15 Trivia Tidbits That Steamed Our Broccoli
![15 Trivia Tidbits That Steamed Our Broccoli](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/7/846687_320x180.jpg)
Two soldiers stand on an old, rusty ladder. They are both wearing helmets with the visors closed, but one of them has a small mirror in his left hand and is using it to look into his own visor. He looks at himself for a moment, then turns to the other man and says: "I was a great magician when I was young."
The other soldier is wearing a helmet with its visor open and is looking out into the trench beyond, where a group of soldiers are walking past on patrol. That other soldier looks over to see what has caught his attention and sees that they are carrying guns, although the soldiers seem to be ignoring their existence as they walk past. "They're carrying weapons, aren't they?" he asks.
"Yes ... they are," sighs the soldier who used to be a magician.
"Say ... why did you stop doing magic, anyway? And join the army?"
"I learned something that drove me mad."
"What ... what .... what was it?"
"It was a list of fifteen facts, and it went ...
There is one freshwater lake with ocean life.
![Lake Nicaragua is the only freshwater lake in the world that has sharks. CRACKED.COM It is also the only fresh- water lake containing other oceanic animal life, including swordfish and tarpon, thanks to a volca- nic eruption cutting it off from the sea.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/8/846718.jpg)
Jumping beans have bugs in them.
![Mexican Jumping Beans jump because of moth larvae inside them. CRACKED.COM The moth lays its eggs in the flower of the plant, and the eggs are incorpo- rated into the seeds. The larvae then eat out the in- terior of the bean and live there.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/7/846717.jpg)
Light colors confuse and repel mosquitos.
![Wearing light colors will help repel mosquitos. CRACKED.COM Light colors don't produce shadows like darker shades. Mos- quitoes won't be able to sense your pres- ence as easily.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/9/846719.jpg)
Warren Beatty exterminated rodents before acting.
![Warren Beatty once worked as a rat-catcher. CRACKED.COM Beatty got a job at a theater in Washington DC, where his sister, Shirley MacLaine, had worked as an usher. Beatty was the doorman and handyman, enacting all sorts of pest control.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/6/846716.jpg)
Boxing champ Jack Johnson invented a wrench in prison.
![The household wrench was invented by boxing heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in 1922. CRACKED.COM Johnson created the device while serving a prison sentence for traveling across state lines with his white girlfriend.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/5/846715.jpg)
Val Kilmer’s dad bought Roy Roger’s ranch.
![Val Kilmer grew up on Roy Rogers' ranch. CRACKED.COM Kilmer's family lived next door to Roy, in Chatsworth, CA. When Roy died, Kilmer's father bought the ranch.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/4/846714.jpg)
Hitchcock lost his belly button after a surgery.
![Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. CRACKED.COM After one of his many surgeries, Hitchcock had his stomach stitched up the mid- dle, leaving him with- out the button.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/7/1/3/846713.jpg)
Howard Hughes lounged around naked watching movies and peeing in jars.
![Billionaire Howard Hughes stored his own urine in large bottles. GRAGKED.COM Hughes loved films so much he moved into a projection room at a Santa Monica film studio, where he would watch a marathon of movies, not even stopping for bath- room breaks.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/7/846697.jpg)
Birth control works on gorillas.
![Apes in ZOOS take human birth control as a means of animal population control. CRACKED.COM Other ZOO animals eat hormone-spiked food or have slow-releasing hor- mones implanted in their bodies.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/6/846696.jpg)
Da Vinci wrote backwards to safeguard his notes.
![Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards in his personal notes, but wrote the correct way for other people. GRACKED.COM Da Vinci wrote from right to left, in a mirror image, by choice. It's thought that he did this to make it harder for anyone to read his notes and steal his ideas.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/5/846695.jpg)
Caesar probably suffered from a series of mini-strokes.
![A new examination of Julius Caesar's health has found that he may have suffered from a series of strokes. CRACKED.COM Conventional wisdom has long held that he suffered from epilepsy, but his symptoms are more in line with Transient Ischemic At- tacks, more commonly known as mini-strokes.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/4/846694.jpg)
Oscars during WWII were made of painted plaster.
![Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of plaster. CRACKED.COM Following the war, the Academy invited recipi- ents to redeem the plas- ter figures for the real thing, made from solid bronze and plated in 24-karat gold.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/3/846693.jpg)
Cleopatra comes from a long line of incest.
![Cleopatra married two of her brothers. GRAGKED COM More than a dozen of Cleopatra's ancestors married cousins or sib- lings, and it's likely that her own parents were brother and sis- ter.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/2/846692.jpg)
Hitler loved the movie “King Kong.”
![King Kong was Adolf Hitler's favorite movie, despite being censored in Germany. CRACKED COM Nazi Health Officer, Professor Zeiss, didn't like the fact that it showed a blonde women of the German- ic type in the hand on an ape.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/1/846691.jpg)
LL Cool J stands for ‘Ladies Love Cool James.’
![Rapper LL Cool J's name is short for 'Ladies Love Cool James.' GRACKED.COM LL took the stage name at 16 when he signed with fledgling rap label Def Jam in 1984. his first single, I Need a Beat, sold more than 100,000 copies.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/0/846690.jpg)