Charlie Chaplin made…

Charlie Chaplin made the Hitler mocking film, “The Great Dictator”, in 1940 using his own money because none of the Hollywood studios were comfortable irking the Germans as they had financial relations with them. The film is said to be one of the greatest works of Charlie Chaplin.

The last Blockbuster on earth…

The last Blockbuster on earth, in Bend, OR uses floppy disks to boot their system, employees have to hand print cards because their printers broke, and transactions are backed up on a reel-to-reel tape that can’t be replaced because Radio Shack went out of business.

In 2015, researchers testing….

In 2015, researchers testing the efficiency of mosquito repellents used a Victoria’s Secret perfume because they thought the floral fragrance would attract mosquitoes. To their surprise, they found it repels mosquitoes better than a range of mosquito deterrents.

During WW2 German prisoners…

During WW2 German prisoners were so well treated in Canada that they didn’t want to leave the country when released. Thousands of them eventually stayed or came back to Canada with one saying that the time in Canadian prison was “the best thing that happened to me.”

Gwen Stefani’s brother Eric…

Gwen Stefani’s brother Eric was originally the keyboardist for No Doubt but left to become an animator for The Simpsons. He was able to put No Doubt into the background of the Lollapalloza episode when they were still pretty much an unknown band.

Word quarantine comes…

Word quarantine comes from an Italian variant ‘quaranta giorni’, meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.

During the time of the Great…

During the time of the Great Depression, a banker convinced struggling families in Quincy, Florida to buy Coca-Cola shares which traded at $19. Later, the town became the single richest town per capita in the US with at least 67 millionaires.

One evening, while rushing…

One evening, while rushing for dinner after a long day at the lab, Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist at Johns Hopkins, forgot to wash his hands that had traces of benzoic sulfimide. This compound made his dinner taste sweet, and that’s how he discovered the artificial sweetener Saccharin.