Strange But True: Potatoes considered cruel
By Lucie Winborne
In mid-18th century France, eating potatoes was considered cruel and unusual punishment since they were not only thought of as feed for livestock, but believed to cause leprosy in humans. The fear was so widespread that the French passed a law banning them in 1748.
Every year, Americans alone create around one-fifth of the world’s trash.
Some of the boulevard medians in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have 8- to 10-feet deep bunkers with toilets in them, originally installed in the 1930s as a convenience for city workers who were out and about all day without access to a bathroom.
According to the head of MI6, if Ian Fleming’s iconic hero James Bond were real, he wouldn’t be allowed to work for British intelligence due to lack of the required emotional intelligence, respect for the law and teamwork abilities.
Colombian pop singer Shakira was rejected for the choir in her Catholic school because her music teacher thought that her vibrato was too strong and that she sounded “like a goat.”
In 1907, Parisian waiters went on strike for the right to grow a moustache.
Cruise control in cars was invented in 1948 by the blind inventor and mechanical engineer Ralph Teetor. The idea was inspired by his frustration with his driver’s habit of speeding up and slowing down as he talked.
There is a material called FOGBANK, used by the U.S. Department of Energy, the precise nature of which is classified and so top secret and compartmentalized that the government once actually “forgot” how to make it due to a lack of actual records and dwindling institutional knowledge.
A sloth takes two weeks to digest the food it’s eaten.