fact
In 1973, during his stay in Vietnam, Henry Moak was issued a combat ration that included a can of pound cake, manufactured in 1969. He vowed to eat the pound cake when he retired from the Army. On July 24, 2009, Colonel Moak opened the forty-year-old can and kept his word. 00
1-800-COLLECT was so popular in the 90s that AT&T launched a competing service, 1-800-Operator. However AT&T later discovered many people misspell Operator with ‘er’ instead of ‘or’ at the end, and that unfortunately, 1-800-COLLECT owned the misspelled number and had been taking their customers. 00
2 rival churches in Vrontados, Greece shoot tens of thousands of fireworks at each other every Easter in a “Rocket War”. Both churches then claim victory and agree to settle the score next year. The tradition dates back to the Ottoman era, when real cannons were used instead. 00
MIT lawyers did not patent turn-by-turn in-car navigation in 1989 because “This will never happen.. because the insurance companies won’t allow it”. 00
Saddam Hussein’s campaign song in the 2002 presidential election was “I Will Always Love You.” Hussein won 100% percent of the vote, besting Stalin’s mark of 99.95. 00
The Japanese never ate salmon sushi until the 1980s when a Norwegian businessman, hired by Norway’s government to offload excess salmon, made a deal with a Japanese company to sell the fish in its grocery stores, leading to its popularity today. 00
Scientists once gave drugs to bees, and found that they respond similarly to humans: bees on cocaine tend to overestimate the amount of sugar they find and exaggerate when reporting back to the hive. 10
Millennials aged 18-34 are more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse/partner – the first time this has ever happened since record-keeping began in the 1880s. 00
The iconic black-and-white soccer ball design was popularized by the Adidas Telstar, which adopted the design to be visible on black and white television screens. It was named after the AT&T Telstar, the first satellite to transmit television images and telephone calls through space. Its creator, an amateur soccer player, came up with the idea […]
A young Irishman threw a message in a bottle from the sinking Titanic. He drowned. A year later, the bottle washed up on a beach — just a few miles from his mother’s home in Ireland. 00