16 Random Facts To Fire Off At Strangers (Or More Likely, Friends)
![16 Random Facts To Fire Off At Strangers (Or More Likely, Friends)](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/8/0/777380_320x180.jpg)
We're not suggesting that knowing a certain pop-culture fact will save your life. We're simply stating that you have no way of knowing whether or not it will ever happen. What about the Riddler? That guy proves that there are master criminals out there who enjoy asking questions and have an insatiable curiosity. What if a real-life Riddler apprehends you, let's call them the Fact Checker, and they say, "Answer these three questions: how much did Mr. Rogers weigh?" You have to respond because it's a Fact Checker, and he’s a supervillain who undoubtedly has you trapped in some kind of odd vat!
They're what happens when a pub quiz turns to robbery, kidnapping, and dressing up in ridiculous costumes! And, hey, even if that day never arrives, isn't it enjoyable to collect useless facts in the meantime? That's why we work so hard at Cracked to compile these trivia collections - to keep you engaged (and, should you be apprehended by a dastardly trivia hungry villain–alive.)
Look out for these bizarre facts that will make you hold your head high and say: WOAH, those are some wild facts.
![Marvel teased fans for decades with Bucky Barnes' return. For a long time, Marvel had a standing rule that Captain America's dead sidekick would never be brought back but that didn't mean they couldn't suggest the possibility to boost sales. Many fake Buckys came and went until the Winter Soldier storyline revived him for real in 2005.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/7/777377.jpg)
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![I Will Always Love You is about ending a commercial relationship. It certainly sounds like a love song, but Dolly Parton wrote it for her partner Porter Wagoner. He wasn't cool with Parton leaving to pursue a solo career, so she wrote the song to tell him that she really appreciated him, but needed to go.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/7/777367.jpg)
![The Jedi are officially wild sleazebags. While Jedi Knights are often assumed to abstain from sex, George Lucas has clarified that they can, as a matter of fact, bone. The thing that is forbidden is attachment, he has said. You just know the lightsaber-wielding players keep using relationships are against my religion as an excuse to run away from commitment.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/9/777369.jpg)
![Harry Potter has made owls miserable. The franchise's popularity caused a boom in the illegal owl market, which in turn led to a lot of neglected and abandoned pet owls. But not only were wild owls threatened multiple handlers who provided owls for the Harry Potter movies have been charged with causing their birds unnecessary suffering.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/6/777366.jpg)
More: 'Harry Potter' Has Been a Nightmare For Real-Life Owls
![Mr. Rogers had to weigh exactly 143 pounds. Mr. Rogers being Mr. Rogers, even his weirdest habits were wholesome deep down. In this case, he insisted that he always had to weigh 143 pounds, because 1-4-3 is the number of letters in I love you.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/2/777362.jpg)
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![Hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin have been lost to forgotten passwords. About 20% of all Bitcoins are locked in inaccessible digital wallets, in many cases because the owners have forgotten the password. As it turns out, people don't get better at remembering passwords when the stakes get higher.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/6/777376.jpg)
![The first Smurfs story was about a zombie apocalypse. The comic The Black Smurfs (which became The Purple Smurfs in the U.S.) had many tropes of modern zombie stories: Mindless ghoul Smurfs, an infection which spreads by biting, the near extinction of Smurfkind... And it came out more than 10 years before Night of the Living Dead.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/1/777361.jpg)
![Rats can live everywhere except in Alberta, Canada. Alberta takes rats as seriously as any other place else would take kaiju. There's an overzealous, government- sponsored rat-control program, and every resident is responsible to fight the whiskered menace. As a result, Alberta has been rat-free for the last 70 years.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/5/777365.jpg)
![Motley Crue demand a boa during their tours. A usual request in Motley Crue's tour contracts is a list of local AA venues, which makes sense considering their hard-partying history. Harder to explain are the submachine gun and the 12-foot-long boa constrictor.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/3/777373.jpg)
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![Blockbuster passed on the chance to buy Netflix. Back in 2000, a struggling Netflix kept aggressively shopping themselves to then- booming Blockbuster. But Blockbuster CEO John Antioco laughed at Netflix's pitch. The dot-com hysteria is completely overblown, he said, with epoch-making business acumen.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/1/777371.jpg)
![Godzilla began as a rip-off of an American movie. When plans for a post- war drama fell through, produce Tomoyuki Tanaka decided to use the budget for a copy of the recent The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Ray Harrysausen, who made the creature effects for The Beast, was still peeved about that decades later.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/8/777368.jpg)
More: 5 'Whoa' Godzilla Moments You Might Not Have Learned Of Yet
![Gamers are living regular lives on Grand Theft Auto. The most transgressive thing you can do in GTA Visn't shooting cops or pedestrians, but living a normal, unremarkable life as a law-abiding citizen - and Grand Theft Auto Roleplay is exactly about that. While the community has been around since 2019, it has become wildly popular during lockdown.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/0/777370.jpg)
More: Gamers Are Enjoying A Regular, Explosion Free Life In ... 'Grand Theft Auto?'
![The Chinese government banned puns. Wordplay is common in Mandarin language - or it was until 2014, when the government disallowed puns in TV and advertisements. The rationale was ostensibly to uphold traditional values and avoid cultural and linguistic chaos. Punbelievable.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/4/777374.jpg)
![Filing your taxes is complicated because of industry lobbying. Companies like Intuit (of TurboTax) and H&R Block are just too invested in you needing their services. That's why they keep pouring millions into preventing your taxes from getting easier to file. Then they pump out ads telling you how the only want to help you.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/3/777363.jpg)
![Elephants can learn to imitate human speech. A male Asian elephant named Koshik, at South Korea's Everland Zoo, uses his trunk to change the shape of his vocal tract and produce eerily human-like sounds. Koshik's vocabulary of five words doesn't sound like a lot, but it's still better than humans can imitate elephants.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/7/2/777372.jpg)
![A lot of groundbreaking AI is actually low-paid people Artificial intelligence is hot right now, but it's also expensive. Human workers, on the other hand, can be dirt cheap. Many Al-driven services (even robots) keep turning out to have little to no AI at all, with all the work actually done by lowly-paid contractors in developing countries.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/6/4/777364.jpg)
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