12 Incorrigible Bits of Trivia That Are All Running for Speaker of the House

A pilot who was riding in the cockpit’s third seat — a courtesy extended to pilots who need to get home, or travel to their next assignment — stood up and attempted to disable the engines out of nowhere. He was subdued in time, and no damage had been done, but he’s since been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder. He reportedly hadn’t slept for 40 hours, and may have been on shrooms at the time.

The Animal Aging and Longevity Database lists nine animals whose rates of cellular deterioration stay the same, or even decrease, as they get older: the olm, the European fire salamander, Blanding’s turtle, the eastern box turtle, the rougheye rockfish, the red sea urchin, the ocean quahog clam, Schmidtea mediterranea and the Great Basin bristlecone pine.

In 1997, 10-year-old Natasha Demkina claimed she could suddenly see inside of bodies, and soon began diagnosing people with internal illnesses and injuries. She’s brought her talents all over the world, sometimes performing for skeptics and medical researchers. A scientist from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry likened her powers to those of a fortune teller: “I couldn't believe the discrepancy between what I was hearing and how impressed the individuals were.” 

Basically, her diagnoses didn’t match reality, but she made patients feel special, so they chose to believe she was magic

Douglas Brent Hegdahl III fell overboard while stationed on the USS Canberra, and was picked up by some Vietnamese fishermen. He was taken to a prison camp, where he acted like he was incapable of reading, writing or holding much of a conversation. They called him “The Incredibly Stupid One,” and let him roam the prison unattended. Big mistake! He spent his time memorizing the personal information of over 250 prisoners, plus other sensitive information he picked up, which he was able to relay to the U.S. Navy after his eventual release. He once got them to drive him into town to get new glasses — picking up crucial information on their whereabouts — and destroyed at least five trucks by shoving dirt into the gas tank.

There’s only one left (bummer), but it’s on the National Register of Historic Places (nice!). Preservation North Carolina spent $50,000 to restore it and turn it into a museum.

After winning a political debate with a red carnation on his lapel, that became McKinley’s calling card and lucky charm throughout his political career. He would often give away his carnation (and then replace it ASAP). One day at the beginning of his second term as president, he gave his lapel carnation to a little girl, saying, “I must give this flower to another little flower.” He was assassinated minutes later.

Chemist William Perkin was trying to reverse engineer quinine, an effective treatment for malaria, and noticed a byproduct of his concoction was a pretty pink/purple color. Having just accidentally invented the color mauve, he dropped the whole “curing malaria” thing and made a fortune selling his new dye.

The letter J was the last letter added to the English alphabet. For a while, J and I were the exact same letter, with the hook in the J being nothing more than a stylistic embellishment. For example, to denote the end of a string of i’s in a lower-case Roman numeral, the number 13 would be written as “xiij.” Italian grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to make a distinction between the J sound and the I sound.

It’s currently growing on the Old Vine House in Maribor, Slovenia, and is harvested to produce 100 miniature bottles of wine per year. 

The Dead Sea has about 34 percent salinity, but Don Juan Pond in Antarctica has been recorded at 44 percent. It’s so salty, it can get as cold as -58 degrees Fahrenheit before it freezes.

Squirrels use our electrical and telecommunications infrastructure like a playground, and it’s estimated they cause over 8 percent of all power outages in the U.S. Some experts believe that they pose a greater threat to the internet than cyber terrorism.

Green fluorescent protein has been incorporated into several animal species to help visualize various anomalies and areas of interest. Glow-in-the-dark pigs have been used to research organ transplantation, and glow-in-the-dark cats have been created to research AIDS.