Random Fun Facts That Will Amaze You - Part 5

Do you need more trivia capable of winning a bar bet or making you look incredibly smug at a family gathering? Just read on, you never know when these random facts might come in handy!

It’s Illegal to Carry Ice Cream in Your Back Pocket in Kentucky

Picture this: it’s a scorching hot day in Kentucky, so you treat yourself to a cone from an ice cream truck. Suddenly, a woman asks you to hold her two dogs while she ties her shoelace. With no other option, you stick the cone in your back pocket, praying that the chocolate double-scoop doesn’t make an embarrassing mess on your shorts.

Before you know it, you’re under arrest. Turns out it’s totally illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket in Kentucky.

This bizarre law actually has nothing to do with the absurdity of storing frozen treats in stupid places, and everything to do with horse theft. Back in the 1800s, scheming horse nappers came up with a fool-proof plan to lure horses back to their homes without even touching them.

All they had to do was stick an ice cream cone in their back pocket and wander past a hungry horse in the hope that it would follow. You can hardly be accused of any wrongdoing if the horse willingly followed you, right? That is until someone laid down this law to prevent such a crime from ever happening again!

Turtles Can Breathe Out of Their Butts

During cold winters, most turtle species enter a temporary slowed-down state known as brumation. They take extended naps throughout this period in two strange ways: either by burying themselves in mud or sleeping underwater. If humans were to do either of these things, we’d obviously die from lack of oxygen, but turtles have a secret weapon: their butts.

Turtles do not just stick their butt out of the water and use it like a snorkel but they poop, pee, mate, and give birth through one common hole known as the cloaca, or "one-hole-fits-all" as some like to call it.

Some species of aquatic turtles also have structures known as cloacal bursae which are equipped with blood-vessel-filled tissues that oxygen can be absorbed through. For most turtles, butt-breathing is only about 20% as efficient as respiring, so they still have to come up for air. The Australian White-throated snapping turtle, aptly nicknamed the bum-breathing turtle, can actually get 70% of its oxygen this way.

The Man Who Invented Comic Sans Has Only Used It Once

Just the name Comic Sans is enough to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has ever received a poorly-designed funeral invitation mindlessly scribbled out in the clown-like, bouncy font everyone loves to hate.

If this heinous lettering is enough to send shivers down your spine, then this information is sure to be a comfort: the guy who invented it hates it just as much as you do. Vincent Connare, who created the fun-loving font in 1994, has openly admitted his regret for ever unleashing on the world.

In fact, Connare has only ever used the font once in a strongly-worded letter of complaint to the broadband company Sky, which earned him a disappointing $12 refund. That’s all very well, Vincent, but no amount of regret is going to erase the permanent scourge you’ve placed on society.

Why Are Baguettes Long and Thin?

There are some questions you never knew you needed the answer to, and this is probably one of them. The baguette is an iconic staple of French culture; there’s even a proper way to carry one under one's arm and a correct way to eat it by breaking off the heel to munch the way home from the bakery. But when it comes to the elongated shape, legends abound.

One theory is that, in 1920, a Parisian law decreed that bakers couldn’t work before 4 AM, which only gave them enough time to prepare long, thin loaves that would cook quicker. A more popular (and more amusing) theory involves our good friend Napoleon Bonaparte.

The story goes that soldiers in the Napoleonic wars needed to carry their bread on foot, but backpack space was limited. The solution? Napoleon commissioned a long, thin bread that you could stick down your trouser leg instead.

A Reindeer Lived Inside a British Submarine For 6 Weeks During WW2

This probably sounds like the plot for a bad Hallmark Christmas movie, but it’s totally true. Back in 1941, the 56-man British crew of the T-class HMS Trident stopped in the Soviet Union for repairs when Captain Geoffrey Sladen was invited to dine with the Russian admiral.

Apparently, Sladen mentioned that his wife had trouble pushing her pram through the snow in England, so the admiral presented him with a useful gift: a fully-grown reindeer. The crew affectionately named the animal Pollyanna, lowered her into the submarine through the torpedo tube, and went on their way.

In the 6 weeks Pollyanna spent at sea, she quickly burned through the barrel of moss provided by the admiral and started gorging herself on condensed Carnation milk instead. Her appetite was so voracious that she even consumed the navigation chart intended to guide the men back to British soil.

Miraculously, the crew did make it back to Blighty, but there was one problem: Pollyanna wouldn’t fit back through the tube. Using a dockside winch and a broomstick, the reindeer was freed from the submarine and given to London Zoo, where she lived for 5 years until her death in 1947, the same year the HMS Trident was decommissioned.

Otters Have a Secret Pocket for Their Favourite Rock

You may already know that otters hold hands with their loved ones while sleeping so that they don’t drift apart, but otters have an even cuter trick up their sleeve: they have folds of loose skin across their chest which create a handy pouch under each of their forearms that are large enough to keep stuff in.

Yaku's Pocket by Shedd Aquarium

Generally, they use these pockets to store food gathered on dives, but there’s another vital item every otter carries with them: their favorite rock. Sea otters use rocks to crack open clams, crabs, and other shellfish on their tummies, and they can hammer abalone shells as quickly as 45 times in just 15 seconds.

When they find the perfect rock with optimum cracking abilities, it would be silly to let it go, so they just stick them in their secret pocket and take it with them instead.

Queen Elizabeth II Had a Stunt Double

Having a stunt double doesn't mean the Queen got fired out of a cannon or thrown off speeding trains. In fact, the arrangement was more of a stand-in role, because standing and waving is mostly what the queen did. Of course, this came with its own risks, and one of those was sunlight getting in the queen's eyes, which would be humiliating on a national scale. That’s where Ella Slack comes in.

Slack started off as a manager for the BBC’s sports and events department which also involved coordinating royal broadcasts. While filming at The Cenotaph war memorial one day, the Queen was irked by her position conflicting with the sun. Realizing that she had the same frame, height, and looks as the Queen, Slack volunteered to do a dummy run in her place to find the best spot to stand.

Before she knew it, Slack was traveling in the royal carriage, accompanying the royals in their boat and attending every public event as the designated rehearsal queen. She may have gotten closer to the royals than most, but there was one strict condition: she was never allowed to sit on the throne, she could only squat above it.

You Should Never Eat a Polar Bears Liver

In survival situations, people have been known to eat just about anything, but there’s one thing you should definitely stay away from no matter how hungry you are: polar bear liver.

Thanks to their rich diet of fish and seals, polar bears consume a huge amount of vitamin A, which gets concentrated in the liver. The Polar bear liver is so high in Vitamin A that humans could get their daily allowance of 0.9mg of the stuff just by eating one-tenth of a single organ.

If you somehow came into possession of a polar bear liver and decided to spread it out as per your daily allowance, it would probably contain enough Vitamin A to last you about 143 years.

But there’s a catch: ingesting any more than just a tiny sliver can cause Vitamin A poisoning known as acute hypervitaminosis A, which results in vomiting, hair loss, bone damage, and death. In fact, the polar bear liver is so potent that a single organ would be lethal enough to wipe out 52 adult humans in one sitting; that’s one way to ruin a dinner party.

Jellyfish Snot Can Sting You

For many years, people snorkeling, surfing, and fishing in the shallow waters around the Floridian coast have been terrorized by a mysterious phenomenon called stinging waters. Jellyfish are a nuisance enough as it is, but being stung without even coming into contact with one? That’s just unfair.

At first, the sensation was blamed on detached tentacles that might be floating around in the water, but in February 2020 researchers made a surprising discovery: jellyfish snot can actually sting you. The upside-down jellyfish or Cassiopea Xamachana, which can be found in shallow tropical waters, has developed an amusing and kind of lazy way of hunting its prey.

The creatures lay on their backs and throw globules of venom-enriched mucus into the surrounding water, which can cause an uncomfortable itching sensation when humans touch it. The snot grenades might not be lethal, but these jellies need to learn some manners before sneezing on innocent bystanders.

The Spanish National Anthem Has No Words

Avid sports fans might have noticed that when it’s time to sing the national anthem at the World Cup, Spain’s players are left awkwardly swaying and half-heartedly humming along. That’s because the Spanish National Anthem is actually a totally wordless song.

Anthem of Spain v Germany (FIFA World Cup 2010) by Football Anthems

The Marcha Real was first composed in 1761 by Manuel de Espinosa de los Monteros, who wrote the tune as a military march for the Spanish Infantry. In the 1770s, Charles III declared it the official march of Spain, and it later became the country’s national anthem, except no one could agree on what the words should be.

When Spain moved toward democracy after the death of the dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975, the lyrics that had been used up to that point were dropped. In 2008, Spain’s Olympic Committee decided enough was enough a new suggestion was submitted; except the first line, “Viva España”, was the exact same as the Francisco Franco version.

After the nationalistic tone was harshly criticized the new lyrics were scrapped after 5 days, and it was back to awkward humming.

Dead People Get Goosebumps

If there’s one question most of us would like answered it’s this one: what happens when you die? Even though we wrote a whole article about it, there is no definitive answer, besides the fact that you’ll probably still get goosebumps.

In the first few hours after we die, all the joints and muscles in our bodies stiffen through a little process called rigor mortis, which can leave us looking like scarecrows.

Muscle relaxation relies on a compound known as adenosine triphosphate or ATP and when this is depleted it causes contraction instead. When that happens, millions of hair follicles, home to muscles known as arrector pili, also contract, causing tiny depressions we know as goosebumps.

Why You Should Always Have Copper Door Handles

Copper might not seem as attractive as sleek stainless steel when it comes to interior décor but choosing substance over style could actually save your life. Ancient civilizations have recognized the intrinsic value of copper for around 5000 years, and it might be time for this underappreciated material to make a much-needed comeback.

When bacteria like E-Coli, superbugs or MRSA, and viruses (including the one you're probably thinking about) land on most hard surfaces they usually live for 4-5 days, but copper is a whole different kettle of fish.

That’s because copper is a natural, passive, antimicrobial material that can self-sterilize its surface without any need for electricity or bleach. When nasty bacteria and viruses land on it, they’re flooded with copper ions which penetrate the cells like bullets and destroy them right down to the reproductive blueprints or nucleic acids inside.

Maybe it’s time to start switching out your doorknobs, drinking from copper cups, and donning copper-plated armor whenever you leave the house.

I hope you were amazed at these weird and wonderful trivia facts. If you want to find out more interesting facts, you might want to take a look at our whole fun facts series. Thanks for reading.