Facts You Probably don’t Need
- Woodstock would have never happened if not for one dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, who allowed the festival to take place on his property after surrounding villages declined to host the event. As a result, the locals boycotted his products.
- Croissants are Austrian, not French.
- When the mummy of Ramesses Il was flown to Paris in 1974, he was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as “King (deceased)”.
- Letters sent to London Newspapers by Jack the Ripper had a sample of saliva from their stamps tested in 2006. The results seemed to point that the sender of the letters might have been a woman.
- The idea for the makeup brand Maybelline came to Thomas Lyle Williams when he noticed his older sister Mabel applying a mixture of Vaseline and coal dust to her eyelashes to give them a darker, fuller look.
- Shakespeare intentionally made grammatical errors to heighten the attention of his audiences before key points in his plays. This technique is called “functional shift” and his most common examples involve using a noun as a verb.
- NBA player Steven Adams is the youngest of 18 children. The boys in his family have an average height of 6 feet 9 inches and the girls average at 6 feet.
Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.
