Curious Mind Blowing Facts - 11
will make you say "No Way"
Quickly Written Songs:
Freddie Mercury wrote "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in 10 minutes.
Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" was written in 25 mins.
Lorde's breakthrough hit "Royals" was written in 30 minutes.
Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" was written in 20 minutes.
Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas" was written in 15 minutes.
Ray Charles wrote "What'd I Say" in under 15 minutes while improvising at a live show.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses was written in five minutes.
Out of the 100,000 new, hardcover print books published each year, fewer than 500 make it on to The New York Times Best Seller list (0.5 percent).
How To Prepare Your Phone for a Protest? (Updated 2024):
Here are a few submitted words that folks want to be included in the next dictionary: From https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submissions/latest
rizz
elatrometer
stanky
deescalate
gigapreneur
untappedness
Clampiest
Xanax
Limoncello
priorday
swicy
melanated
aftermorrow
star jump
runtime
romantasy
newline
A judge just sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for orchestrating fraud through his cryptocurrency company FTX. He has also been ordered to forfeit more than $11 billion, including property. He’s been in jail for the past year and a half awaiting trial. He has not been in a jail cell with bars but in a dormitory like a hostel with some interesting room mates. They include people involved in high profile drug cases including the former President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 - Juan Orlando Hernandez Alvarado.
There are 30,000 particle accelerators in the world. A particle accelerator is a big machine where scientists make tiny particles go super fast and crash into things to learn more about how the universe works. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. The accelerator sits in a tunnel 100 metres underground at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.
“Large" refers to its size, approximately 27km in circumference
“Hadron" because it accelerates protons or ions, which belong to the group of particles called hadrons
“Collider" because the particles form two beams travelling in opposite directions, which are made to collide at four points around the machine.
Nicotine kills insects rapidly, often within an hour. When applied externally, one usually sees tremors and convulsions, followed by paralysis.
This is false: “Chewing gum takes seven years to pass through the human digestive system”. It takes the same amount of time as other foods.
The textile industry is responsible for as much as 35% of microplastic pollution in the oceans.
The Fastest Train in the World is the Shanghai Maglev - goes 460 kph/286 mph (China). That’s faster than F1 cars which can go up to 230 mph. The world’s fastest public train is also unique – it’s the only link in the world currently carrying passengers using magnetic levitation (Maglev) rather than conventional steel wheels on steel rails.
The character of Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld was inspired by Larry David's neighbor Kenny Kramer, who shared many outrageous traits with the fictional character.
Detroit’s #1 radio station, in the ’60’s and into the 70’s was CKLW - “The Big 8”. “Its 50,000 watts of AM power, which blanketed southern Ontario and more than a dozen states, was instead situated on the south shore of the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.” I grew up in Windsor, and hung around in Detroit. (https://www.heritage-matters.ca/articles/cklw-the-big-8-canadas-1-american-radio-station).
In January, 1976 promoter Bill Sargent offered The Beatles $50,000,000+ for a two show reunion. They only needed to perform together twenty minutes per show. The Beatles turned this offer down, but contemplated another offer - to appear on Saturday Night Live for $3,000. They nearly called a cab, but were just too tired to go:
Thanks for finding the above video, Brad! :
How English has changed through the years:
The Ukrainian Army has 2 American Black Hawk Helicopters. The Western governments have said they have not supplied NATO helicopters to Ukraine. They say that Kyiv acquired them privately.
Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a song in the 70’s with nonsensical made up words meant to sound like American English, to prove Italians would like any English song. It was a huge hit:
Taipei, March 29, 2024 (CNA) - Contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said Friday that children born to its employees in Taiwan accounted for 1.8 percent of the total number of newborns in the country in 2023.
The term Wi-Fi isn’t an abbreviated version of wireless fidelity. There’s no such thing as wireless fidelity. Wi-Fi is just a snappy name invented by marketers. Just like Corinthian Leather in 70’s Chrysler Cordobas. And words like Retsyn, Fluoristan, Ski-Doo, Jell-O. Fahrvergnugen, and Schweppervescence.
Speaking of commandeering a word or phrase, did you know that Colgate owns the trademark for "The Tooth Fairy?"
Studies have shown that when people are asked to pick a random number between 1 and 100, the answer is 37 more than any other number.
The newly publicly traded social media company of former President Donald Trump had total revenue of just $4.1 million last year. There are writers on Substack that make more than that.
Researchers have discovered the oldest figurative tattoos in the world on two 5,000-year-old mummies from Egypt. I’m a bit sceptical of this one, as the images look like smudges to me. (You be the judge - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43230202)
An airplane’s autopilot system is sometimes referred to as "George" (“Let’s let George fly for a while”.)
According to NASA, each voyager probe has about 3 million times less memory than a mobile phone and transmits data approximately 38,000 times slower than a 5g internet connection. (Thanks to
for contributing to this fact).What was described by the U.S. Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history”? The fact that FBI agent Robert Hanssen was tasked to find a mole within the FBI. Robert Hanssen was the mole and had been working with KGB since 1979.
✌️Thanks for subscribing, reading, liking, commenting, re-stacking, sharing, and emailing to your special friends!
More:
Which fact made you say “No Way“?
I did not know that the term wifi was created by marketers and I find it bizarre that a corporation owns the tooth fairy! I love all your head shakers Paul!
Such a fun brain dump!!