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A little known fact...

22K views 317 replies 32 participants last post by  Rafael Oliveira 
#1 ·
Got a little known piece of trivia? Post it here! The weirder, more obscure the better(but not R-rated), but I'll start out with something I just learned today..

The reason Magnum P.I. was filmed in Hawaii? The studio stopped filming Hawaii 5-0 and they had an expensive production studio on location in Hawaii with no show so they made up the Magnum P.I. show as a way to continue using the studio!

Got any fun/weird trivia?
 
#5 ·
Eleanors are actually '72 fastbacks and not '73 Mach 1s. Since the production of the movie took longer, they added '73 grills to them to make them more relevant to the then current model year.
 
#9 ·
New Zealand has the longest place name in an English speaking country (though the name is in Maori) and the second longest of all place names...

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu or Taumata for short!
 
#10 ·
A Googol is a 10 with 100 zeros next to it. A Googleplex is a 10 with a Googol of zeros next to it. A Googolpleplex is a 10 with a Googleplex of zeros next to it. If you put a zero on every atom in the known universe, you could still not write the number.
 
#11 · (Edited by Moderator)
Leon Czolgosz, assassin of William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, was electrocuted for his crime on October 29, 1901, at Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York. Among the personal effects found in his cell was a U.S. quarter stamped with the date 2218. The face in profile on said quarter was not George Washington, but rather a face which has yet to be identified.
 
#13 ·
Leon Czolgosz, assassin of William McKinley, the the 25th President of the United States, was electrocuted for his crime on October 29, 1901, at Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York. Among the personal effects found in his cell was a U.S. quarter stamped with the date 2218. The face in profile on said quarter was not George Washington, but rather a face which has yet to be identified.
Besides being a hoax started by Creepypasta.com, whose face would there been? Washington's face was not put on a quarter until 31 years later, in 1932.
 
#17 ·
This is a story from cracked. I have never heard this and thought it was a pretty cool piece of history.

The Civil War Toy Boat Messengers


During the second half of 1862, soldiers in the Civil War were getting bored. Camped on opposite sides​
of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, they were locked in a waiting game -- the Northern army was waiting for a bunch of pontoon boats to be fastened together as bridges, and the Southerners were waiting for the Northerners to just try and cross. But this ended up taking weeks, and so the two armies, both made up of Americans, wound up having a lot of time to sit and stare at each other. What's more, the area where they had set up camp had precisely jack shit to do. Eventually, they started to get goofy.​

They were all stuck somewhere they didn't want to be, waiting to do unpleasant things they didn't want to be doing to a bunch of other guys they didn't even know. In a nutshell, it resembled a particularly crappy summer camp, and many of the soldiers were pretty young. So they started behaving accordingly: They built little toy boats and sent them across the river to the enemy soldiers.

The boats carried soldier variations of those little notes kids send to each other in the classroom. Instead of a scrap of paper with a "Do you like us?" scribble, the Southerners would fill a boat with tobacco, then float it over. Northern soldiers would send the boat back, stacked with coffee.

These were valuable gestures of friendship during a time when such luxury supplies were nearly nonexistent, and they didn't go unnoticed on either side. Like little boys on opposite sides of a river, the soldiers began making new friends. Waves and informal friendly gestures were exchanged across the water. When the Confederates held sports contests, Union troops were eager spectators from their waterside seats.

Eventually, men would even start crossing the river to meet with their friends on the other side, engaging in conversation, exchanging newspapers and generally acting like actual human beings toward the very men they were supposed to attack.

This would go on for weeks before the Battle of Fredericksburg would snap everyone back to reality
 

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#20 ·
This is no joke.... there is a place in England, in the lake district called........ Cockermouth.

Don't believe me..... google it.
 
#22 ·
One little known fact about George Washington for you...

He did not attend college, the only American President not to do so. His birthday is celebrated on February 22, though he was born on February 11. His inaugural speech is the shortest in American History. It was only133 words long.
 
#24 ·
In October 1965, to celebrate the 6 millionth pound of ordinance dropped by an A-1 Skyraider, Skyraider 572 ("Paper Tiger II") of the USS Midway was fitted with a very special type of bomb. A Toilet. As the Skyraider shot off the deck of the Midway, a message was sent from the bridge to the deck staff that read "what the hell was on 572's right wing?".

While it seemed a great idea at the time to drop a toilet on the Viet Kong, it almost turned pear-shaped when the toilet apparently got caught in the turbulence of Paper Tiger II and nearly took out another Skyraider that was following.

 
#26 · (Edited by Moderator)
People think of U-boats attacking ships in the Atlantic, around Greenland or closer to Europe, rather than off the coast of the United States. However, Operation Drumbeat involved 40 U-Boats attacking shipping very close to the coastline of various states. An even scarier fact is that German U-Boats even landed saboteurs on American soil! At Long Island, New York, and Ponte Vedra, Florida, 8 English-speaking Germans snuck into America (the 4 at Long Island were captured after several weeks).

 
#28 ·
  • If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
 
#29 ·
The car that crashes into the Bulldozzer at the end of the film "Vanishing Point" is actually a Camero & not a Dodge Challenger R/T.
 
#30 ·
Due to the reclining "S" shape of the Isthmus of Panama the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal is 22-1/2 miles west of the Pacific entrance and the sun rises from the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic Ocean.
 
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