Feel free to drop interesting but utterly trivial facts into this thread. To my best knowledge all of these are true.
When US President James Garfield was shot in the abdomen on July 2, 1881, no less than 16 doctors, attendants and others probed the wound with unclean fingers, one of which perforated his liver. By the time he died on September 19, they had turned a three-inch-deep wound into a horribly infected twenty inch-long hole from ribs to groin. He died in great pain from a heart attack caused by the infection. If they had left the bullet alone he would probably have lived.
To try to hide the awful inefficiency of his forced collective farming, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung increased grain exports from Communist China in the 1960s. When millions began to starve, he blamed sparrows for eating the grain and began a campaign to kill them all. By having the Chinese people clatter, shout, and make as much noise as they could, they prevented sparrows from landing until they died of starvation. This was not an unpopular move since fried sparrow is a Chinese delicacy. However without the sparrows to keep insect populations down, crops failed and up to 50 million people starved to death. Mao also never took or bath or brushed his teeth, on the rationale that "Tigers never brush their teeth." Mao is not generally used as a role model for modern democratic socialists, for some reason.
Early Christians feared aural sex and it was forbidden for women to show their naked ears in public.
The original British support for the Jewish national state of Israel in Palestine goes back as far as 1917, when a Zionist chemist called Chaim Weizmann found out how to synthesise acetone from bacteria and grain. This invention secured Britain a constant supply of explosives and propellants. It was partly because of this that Britain signed the Balfour Agreement agreeing to the reestablishment of Israel, should the chance arise.
The Hunza of Northwest Kashmir are the only racial group of humans on Earth totally free of cancer, and are known for their long lives.
85% of planet Earth's chlorophyll can be found in the sea. Use of persistent herbicides which then reach the sea threatens to kill all animal life on the planet by starving them of oxygen.
The anthem "God save the King/Queen" came directly from a tune composed by French nuns to celebrate sucessful surgery performed on King Louis XIV, when heard by a travelling Englishman. The English national anthem was written to celebrate the removal of an anal fistula on a French king.
It was the fashion in Elizebethan England for unmarried ladies to wear their breasts exposed. Queen Elizabeth I herself did so well into her 70s. This has never been recreated in movies.
When George Washington became president, average life expectancy for the new American people was 34.5 years for men and 36.5 years for women. The average woman gave birth to 13 children.
The United States Refuse Act of 1899 is a Federal statute that makes industrial discharges into bodies of water a crime. Every industrial discharge since then has been breaking the law. The statute has been ignored since.
