The Extraordinary Book of Useless Information (14 page)

In Victorian London the mail was delivered seven times a day.

The reason London police are known as “bobbies” is because the Metropolitan Police Force was founded by an act of Parliament introduced by Sir Robert (Bobbie) Peel in 1829.

The Crystal Palace, built in London for the Great Exposition of 1851, had the world's first public toilets, known as the “Retiring Rooms.” 827,280 people each spent a penny to use the facilities. Using the lavatory is still referred to as “spending a penny” in England.

CLOTHESHORSE

The Aztec ruler, Montezuma, was quite the clotheshorse. He wore four different outfits each day and never the same one twice.

OGRE'S OFFSPRING

Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, defected from the Soviet Union in 1967, while in India, leaving her children behind. Her notorious father had died in 1953.

Svetlana was the darling of the Soviet Union as a child, with countless baby girls named after her.

Svetlana's mother committed suicide when she was six.

Her brother, Yakov, shot himself in the head because of his father's brutality toward him, but survived. Stalin remarked afterward that his son “can't even shoot straight.” During World War II, Yakov was captured by the Germans. They offered to swap him for a captured German field marshal held by the Soviets, but Stalin refused. Yakov then succeeded in killing himself while in a POW camp.

HOLY UNACCEPTABLE

Pope John XXIII, who ruled from 1410 to 1415, was an ex-pirate. His campaign to become pope was funded by the powerful Medici family. Once in power, John XXIII made the Medici Bank the official bank of the papacy.

John XXIII was defrocked for corruption and fornication.

Pope Leo X had an elaborate celebration when he was elected pope in 1513. He had a young boy painted entirely gold for the gala. The unfortunate child died soon afterward.

A pope who is considered an illegal claimant of the Holy See is known as an antipope. Such popes sit in opposition to a legally elected or sitting pope and sometimes enjoy more widespread support than the actual pope. There have been about forty antipopes.

Between 1409 and 1413, there were three different men who simultaneously claimed to be pope, one in Avignon (in France), one in Pisa, and one in Rome.

CHRIST-CROSS

Early Christians began the practice of crossing fingers as a symbol of the cross. They did so secretly to recognize one another during the time of the Roman persecution and to help ward off evil.

ABOUT FACE

Muslims used to pray facing Jerusalem, not Mecca.

TILL DEATH DO US PART

During the Middle Ages, in Germanic countries, two parties could settle a dispute in the absence of any witnesses or evidence by engaging in a judicial duel. These fights to the death were overseen by a judge/justice, and the survivor was deemed to be right in the eyes of the law.

Men and women, sometimes a husband and wife, could engage each other in a judicial duel. To make for a fairer fight, the man had to stand in a hole up to his waist and was given a pointy wooden club to fight with, while the woman could move freely and fought with a large rock wrapped in the end of her veil, which she would swing at her spouse.

COLA WARS

In the early 1930s, the owner of Pepsi offered to sell his company to the Coca-Cola Company, but they weren't interested.

By the mid-1980s, Pepsi had a bigger market share than Coke.

In 1985, Coca-Cola was reformulated as New Coke to make it sweeter and less acidic—like Pepsi. New Coke replaced Coke on April 23, 1985. Public outcry forced the company to bring Coke back, as Coca-Cola Classic, on July 10 of the same year.

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF

A vomitorium was not a place where Romans would puke after a meal to make room for more food. Such a custom was never practiced. A vomitorium was actually a passageway beneath a stadium that allowed rapid flow of spectators in and out. The word derives from the Latin verb
vomeo
, meaning “to spew forth.”

Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned, but immediately became involved in relief efforts to feed and house the victims.

The Vikings did not wear horns on their helmets. This misconception probably began with an 1876 production of the Richard Wagner opera
Der Ring des Nibelungen
.

The Pilgrims did not necessarily wear all black, but rather they also wore a variety of colors.

The first American Thanksgiving was not celebrated by the Pilgrims in Plymouth in 1621. Several others predate this, including ones in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565; Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and the Berkeley Hundred in the Virginia Colony in 1619. The myth of the Pilgrims being first was promoted by nineteenth-century writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who was pushing for a national day of Thanksgiving.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish slavery in the United States. It only applied to states that had seceded from the Union, who ignored it. The Union's slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia were exempt. Slavery was not abolished until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865.

The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was made up by a newspaper reporter looking for a good story.

Albert Einstein never failed a math class and had mastered calculus by age fifteen.

THE REAL MCCOYS

The Hatfields were from West Virginia and the McCoys from Kentucky. The two clans were separated by the Tug Fork River.

The feud between the two families resulted in twelve deaths between 1880 and 1891.

The U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the feud after a Kentucky posse captured eight Hatfields and brought them across state lines for trial.

In 1888, the eight Hatfields were tried and convicted for having killed one of the McCoys. Seven got life sentences and another was hanged. This essentially put an end to the feud.

In 1979, members of each family reunited on the TV game show
Family Feud
. One of the prizes was a pig that was kept on stage for the run of the weeklong series of shows. (Ownership of a pig was one of the root causes of the feud.)

THAT'S A LOTTO MONEY

Legend has it that writer/philosopher Voltaire and a friend noticed that the prize in the French lottery in 1728 was much bigger than the cost of all the tickets being sold. They formed a syndicate and bought up all the tickets, winning a large sum of money.

IT TAKES TWO

The tango was considered an obscene lower-class dance, until it migrated to Europe in the early twentieth century and was embraced by Parisian high society.

FAR-OFF FRIENDS

In 1777, Morocco became the first foreign country to recognize America as a unified sovereign nation.

THAT BITES

Alexander I of Greece died in 1920, after a macaque on the palace grounds bit him and the wound became infected.

WELCOME TO THE PARTY

The Republican Party began as an antislavery third party and quickly became a force in the 1856 and 1860 elections. Before this, the Democrats and the Whigs were the main parties.

N
ot
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ecessarily the
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ews

MON DIEU!

In 2012, a 140,000-square-foot French château was bulldozed to the ground by mistake. The construction company was supposed to raze a smaller structure on the property and refurbish the mansion. Somehow they got confused.

ARE WE THERE YET?

In December 2012, a 125-mile-long traffic jam on Russia's M-10 highway stretched from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Fog and heavy snow were to blame.

HO, HO, OH NO!

In 2011, an eighteen-year-old California man got stuck in the chimney of his family's home while trying to sneak in after his curfew. He was found with his feet hanging in the fireplace. Firefighters pulled the Santa wannabe back up and out using ropes and a ladder.

PISS DRUNK

In 2012, a Colorado woman was arrested after punching a $30 million Clyfford Still oil painting and then pulling down her pants and urinating on it. The drunken art critic, Carmen Tisch, caused $10,000 worth of damage to the picture hanging in a Denver museum.

HIGHWAY TO HELL

In 2012, a New Hampshire women, one Joyce Coffey, was arrested four times in twenty-six hours—three times for playing the AC/DC song “Highway to Hell” too loudly and once for throwing a frying pan at her nephew.

BUSTED

In 2012, a Panamanian woman was arrested at a Barcelona, Spain, airport after coming in on a flight from Bogotá, Colombia, when security agents noticed that she had bloody bandages under her breasts. She was taken to a hospital, where doctors removed two breast implants that were packed with three pounds of cocaine.

FATAL PHONE

In 2012, a Ugandan man contracted the deadly Ebola virus after stealing a cell phone from a patient quarantined at a hospital. The man subsequently was admitted to the same hospital for treatment.

WHIZ KIDS

American Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to build a nuclear fusion reactor, at age fourteen, in 2008.

Six-year-old Lori Anne Madison of Virginia in 2012 became the youngest person ever to qualify for the National Spelling Bee.

FLOTSAM FLOTILLA

In 2012, a huge mass of pumice, eight times the area of Rhode Island, was found floating in the South Pacific. (Pumice is a lightweight volcanic stone that floats in water and is commonly used to smooth skin.)

WHERE'S WILSON?

Sixty-seven-year-old Jennifer Wilson of England spent much of her life searching for her twin sister from whom she was separated at birth. In 2010, a TV production company, doing a show on reuniting families, finally found her sister, who had always lived just three miles away and had the same dentist and doctor.

IN YOUR HONOR

Former Arapahoe County, Colorado, sheriff Patrick Sullivan Jr. was arrested in 2011 on charges that he traded drugs for sex with other men. The former national “Sheriff of the Year,” ironically, was sent to the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility, which is named in his honor.

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

In 2011, a Kansas couple was held captive in their home by criminal Jesse Dimmick, who was on the run from the police. Dimmick, who had a knife, offered the couple an unspecified amount of money if they wouldn't call the authorities. When Dimmick fell asleep, they did so. Dimmick, who is serving an eleven-year sentence for the kidnapping, sued the couple for breach of oral contract and is seeking damages for the $235,000 medical bill he incurred after police shot him while they were rescuing the couple.

NO HORSING AROUND

In 2011, Congress removed restrictions on the sale of horsemeat for human consumption in the United States.

DYING TO MAKE A POINT

In 1993, Toronto lawyer Garry Hoy died while demonstrating to a group of his partners that windows on the twenty-fourth floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable. Hoy threw himself against a window. It didn't break, but popped out of its frame, falling twenty-four floors to the ground, along with Hoy.

EASY COME, EASY GO

In 2011, a Utah man wrecked a $380,000 Lamborghini Murciélago roadster he had won in a convenience store contest, a mere six hours after picking it up.

CHUBSY-UBSY

In 2011, there was a three-year-old boy in China who weighed 132 pounds. He had weighed just 5.7 pounds at birth.

THAT'S USING YOUR HEAD

In July 2011, a motorcyclist in Onondaga, New York, riding without a helmet to protest the state's helmet law, died when he flipped over the handlebars and landed on his head on the pavement. Police said he probably would have lived if he had been wearing a helmet.

FLIGHTS OF FRIGHT

On a 2011 Comtel Air flight from India to England, the plane landed in Vienna and the crew demanded hundreds of dollars from each passenger for fuel if they wished to continue on to their destination. Airline officials said later that none of the cash was given to the company.

In 2012, a British Airways flight from Miami to London announced while over the Atlantic Ocean that the plane was about to make a water landing. The warning was repeated again before the crew calmed the passengers down and told them the announcement had been made in error.

In 2011, a pilot in a holding pattern around New York's LaGuardia Airport stepped out of the cabin for a moment to use the restroom. He somehow got locked inside and could not get out. He pounded on the door to alert passengers. A man with a thick accent knocked on the cockpit door to tell the copilot, but spooked him instead. Thinking terrorists were taking over the plane, the copilot radioed for help. Fighter jets were alerted and the FBI met the plane upon landing.

In 2012, the TSA at Las Vegas McCarran Airport refused to allow a woman on a plane because there was gel-like frosting on a cupcake she had in her carry-on bag.

In 2011, model Lauren Scruggs was severely injured when she accidentally walked into the still-spinning propeller of the small plane she had just flown in. Scruggs lost her left hand and eye and had extensive facial damage.

In 2010, a teen snuck into the wheel well of a plane waiting to take off from Charlotte Douglas International Airport and bound for Boston. He plummeted to his death when the landing gear was lowered outside of Boston before landing. Naturally, his parents have sued the airline.

Also in 2010, a small plane in the Democratic Republic of the Congo crashed, killing twenty passengers, after a crocodile smuggled on board got loose and caused everyone to rush to the front of the craft in a panic and the pilot to lose control. One passenger and said crocodile survived.

In 2006, an unnamed airline mechanic was sucked into the engine of a jetliner at El Paso International Airport, with predictable results.

NO TANKS!

In 2004, the city council of Monza, Italy, outlawed the keeping of goldfish in curved bowls since the bent light would give them a distorted view of the outside world.

GUEST SERVICES

Vanisha Mittal, daughter of a billionaire steel magnate, married investment banker Amit Bhatia in 2005. The $60 million wedding featured invitations mailed in silver boxes, plane fare, accommodations at five-star hotels in Paris and Versailles, and gift bags filled with jewels for the guests. Kylie Minogue performed at the reception.

STICKUPS

In 2008, in broad daylight, the Harry Winston jewelry store in Paris was robbed of jewels with a retail value of $110 million. One year earlier, the same store had been robbed of 10 million euros worth of jewels.

In 2011, a modern-day Robin Hood was arrested shortly after holding up a Boston bank and then being found handing out cash to children in a park.

BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME

In 2012, a man apparently trying to kill himself went over Niagara Falls and survived the 180-foot drop, swimming to shore afterward.

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and his wife both attempted suicide by taking overdoses of prescription sleeping pills on the Christmas Eve after his crimes were exposed. While both survived, the Madoffs' son, Mark, hung himself in December 2010.

RAILROADED

A Chicago court ruled that a man who was killed by a train while crossing the tracks at a station could be held liable after part of his body flew into and injured a bystander. In 2008, an unspecified part of Hiroyuki Joho's body was flung into Gayane Zokhrabov. She sued Joho's estate for damages and won. The court found that “it was reasonably foreseeable” that the train would hit Joho and hurl his body toward the platform.

In 2012, two different men were killed on opposite sides of the state of Florida (435 miles away) by the same train on the same day.

NICE TRY

In 2011, one Michael Fuller was arrested at a North Carolina Walmart after trying to pay for his purchase with a $1 million bill. He insisted it was real and refused to leave until police arrived on the scene.

GET STUFFED

In 2011, six-hundred-pound Donna Simpson, holder of the Guinness World Record for the “World's Heaviest Mother,” shut down her “feederism” website and decided to promote healthy eating. “Feederish” is a type of fetish where people get excitement by watching extremely fat women eat. Simpson pulled in ninety thousand dollars a year from subscribers who would pay to view her stuff herself with various foods, while trying to pack on as many pounds as possible. Some men would even send her additional money and a grocery shopping list with foods they wanted to see her eat.

Twenty-one-year-old Kerry Trebilcock of England has eaten more than four thousand sponges and one hundred pounds of organic soap since being infected with hookworm in 2008. She enjoys the sponges with BBQ sauce or ketchup.

BIGGEST LOSER

Englishman Paul Mason used to be billed as the “world's fattest man.” By the end of 2012, he had shed 650 pounds after a gastric bypass procedure and diet modification. Before this, he weighed 1,000 pounds and ate twenty thousand calories a day, including up to forty bags of potato chips.

BOOZE NEWS

The American Automobile Association (AAA) has instituted a “Tipsy Tow” program, where members too drunk to drive themselves home can call and get their car towed home and a ride with the driver. The program is offered in select areas on certain days, such as Thanksgiving, New Year's Eve, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Super Bowl Sunday.

DR. NO!!

In 2011, a woman in Florida, who aspired to work in a nightclub, went to a person she believed to be a doctor to have her buttocks enhanced. Oneal Ron Morris, a man posing as a woman and claiming to be an MD, injected the woman's behind repeatedly with a mixture of cement, flat tire sealant, and mineral oil for the sum of seven hundred dollars. Predictably, the woman ended up hospitalized.

In 2012, a fake doctor in San Francisco performed liposuction on a woman while smoking a cigar and making her hold her IV bag during the procedure. The woman, who thought she was getting a real bargain, came to regret her choice of “physicians” after the inevitable complications developed.

Among the bizarre items found in people's rectums at emergency rooms in 2011 were a Buzz Lightyear doll, a Barbie, a large kitchen knife, and a revolver. The explanations of how these things got there were often as bizarre as the items themselves.

Like a scene from a bad movie, Pennsylvanian Ed Juchniewicz died in 1991 after the unattended ambulance stretcher he was strapped to rolled down a hill and turned over.

In 2001, six-year-old New Yorker Michael Colombini was killed during an MRI procedure. A portable oxygen tank was brought near the machine's magnetic field and flew into the boy's head.

In 2010, a U.S. military veteran's penis got frostbitten in a VA medical center and required amputation after nurses left an ice pack on his member for nineteen straight hours following a surgical procedure down there.

In 1974, British health food advocate Basil Brown died after drinking too much carrot juice.

ONE WEDDING AND A FUNERAL

In 2012, a Thai man married his girlfriend of ten years after she died, in a combination wedding/funeral ceremony. She was buried in her wedding dress.

PIGGING OUT