20 Random Facts You Need To Know

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Did you know that “posiwala” was an early 20th-century term for a man who is excessively fond of jam? It apparently originated in the military. I don’t know what was going on in the early 1900s that required this slang phrase. I do know that the definition of “posiwala” is just the first of our team’s 20 favorite facts from 20 years of Mental Floss.

My personal entry to this list was disturbingly obvious to anyone who knows: lobsters pee out of their faces! I will never get sick of this fact. The urine comes from glands located near the crustacean’s antennae. As Bob Bayer, the former head of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, told us a few years ago, they are greenish-brown spots that actually look like two pieces of snot—that’s the best way to describe them. You’d have to open them up to see them. Peeing at one another is part of both fighting and courtship for lobsters.

John Tyler isn’t generally considered one of the United States’ most impressive presidents. After coming to office following William Henry Harrison’s untimely demise in 1841, Tyler was sometimes called “his accident.” Not quite the great emancipator as presidential nicknames go, but Tyler did contribute one of our favorite presidential facts: one of his grandsons, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still alive as we film this video—not great-great-grandson; his dad’s dad was the 10th president of the United States. It helped that President Tyler’s son, Lion Gardner Tyler, sired his second son at a sprightly 74 years old.

While we’re talking about family connections, let’s discuss Mary Shelley and her beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary was so fond of her husband that after he drowned at age 29, she was said to have kept his heart, which somehow survived cremation, in a poem wrapped in silk—creepy yet romantic. That means Shelley very well could have been carrying around her husband’s heart in 1835.

That same year, in another unusual display of passion, dairy farmer Colonel Thomas S. Meacham sent President Andrew Jackson a wheel of cheese weighing in at nearly 1,400 pounds. At his last public reception as president, Jackson offered up his massive fromage to the masses, who quickly polished it off. As a contemporary noted, “A day more disgustingly spent in the president’s house there could not be.” With difficulty, pockets, hats, handkerchiefs—everything was filled with cheese. That was, to our eternal delight, not the end of Meacham’s impact on the White House. As then-Senator John Davis’s wife, Eliza, wrote in an 1838 letter, Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, had a hard task to get rid of the smell of cheese, and in the room where it was cut, he had to air the carpet for many days. Let that be a lesson to all those planning on cutting the cheese in the hallowed halls of government.

Another smelly fact: when a dead beached whale sat on the shore just south of Florence, Oregon, in 1970, it began to emit a horrifying stench. The Oregon State Highway Department’s solution to this problem involved a half-ton of dynamite. They decided to blow the whale up. A crowd of onlookers gathered at the scene, but their hopes for a wholesome whale-exploding version were soon dashed when the blast went off. The smell of putrid whale engulfed the area, and a large chunk of flying whale carcass did some damage to an Oldsmobile parked nearby. Even with the collateral damage, a large portion of the whale remained, and eventually, it had to be buried in the sand. It wasn’t the finest moment for municipal problem-solving, but the residents evidently have a good sense of humor about the whale incident. In 2020, Florence unveiled a new public space: Exploding Whale Memorial Park.

That’s not the only time government employees had an unconventional idea to deal with an animal issue. In 1948, beavers near Idaho’s Payette Lake were proving to be a nuisance for the new human residents. Officials of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game wanted to relocate the critters, but driving them through the undeveloped mountainous terrain would have been difficult. Past experience had taught authorities that beavers don’t like traveling via truck or pack animals, especially when there aren’t any roads to traverse. Instead, they decided to parachute the animals to their new homes in the wilderness. A total of 76 beavers were eventually moved via airplane and surplus World War II parachutes. You gotta wonder what those beavers were thinking as they parachuted out of the sky!

Let’s stay on the topic of ridiculous information about animals, which made up a surprising number of our top 20 favorite facts. Jurassic Park sound designer Gary Rydstrom was responsible, in part, for some awe-inspiring cinematic moments. Think about the noises made by the Brachiosaurus in that iconic early scene or the terrifying footsteps of the Tyrannosaurus rex. But Rydstrom’s true genius best shines through when you hear the movie’s velociraptors bark at one another. That sound was captured at the Marine World theme park—it’s two tortoises having sex! Showing commitment to his craft, Rydstrom explained to Vulture that tortoises mating can take a long time. You’ve gotta have plenty of time to sit around and watch and record them. We salute you, Gary Rydstrom!

Thomas Edison had some nerdy nicknames for his eldest children, Marion and Thomas Jr. The elder Edison had worked in the telegraph industry early in his career, and it seems he had some fond memories of that time. He called his oldest kids “Dot” and “Dash,” like the Morse code signals.

Wombats poop cubes. I don’t really feel like that fact needs any further analysis to merit its place on this list, but I will tell you that a group of researchers may have determined the cause of this unique fecal shape. Wombat intestines are stretchy but not uniformly so; the stiffer parts of the organs may help form the unusual sides of the fecal matter. There may actually be an evolutionary benefit to this squarish stool. Science news suggests that the shape lends itself to stacking and doesn’t easily roll off rocks like other feces would. This helps when wombats mark their territory, and the smell may even act as a nighttime navigational aid for the adorable marsupials.

If you enjoy pumpkin pie with your Thanksgiving meal, you may want to save a word of gratitude for our mastodon poop. Tens of thousands of years ago, North American megafauna had an affinity for wild gourds—the ancestors of squashes and pumpkins. This made the giant creature somewhat unusual amongst animals, as the plants had a bitter-tasting toxin in their flesh that kept many would-be gourd gourmands away. By dispersing the gourd seeds through their feces, creatures like mastodons helped widely propagate the crops until humans decided to domesticate them—up the squashes, that is.

Here’s a far more horrifying food fact: Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti once called for the abolition of pasta. Marinetti was a leading figure in the Futurist movement, which was a far-ranging school of thought that began in the art world and spread to other parts of society. Eventually, Futurists were advocating for a future in which the government replaced all food with nutritional pills, powders, and other artificial substitutes. Until chemists could create such innovations, the Futurists advocated for swapping out pasta with rice, which was easier to produce in Italy. They thought this would free Italy from expensive foreign wheat. Marinetti co-wrote the manifesto of Futurist cooking with Luigi Colombo. In it, they described pasta as an absurd Italian gastronomic religion and accused pasta lovers of being shackled by its ball and chain, like convicted lifers or carrying its ruins in their stomachs.

On the subject of foods and beverages for which moderation is advised, let’s talk about beer—specifically, Jane Austen’s beer, which she was fond of brewing. One of Austen’s specialties, aside from devastatingly romantic comedies and manners, was her spruce beer. She was also a big fan of mead. Apparently, it might sound like an odd hobby, but in the region Sierra and years prior, it wasn’t unusual for women to brew beer.

We actually got into that history a bit in an episode of Food History. In a different episode of Food History, we discussed an amazing fact about the science of food: nacho cheese. The semi-liquid stuff you might get at a sports arena is often made possible by an ingredient with the chemical formula Na3C6H5O7. Seriously, when Frank Liberto, the owner of Rico’s Products, had the idea to sell nachos at a sporting event in the late 1970s, he knew customers wouldn’t wait around for cheese to melt. Adding a specific kind of salt allows the proteins in the cheese to become more soluble. That means the emulsified liquid and fat is less likely to separate when melted, creating a cheese that melts more easily and stays liquidy. One of the most popular compounds used to achieve this perpetually melty cheese is sodium citrate, whose chemical formula spells out “nacho.”

You might think that Goodyear is the world’s leading producer of tires, but to identify the real number one in that field, you have to think bigger—or smaller. They won’t help you when your car pops a flat, but the LEGO Company actually makes around 381 million tiny tires for their sets each year, making them technically the world’s most prolific tire manufacturer.

Let’s stay in the toy aisle. Christopher Clayton Hutton was an intelligence officer during World War II who helped supply Allied soldiers with tools to escape German POW camps. Hutton’s clever methods included hiding piano wire in a pair of trousers and a flashlight and a bicycle pump. While German authorities were able to stymie many of Hutton’s methods, one particular strategy evaded Axis interference. With the help of a Leeds-based manufacturing company, Hutton hid escape kits for POWs in ordinary-looking board games like Monopoly. Games like Monopoly were often allowed in prison camps, as Germans believed it was a diversion for soldiers who might otherwise use their free time to plot escapes. Unbeknownst to them, some prisoners were actually receiving contraband within the game sets, like silk maps, which could help them navigate to safety once outside the prisons and were quieter than paper maps. Along with the maps, the Monopoly boards could contain a small compass, a saw, and a file. Real money could even be concealed within the play money of the game. It’s a fascinating story laid out in greater detail in Hutton’s biography, “Official Secret.” In total, according to historian Philip Orbanes, over 700 airmen used kits like the ones prepared by Hutton to escape.

The TSA allows people to fly with live fish as long as they’re contained in water and inside a transparent container, and yes, it seems the water can exceed the usual 3.4-ounce limit. If we set our sights even higher than those flying fish, we can recall the first moon landing. But if you want photographic evidence of Neil Armstrong’s time on the lunar surface, you have a surprising dearth of options. Buzz Aldrin’s suit lacked the special camera holder that Armstrong’s had, so Neil handled most of the photography. As the astronauts had a limited amount of time on the surface, Neil focused on taking incredible photographs of his surroundings, not rounding out his Tinder profile with the ultimate travel shot. Besides, Armstrong was married at the time, and Tinder didn’t exist. Buzz Aldrin did spend a bit of time as a lunar shutterbug, providing us with a shot of Armstrong from the back. But we do have a photo of Neil from the front as well, and it’s hidden inside a very famous photo of Aldrin. If you look closely at Buzz’s visor in this shot, you’ll see that it contains the reflection of Neil Armstrong—the first moon mirror selfie, an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, courage, and collaboration.

And then there’s the time Mr. Belvedere sat on his own genitals. Okay, it was actually actor Christopher Hewitt; Mr. Belvedere would never do such a thing. But that ridiculous story was confirmed by Belvedere producer Jeff Stein. He fell backward riding in a convertible in the Hollywood Christmas Parade, Stein said, briefly halting production on the show. I will not out the Mental Floss editor who chose that as their favorite fact in 20 years of publication to protect the innocent and/or ignorant.

And I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t wrap up with a Titanic fact, even if my producers have strongly suggested a moratorium on Celine Dion impressions. Over the years, a lot of suggestions have been made on how to salvage more of the famed vessel. My personal favorite dates back to 1985 when an expert proposed filling the wrecked ship with 180,000 tons of Vaseline and polyester bags. Theoretically, it would have hardened in the cold waters of the Atlantic and floated the ship up to a more accessible depth. Sadly for science and for the Unilever company, the petroleum jelly plan never came to be.

I want to send you all at home 20 years’ worth of gratitude from us at Mental Floss. I’ve been here for the last nine years, and I can honestly say that running the website and making videos for this channel has been the most fun I’ve had in my professional life. Our audience is a bunch of curious weirdos just like us, and we love you for it. If this is the first Mental Floss video you’re watching, please subscribe and start catching up with the hundreds of videos on our channel. I’m pretty sure if you watch the entire catalog, you’ll have learned the entire sum of human knowledge—or at least a healthy slice of human knowledge about animal poop. We’ll see you next time!

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