1

"In the 1920s and 30s, many Europeans supported using massive dams to drain the Mediterranean for farmland and to connect Europe and Africa into a new continent called “Atlantropa.”"

2

"Ernest Hemingway conducted U-boat patrols to get out of legal troubles with the Cuban Police for drunk driving. "

3

"The deadliest war in the history was WWII, but the Mongol Invasions are a close second, despite occurring 700 years earlier, when the world’s population was only a fifth of what it was in 1945. "

4

"The Chicken Dance was originally named The Duck Dance but during the 1981 Tulsa OK Oktoberfest there were no duck costumes available so a local television station donated what they had; a chicken costume."

5

"Managers at NASA claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard Challenger Spacecraft, but Richard Feynman (theoretical physicist) discovered that NASA’s Engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe to be closer to 1 in 200."

6

"Julius Caesar owned a pet Giraffe that Pliny referred to as a “wild sheep” because of its docile nature. Caesar eventually ended up feeding his giraffe to the lions at the Coliseum."

7

"If you hit a moose with your car in Maine, you get first dibs on the carcass. "

8

"Charlie Chaplin’s daughter played Charlie Chaplin’s mother in the 1992 biopic “Chaplin.”"

9

"Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the U.S., was the first president to have electricity in the White House, but wouldn’t touch the switch because he was too scared of being electrocuted. "

10

"When Wilt Chamberlain became the first NBA player to earn $100,000 in salary in 1965, his longtime rival Bill Russell demanded that his own salary be raised to $100,001. His salary was immediately raised. "

11

"Germany finally paid off all of its World War 1 debt in 2010."

12

"In 1933, three Japanese school girls crossed in love committed suicide by jumping into a volcanic crater on the island of Oshima. This act started a bizarre trend in Japan, and in the following year, 800 other people leapt into the same crater."

13

"The Wright Brothers achieved flight in a plane that cost roughly $1,000 to build. In the race to fly, they beat Samuel Pierpont Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian, who failed to achieve a successful flight, despite having $50,000 of government funding put toward his attempts. "

14

"Alligators’ teeth aren’t as sharp as other predators’ because they are made for crushing, not chewing. When their prey is too big to be swallowed whole, they stash carcasses away to be eaten once the flesh has rotted and is soft enough to eat. "

15

"During the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, the two surrendering “Germans,” killed by American soldiers, were saying in Czech: “Please don’t shoot me! I’m not German, I’m Czech, I didn’t kill anyone!” The American soldiers jokingly translate it as “Look, I washed for supper!” "

16

"In Sid Meier’s Civilization game, Gandhi was programmed to be the most peaceful leader. Due to a bug in the endgame, he becomes the most aggressive and casual user of nuclear weapons."