annoys me, but I guess I have to take it up with the participants of the international Meridian conference. And unfortunately, it took place in 1884, so. They're all dead. 

24. The shortest interval between two births from the same mother, excepting twins, triplets, and the like, is 208 days. Or 6.5 months. Jayne Bleackley gave birth to a son on September 3rd, 1999. She later gave birth to a daughter on March 30, 2000.

25. Scientists named a hormone in male mouse pee that female mice find sexually attractive, Darcin. After Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy. 

26 Several scenes in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled were shot in Jennifer Coolidge's New Orleans home.

27. Coolidge one told Vulture that, in her 20's, she would lie her way into popular night clubs. The then-struggling actress claimed to be related to literary icon Ernest Hemingway. She had an incredible, though evidently sometimes believed, identity: Muffin Hemingway.

28. As anyone who's read "A Moveable Feast" knows, Hemingway rubbed shoulders with a Who's Who of notable writers and artists. From Ford Madox Ford to Gertrude Stein. And, in one particularly odd moment, presumably drawn from real life, he assured F. Scott Fitzgerald that his penis was perfectly fine. Fitzgerald's, uh, not Hemingway's. 

29. When he wasn't hanging out with Hemingway, Fitzgerald made time to work on the screen play for 139's Gone With The Wind. The Great Gatsby author proposed cutting Scarlett's miscarriage from the film, a suggestion that ultimately went unheeded.

30. Though Vivien Leigh ended up winning an Oscar for her performance, she wasn't the only actress considered for the role of Scarlett. Lucille Ball was among those who auditioned for the role. 

31. According to an informal analysis done by Deloitte's director of research, Duncan Stewart, YouTube viewers likely watch more than 2 billion hours of videos combined every day. That's over 200,000 cumulative years of content.


 (08:00) to (10:00)


32. In 2019, a YouTube user named iitzrey commented on a music video for Gotye's song, "Somebody That I Used To Know." "Bruh, who just randomly came back to this song like 8 years later." Apparently, 38,000 people did. That's how many users have liked the comment as of the filming of this video. 

33. Belgian waffles have been in the United States only 7 years longer than the internet. Depending on how you define the Internet, that is. The waffles have been stateside since 1962, when Walter Cleyman showcased them at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle. The first ARPANET message, which some would say launched the internet age, was sent from UCLA to the Stanford research institute in 1969. Just a few months after the Apollo 11 moon landing. 

34. The men onboard that historic lunar mission drank a great deal of what amounted to space seltzer. The drinking water the three astronauts had access to had hydrogen bubbles in it, which helped produce gas in the men aboard the space craft. It resulted in what Michael Collins later called, "a not-so-subtle and pervasive aroma which reminds me of a mixture of wet dog and marsh grass." 

35. High altitude is actually associated with flatulence. Mountain climbers and airplane passengers are both subject to a phenomenon known as "high altitude flatus expulsion." According to a letter from Dr. Paul Auerbach printed in the Western Journal of Medicine, this condition is "known to veteran back-packers as 'Rocky Mountain barking spiders.'" 

36. Up until 1987, Louisiana state law mandated that if students were taught evolution, they also had to be taught creationism. That year, a Supreme Court ruling banned the practice making such instruction mandatory for public school students.

37. In the 1960s through the 1980s, alcohol was sometimes administered to pregnant women to prevent premature births.

38. By the time helium was first observed and documented by a human being, the United States Civil War was already over. Pierre-Jules-César Janssen first saw helium in 1868. During a solar eclipse, Janssen looked at the sun with a spectroscope, a tool that disperses light into measurable wavelengths, as Smithsonian magazine wrote. There, he observed the previously unidentified element Helium. The same stuff you can fill up a balloon with at Party City today.

 (10:00) to (12:00)


39. Though students here in the United States probably learned that the Treaty of Paris ended the revolutionary war, you assuredly did not learn what the treaty that ended the Civil War was called. That's because there was none. Though Robert E. Lee surrendered in his capacity as a military general at Appamattox courthouse, the confederate government never officially did. Had it tried, it's doubtful the US would have accepted it, because doing so could have been seen as legitimizing the secessionists' confederacy. 

40. Around the same time, baseball was supplanting its rival claimant to the title of the United States' national pastime. The other contender? Cricket, of course. It was hugely popular stateside before the Civil War. Some sports historian say it was the war that ended cricket's popularity in the United States, but most seem to agree cricket was already on the decline, perhaps due to its slower pace, or the relatively high level of upkeep required of the fields.

41. A 1939 cricket match between England and South Africa lasted 12 days, including a few rest days. And even then, only ended because the England team had to catch a train. 

42. Based on a mean heartrate of 115 beats per minute, in line with averages found in a 2017 study measuring player heartrates in one day cricket matches versus multi-day affairs, the average player's heart would have beat about 300,000 times over the course of the marathon match. 

43. At their shortest, Saturn's rings are about 2/3 as tall as the Hollywood sign. The gas giants' main rings can be as short as around 10 meters, while the iconic sign clocks in at around 15. 

44. There are more unique ways to order a deck of 52 playing cards than there are atoms comprising planet Earth. 52 factorial gives you a total of 8 with 67 zeroes behind it. I don't even know what that number is called, but it's really big. 

It's much trickier to estimate how many atoms make up our home planet. But since we have good estimates of Earth's mass, volume, and chemical composition, we can ballpark the total number of atoms at many orders of magnitude below our possible playing card permutations. 

45. Speaking of large numbers that might have you reconsidering some things, human feet contain more than 100,000 sweat gland each, on average. Each foot can produce around half a pint of sweat per day. Think about that the next time you consider putting on an old pair of socks to avoud doing laundry. 

 (12:00) to (14:00)


46. Before he became Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio once worked as a bouncer at an Argentinian nightclub. Bergoglio wasn't the only future pope to work an odd job before entering the Catholic church. 

47. In the early 19th century, Pope Gregory XVI, then known as Mauro Cappellari, made and sold chocolate with fellow members of the Camaldolese Order. Selling chocolate isn't the first thing you might think of when it comes to men of the cloth. But other popes shot right past quirky and into the realm of disturbing.

48. One example is Pope Stephen VI, who put his predecessor, Formosus, on trial. That wouldn't be so bizarre if it weren't for the fact that Formosus had been dead for 9 months. The prior pontiff's body was exhumed and propped up on a throne for questioning. A deacon answered in his stead. 

If you can believe it, the dead man was found guilty. Among his punishments? Some fingers were chopped off. At least it didn't hurt? 

Every musical theater fan and history buff knows that Alexander Hamilton participated in a fatal duel. But plenty of other historical figures also engaged in the now outdated practice. Among them are composer George Frideric Handel, author Miguel Cervantes, and painter Edouard Manet. In Manet's case, the weapon of choice was swords, and the inciting incident was a bruised ego. 

49. After the artist received a terse review from Louis Duranty, a man he considered a friend, the two had it out in a forest outside of Paris. No one died, and the two reportedly rekindled their friendship in the aftermath. The lesson? There is absolutely no lesson to glean from this incident. 

50. Another historical beef, or beouf, pitted Voltaire against Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The epic enmity between the two men included an incident in which Rousseau began a letter to his adversary, "I do not like you, sir." Point for clarity, at least. That inconspicuous beginning actually wasn't as bad as later on in the message, when he said, translated into English, "I hate you." Voltaire went on to play the Pusha T to Rousseau's Drake, phrase I somehow always knew I would say, outing his enemy as an alleged deadbeat dad. To be clear, despite the diss track, Pusha T's claims against Drake were never validated, but Voltaire's claims were. Rousseau had indeed left five children at an orphanage. 

 (14:00) to (16:00)


After all that talk of pitiless popes and deadbeat philosophers, let's cleanse the palette with an inspiring story of a priest and an orphanage. Specifically, that of Sergio Benítez, a Catholic priest who helped support the activities of an orphanage he founded in a creative way. 

51. Benitez became a lucha libre wrestler, who performed under the name Fray Tormenta, or Friar Storm. When he retired, one of the boys who had lived at the orphanage took up the mantle, fighting under the name Fray Tormenta Jr. If this all sounds familiar, it may be because the real life story inspired the film Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black.

52. The largest crowd ever assembled to watch a wrestling event was in Pyongyang, North Korea, back in 1995. An estimated 300,000+ people attended the two-day event, but that probably wasn't because of some latent love for sports entertainment in the isolated nation. As professional wrestler, Scott Norton, told Sports Illustrated, his limo driver clued the Americans in on what made the event so popular. "Nobody really wants to come," the driver reportedly said. "It's forced attendance. If they don't show up, they get a bullet in the head." And Norton went, "...all right then." 

53. Speaking of bullets and ostensibly violent free contact, alongside the 1908 Olympics in London, dueling was an event. It wasn't exactly a blood sport. Combattants used wax bullets and wore protective armor. Unlike competitors, the event didn't survive beyond that year's games. Since it was an exhibition event, no medals were awarded.
 
54. Another discontinued Olympic event was solo synchronized swimming. That competition, which seems more like a zen cone than an Olympic sporting event, was evidently about synchronizing one's movements with the music. Not with an imaginary friend. It didn't last long either, appearing in just 3 Olympic games. 

55. At the 1994 World Cup opening ceremony, a famous American attempted a penalty kick. The kick went wide of the goal, which, embarrassingly, proceeded to come apart at the seams, following through on a planned stunt that was supposed to mimic the force of the ball destroying the target. The striker for that ill-fated attempt? Diana Ross, of course. 

 (16:00) to (18:00)


56. Ross's daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, once told Jimmy Kimmel that she was born after her father said "boo!" to her mom. I mean, that's what supposedly incited the labor itself. Other things had to happen prior to then. 

57. In 1988, Angela Lansbury released a workout video. She was in her early 60's at the time. It was called Angela Lansbury's Positive Moves, A Personal Plan For Fitness And Well-Being at Any Age. Hell yeah. Perhaps most amazing of all, Lansbury would live for almost 35 more years after released the exercise routine. Apparently her plan worked. 

58. According to a study published in the journal Nature, women who lived to at least age 100 were four times more likely to have had children while in their forties than women who survived only to age 73. The researchers speculated that the ability to have a child at a relatively older age could be an indicator of slower aging. 

59. One centinarian, Edith Atkinson Wiley, suggested that her longevity might be due to good genes, but didn't rule out a dietary regimen that included bourbon, water, and Cheetos.

60. Artist Grant Wood was basically a sugar addict. He poured copious amounts of it into his morning coffee, and even sprinkled it onto lettuce. Maybe all that sugar paid off. Wood modeled the farmer in "American Gothic" on his dentist, Byron McKeeby. 

61. MC Hammer got his stage name with help from Milwaukee Brewer second baseman, Pedro Garcia. The future "You Can't Touch This" rapper was a bat boy for the Oakland A's, and Garcia thought he looked like "Hammerin'" Hank Aaron.

62. Hank, oddly enough, was associated with the name John in medieval England. Han was short for Johanne, hence the John connection, while "ken" was a diminutive in Middle English, so Hanken was kinda like Johnny, or Little John. 

63. Dead bodies sometimes develop a soap-like coating that's been called "grave wax." Technically known as adipocere, this odd phenomenon is the result of body fat decaying. The so-called soap lady at Philadelphia's Mutter museum demonstrates this process. 

 (18:00) to (20:00)


64. The Guinness World Record for highest IQ ever recorded was given to Marilyn von Savant. I guess it was good fortune that her name wasn't Marilyn von Dummy. The record has since been retired by Guinness because IQ tests were deemed too unreliable.

65. Somewhere on the other end of the intellegence spectrum, we have the story of a Tuscon man who got himself stuck in his home's chimney back in 2016. After locking his keys in the house, the would-be south-western santa decided he'd get back in via the fireplace. Firefighters had to extricate the man from the chimney's too-tight quarters, but it could've been worse.

66. A rabbit hunter in Doncaster England was found dead in a rabbit hole. Sadly, the man had gotten stuck and suffocated. He was discovered when someone walked by and saw half a body sticking out of the ground. In a very minor silver lining, the man's dog was found alive tied to a nearby tree. 

67. Perhaps an even more unfortunate place to meet one's end is on the set of the Dick Cavett show. That's the fate that fell Jerome Rodale, a man who extolled the virtues of clean eating. Among other things, he believed diet, and not vaccines, could prevent polio. The legendary host discussed Rodale's plan to live to 100 years of age in a segment for the show, but his guest actually didn't make it to the end of the taping. After having a heart attack, Rodale died, and the episode never aired.

68. David Lynch, director of Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, once kicked a roomate out of their apartment. Supposedly, the guy was "too weird".

69. If you're blowing out birthday candles and stumped about what to wish for, consider survival. The so-called birthday effect says that you have a higher chance of dying on or around your birthday than random chance would dictate. A Swiss study says analyzing deaths between 1969 and 2008 found that people were 14 percent more likely to die on their birthday than any other day. Explanations offered for this odd fact include greater risk taking behavior engaged in on birthdays, people holding on to get to the next year, or just errors in record keeping that assign death dates that don't correspond with reality. Wether the phenomenon will stand up to more scrutany or not, some famous people who have died on their birthdays include Ingrid Bergman and Betty Friedan.

 (20:00) to (22:00)


Neither of those famous women died from a skydiving accident. I haven't researched this but it feels like a safe guess. Fifteen people in the United States did die in skydiving accidents in 2019, sadly.

70. But that number is actually dwarfed by the roughly 100 North American deaths attributed to scuba-diving accidents each year. You won't catch me doing either.

71. A 1938 article in the New York Times discussed the whimsy of California restaurants, including an apparently newfangled offering: The cheeseburger. 

A few years later the paper of records suggested that "... the combination of beef with cheese and tomatoes may seem bizarre" but pronounce that "... If you reflect a bit, you'll understand the combination is sound gastronomically".

Thank goodness, I was worried they just tasted good.

72. According to a survey conducted by Wallethub more than 20% of Americans consider the newest iPhone worth going into debt for.

73. In 2008 the word nomophobia was coined to describe the fear of being without one's phone.

74. There are actually more smartphone subscriptions on earth today than there were human beings in the year 2002.

Living people at least.

75. According to an analysis by Our world in data more that a 100 billion people have died over the last 200,000 years.  

76. The average person spends about three hours and 15 minutes every day on their phone. Over the course of 60 years that works out to almost 3,000 days spent looking at your phone.

77. That's about 20 times more than you'll spend having sex. If the results of an international survey conducted by Reebok are to be believed. 

78. The pH meter was originally developed to measure the acidity of citrus fruit like lemons.

79. Viagra was originally developed as a treatment for hypertension and other symptoms of heart disease. Test subjects reported a peculiar side-effect that has made Pfizer a lot of money in the years since.

80. And Play-Doh was originally sold as a way to clean wallpaper safely.

81. There was a fight for the patent behind feather dusters. It pitted Susan Hibbard against her husband George.

82. The flax plant provides key ingredients for oil paints, linoleum flooring and linen fabrics. Lin seed oil is key to those first two products, while the fibers of the flax plant can be spun into linen. 

 (22:00) to (24:00)


83. Research from Oxford University's Charles Spence and others suggests some unlikely things can affect our perception of taste. Food consumed off of heavier plates tends to be rated more highly, for example. And eating off of white plates leads to a more sweet taste than black plates, even when what's being eaten is functionally the same.

Most everyone watching this video at some point has or had two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on. I say most everyone because I don't exactly know what people in your family two generations back were getting up to. It's possible, for example, that a great grandfather on one side of your family is the same person as the great grandfather on another side. 

84. Either way, the amount of people over the years who had to procreate for you to end up existing is truly dizzying. If you go back 40 generations, somewhere around the 9th century CE, your direct descendants likely climb into the millions. And of course, if we go far enough back, it's basically a statistical certainty that all living human beings share an ancestor with one another.

85. What might be surprising is how far, or not, you have to go to find that common ancestor. According to a probabilistic analysis by researchers at Yale University, you likely only have to go back a few thousand years to find a common human ancestor for today's population. So think twice about telling someone off in traffic. That's your distant cousin you're yelling at. 

86. Some interesting demographic facts: There are around the same number of christians in India as there are in England and Wales combined.

87, And there are more jewish people in New York City than in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. 

88. As a headline for radio new zealand's website announced, sheep outnumber Newzealanders by just 5 to 1. That's in contrast to the estimated 22 to 1 sheep to human ratio in the country back in the early 80's. 

89. According to analysis done by Bill Rankin for the website radical cartography, almost 88 percent of humans live in the northern hemisphere. 

90. And almost 82 percent live in the eastern hemisphere.

91. There are about half a billion pounds of hair on human heads across the planet. Okay, admittedly, this one is based on some very speculative math.

 (24:00) to (26:00)


But stick with me. A piece for healthline.com drew from a 2018 study that provided a rough estimate for the weight of a patch of hair and a separate estimate that the average healthy person has around a hundred thousand strands of hair. It concluded that a person with uniformly six inch stands of hair on their head would have about 6-13 ounces of tresses. Of course a large percentage of people have less hair than that, including the vast majority of men.

A study that looked at the hair lengths of women in Flordia theme parks, yes I just said that, found that something like 30 percent of women there had short hair, to the chin or higher. A little more than 40 percent had hair that ended between their chin and shoulder. And the remainder, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent had longer than shoulder length hair. 

Then you've got male pattern baldness effecting as much as 50 percent of men age 50 or older. Babies, to pick an not entirely arbitrary but admittedly pretty arbitrary estimate. We can say the average person has about one ounce of hair on their head. And yes, my producers did try to get me to shave my head in the name of science.

One ounce, or about 28 grams, times the world's population of around 8 billion people gives us about 224 million kilograms, or about 494 million pounds of hair. 

92. The world's largest ball of human hair incidentally clocks in at around 100 kilograms. In the legendary words of hair stylist and giant human hairball creator Steve Warden, "I got more spiritual as I've aged and I wanted to leave some kind of legacy when I'm gone, and it hit me. I'm going to build a giant hairball."

93. The tail feathers of the Onagadori cock can reach over ten meters long. 

94. And the tongue of a blue whale can weigh as much as an elephant. 

95. No human being has ever made the longest possible walk between two points on Earth. The route from Cape Town to the eastern tip of Russia would be around 22 thousand kilometers, and that's before factoring in the need to travel extra distances to reach legal boarder crossings and access things like, you know, food. That said, if you've got a few years, with supportive friends and an absolutely incredible brain for logistics, I feel like you've got a hit YouTube video on your hands.

96. Eggplants are botanically classified as berries. 

97. But blackberries and raspberries aren't.

 (26:00) to (27:10)


"True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds," as Greta Lorge wrote for Stanford magazine. Those not quite berries come from a flower with multiple ovaries.

98. At a 1996 performance of the musical Cat, one audience member didn't appreciate quasi interactive nature of some of the show's choreography. She filed a law suit asking for six million dollars in damages. Thelitigious theater goer was not interested becoming part of the show or the hip gyrating antics of that night's Rum Tum Tugger.

99. A more recent suit was filed by a women against Kraft Heinz Co. Though the package of their Velvetta mac and cheese product promises the dish will be ready in 3.5 minutes, that doesn't include steps like opening the package and stirring in the enclosed cheese sauce.

100. Finally, you know I have to end with a cat fact. When an Oregon woman found a mountain lion in her home she used a number of methods, including drumming and what she called "feline-speak eye-blinking, to coax the kitty outside.

Thanks all for this episode for the list show. In the comments, drop the most normal fact you know. Do I know what that means? Possibly not. Am I excited to see what you come up with? Absolutely. We'll see you next time.