15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread
![15 Random Facts to Awake Your Sense of Wonder, Curiosity, and/or Dread](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/8/787348_320x180.jpg)
When was the last time you learned something interesting and completely useless? Yeah, it was probably right here on Cracked just a minute ago. Something about the sex life of lion’s mane jellyfish, probably. Why stop there? Here you have some more juicy, juicy facts for you to sink your teeth into right now. As the title says, wonder, curiosity, and dread are the main emotions these should target, because those are the main emotions any good, interesting tidbit of knowledge should evoke. Wonder because you’ll be wondering “where did they find this?” Curiosity because you’ll be thinking “I’m curious how Cracked employees are spending their time trying to find this stuff.” And dread because you’ll be fearing that “my god, what sort of existence are they leading, digging through the bowels of the internet like this?” Don’t worry for us, dear reader, we have a job to do and we’re going to do it.
![Disney workers were forced to share underpants. As regular underwear doesn't play well with the costumes, Disney's costumed characters are issued specially designed shorts and jockstraps - which until 2001, they had to share from a common pool. It took the unions intense negotiations to change that.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/4/787334.jpg)
More: Disney Workers Fought For The Right To Have Their Own Underpants
![Pepsi briefly had the sixth most powerful navy in the world. As payment for a huge shipment of cola to the USSR in the '80s, Pepsi got $3 billion worth of warships and submarines. Fortunately, they didn't need to invade anywhere, PS having nowhere left to conquer.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/5/787335.jpg)
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![Redshirts are actually less likely to die than other crew members. Yes, most of the dead on Star Trek wear red, but also red shirts greatly outnumber other shirt colors. Fan and mathematician James Grime calculated that about 10% of the Enterprise's redshirts died during the show, compared to 18% of goldshirts.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/4/787344.jpg)
![Big Bird taught Giancarlo Esposito to work with Baby Yoda. Esposito has said that a Sesame Street gig early in his career prepared him for The Mandalorian. Big Bird taught me how to play with someone who was inside the suit, who was a real human being, which all led me to being able to work with Baby Yoda.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/2/787332.jpg)
![Bill Burr (not the comedian) came up with all those password rules you hate. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation marks, unholy glyphs from forgotten languages... Burr, a government IT specialist, created all those rules for passwords in 2003 - but he intended them for administrators, not regular users. Today he's sorry for all the pain he's caused.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/1/787341.jpg)
![The TV version of The Thing is almost a different movie. The edit of John Carpenter's movie CBS debuted in 1986 was weird, even by TV edit standards. Not only was a lot of the gore cut out, but a voiceover narration was added in for some reason. Also, the ending is made much less ambiguous by heavily implying the Thing escaped.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/6/787346.jpg)
![Elves get married by having sex. Tolkien's notes and rought drafts published after his death reveal that elves can't get naughty out of wedlock, as getting naughty results in wedlock. They do have wedding ceremonies, but those are a formality - it's the act of bodily union that seals the deal.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/3/787333.jpg)
More: 5 Weird Details Of Fictional Universes Nobody Told You
![John Steinbeck wrote an unpublished werewolf novel Steinbeck is well known for The Grapes of Wrath, and tragically much less well known for Murder at Full Moon, a potboiler about werewolves he wrote with a pseudonym. Steinbeck's estate selfishly refuses to let us read it.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/5/787345.jpg)
More: Give Us John Steinbeck's Werewolf Pulp Fiction, Cowards
![The Soviets sent the first woman into space because of a misunderstanding. Skydiver Valentina Tereshkova was rushed into orbit in 1963, to beat the U.S. at the women in space game. Except that America wasn't training female astronauts- the Soviets were just misinterpreting a news report.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/2/787342.jpg)
More: 5 Amazing Firsts In Women's History (That Were Total Accidents)
![A Good Samaritan was seen as a contradiction. Israelites of the time were prejudiced against Samaritans. That's why the biblical parable underlines that this Samaritan was good-listeners wouldn't expect him to be.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/7/787337.jpg)
![Americans are more susceptible to placebos. Extensive research has found out that the placebo response to sham treatments has risen dramatically in the last two decades but only in the U.S. This is speculated to be caused by increasingly big and elaborate clinical studies, which may boost participants' expectations.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/9/787339.jpg)
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![Superheroes lost readers in the early '70s - but not the Hulk. After Marvel's massive success in the '60s, most of their heroes slumped in the new decade, except for Hulk, who actually gained readers. Hulk was seen more as a monster than a hero, and monsters were all the rage back then.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/3/787343.jpg)
More: Why Marvel Studios Is Branching Out Beyond Superheroes-- Sort Of
![That car window Garfield was a mistake. Not just in the obvious sense - the product wasn't supposed to be like that. Jim Davis' idea was to put velcro on the toy's paws to hang it on curtains, but the manufacturer used suction cups instead. Still, no one thought people would stick it to car windows.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/4/0/787340.jpg)
![Some scientists want to do away with the concept of fish. Yes, all fish kinda look alike, but that doesn't mean they're all related some are genetically closer to you than to other fish. That's why many experts have been advocating for replacing the category with others that make more biological sense.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/6/787336.jpg)
More: The Scientific Movement To Declare Fish A Myth (It Makes Sense. Really.)
![Die Hard became a classic because of a cardboard box. A fridge box fell off a truck in front of screenwriter Jeb Stuart's Car - - and before he found out it was empty, he thought he was going to die and that he should have patched things up with his wife while he had the chance. Then he decided the movie should be about a guy trying to do exactly that.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/3/3/8/787338.jpg)
More: How A Literal Piece Of Garbage Made 'Die Hard' Possible