15 Trivia Tidbits For Your Thursday
![15 Trivia Tidbits For Your Thursday](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/5/1/790951_320x180.jpg)
Have you ever taken a look at the world? That place is incredible -- it’s like a huge, sprawling, immeasurable, incredibly detailed open world game. Every step of the way you find stuff you didn’t expect, like these facts here we have looted for you.
Some people are into mundane and predictable facts. We call them ‘sheeple’. Not us, we love our facts wild, unpredictable and RANDOM. If an unsurprising fact waltzes in the door, guess what? We tell that thing to scram. That’s right, we are on a no nonsense mission to find out some really bizarre and surprising things.
For example, Jeff Bezos might not be the next Mother Teresa but the figures describing his absolutely unbelievable net worth are not exactly accurate. To be fair though, he is ‘launch myself into space’ level rich, so that’s pretty good.
So scroll on at these wild facts while we try to figure out how many FPS this thing runs on. (Probably a lot).
![Harrison Ford was a pot dealer to the stars. Ford hung around Hollywood for over a decade before his big break, taking bit parts while working as a carpenter, and also hooking up people with weed. He had -profile clients - Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was very surprised to see her dealer in Star Wars.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/6/790946.jpg)
![We almost got a Taxi Driver video game. In 2005, game developer Papaya Studio thought it’d be cool to put the player in Travis Bickle’s shoes, apparently thinking that the movie was about how awesome he is. The game was never released, as the publisher ran out of money.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/9/790949.gif)
More: For Some Reason We Almost Got A 'Taxi Driver' Video Game
![Vin Diesel became Groot because fans blindsided him. Diesel was caught off guard during a Comic-Con, when fans asked him about his (then merely introductory) meetings with Marvel. Fearing to be a killjoy, he blurted out something about big news coming soon. Marvel saw that as an opportunity and offered him Groot right away.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/5/790945.jpg)
![Conan and Cthulhu exist in the same fictional universe. H. P. Lovecraft and Conan creator Robert E. Howard exchanged tons of letters, and kept working shout-outs to each other's work into their stories. So Cimmeria is a part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and R'lyeh exists in Conan's universe. Sadly, the two big Cs never met.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/8/790948.jpg)
More: 5 Weird Details Of Fictional Universes Nobody Told You
![Kids today are actually less narcissistic than previous generations. After testing tens of thousands of students over decades, psychologists have concluded that ratings in the Narcissistic personality Inventory Scale have been dropping, not rising. (While not as technical, we have to wonder at people who claim, my generation is much better than these young'uns.)](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/7/790937.jpg)
![Jeff Bezos isn't actually that rich. There's a lot wrong with Amazon and other corporations, but the headlines that Bezos or anyone else is worth 700 bajillions are misleading Those figures are about the market value of their stocks - so it's cash they could have, in theory, if they sold all their shares (which isn't an easy thing).](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/5/0/790950.jpg)
![Oscar the Grouch is weirdly related to racism. Oscar isn't a grouch just because he's cranky - grouch is canonically his race. He hails from a city where everyone is a grouch. It's not such a stretch to call that segregation - he was intentionally created to represent racial and ethnic diversity.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/9/790939.jpg)
![Tarzan originally had superpowers. Edgar Rice Burroughs believed British aristocrats were racially superior to everyone else. So when this English scion was left in the wild to fend for himself, he naturally grew up to lord over this harsh environment - even developing superhuman strength and agility.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/4/790944.jpg)
More: 5 Classic Characters Nearly Every Adaptation Gets Wrong
![Teddy Roosevelt publicly humiliated a young Dr. Seuss. In 1918, future Seuss (then a teen Boy Scout) was to get a medal from President Roosevelt for selling a lot of war bonds. But due to a mistake, Roosevelt had the kid removed from the stage, thinking he shouldn't be there. Seuss said the episode gave him stage fright forever.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/2/790942.jpg)
![Denim is awful for the environment. Just growing the cotton requires a huge amount of water - and then the chemical runoff from the dyes is poured into rivers by the barrel. Satellite photos show whole rivers stained a stunning Prussian Blue.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/7/790947.jpg)
![An ''Unknown Person has been jailed for years. French citizen Herman Emmanuel Fankem was arrested for fraud in Canada in 2013 but then this turned out to be a fake identity, and the man refused to answer any questions. He's still in a Canadian jail, as they can't deport him until they find out who he is and where he's from.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/8/790938.jpg)
More: 5 Outlandish Criminals Who Sound Like The Stuff Of Legend
![Doctors used malaria to treat syphilis. Before antibiotics, one of the only effective treatments against syphilis was to infect the patient with malaria. Once the high fever did away with the STD, the doctors would treat the malaria with quinine.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/0/790940.jpg)
![The MCU is based on an edgy comic. A lot of staples of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (like Tony Stark's personality) come from The Ultimates, which Marvel started publishing in the early 2000s. The edgiest parts, though (like Wanda and Pietro's incest) were thankfully left out.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/3/6/790936.jpg)
More: The 'Avengers' Comic That Basically Created The Modern Superhero Movie
![Lightsaber fencing is a real sport. The game is a lot like traditional fencing, but the points are scored differently (nobody gets their limbs chopped off -- polycarbonate LED lightsabers are used). It has been registered as official by the French Fencing Federation.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/1/790941.gif)
More: 4 Serious Sports (That Sound Like They Were Invented As A Joke)
![A New Zealand city has an official wizard. Since the 1970s, the city of Christchurch pays lan Brackenbury Channell a stipend of about $10,000 a year for acting as the city's wizard. Sadly, he doesn't cast spells - he's paid for his services as a comedian, educator, tourist attraction, and living work of art.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/9/4/3/790943.jpg)
More: New Zealand's Government Has An Official Wizard On Payroll