200 Random Facts Presented Without Context

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript, with inappropriate or sensitive content removed or modified for clarity:

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French short story writer Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower. Holbein carpets are named in honor of Hans Holbein the Younger, who is known for painting King Henry VIII. The word “Rubenesque” comes from Peter Paul Rubens, who liked to paint voluptuous women. The same person designed St. Louis’s Gateway Arch and the TWA terminal at JFK Airport. Double Stuf Oreos are only 1.86 times as stuffed as classic Oreos. Actress Glenn Jackson won two Emmys, two Oscars, and then became a member of the British House of Commons. “To Have and Have Not” was made into a movie after Howard Hawks told Ernest Hemingway he could make a great film from Hemingway’s worst book. The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland. Only one country’s English language name can be typed on a single row of a standard QWERTY keyboard. Drop its name in the comments if you can figure it out without Googling.

Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and this is The List Show. For regular viewers, you might have noticed we’re doing something a little different today. I would explain more, but I think the title of the video is probably pretty self-explanatory. We’ve got 190 facts to go, so let’s run that intro.

Louis Vuitton started out as a trunk maker. St. Patrick wasn’t born in Ireland. Richard III was the last English king to die in battle. The world’s largest island in a freshwater lake is Manitoulin. Unlike Huron, Michael Collins, who fought for Irish independence, was known as the Big Fellow. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election. The pulmonary arteries are the only arteries in the human body that carry deoxygenated blood. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, revolutionary leader Wat Tyler made it all the way to a face-to-face meeting with King Richard II. Tyler was stabbed in the throat and died. Willem de Kooning came to the United States as a stowaway aboard the SS Shelly. On average, tall people perform better than short people on IQ tests. British doctor William Stark looked into the effects of severely limiting one’s diet; by doing so, he soon died of scurvy.

Eliza Acton, a struggling poet, wrote a cookbook in 1845 that introduced the custom of listing ingredients and their quantities. In the mid-1800s, ice from Massachusetts’ Wenham Lake became a luxury good in England. An ice-producing lake in Norway was subsequently renamed Lake Wenham. Germany’s second-largest city by population is Hamburg; its fifth-largest city is Frankfurt. Early 20th-century Pennsylvania Germans considered it bad luck to take a bath or change your clothing between Christmas and the New Year. Time magazine once ran a headline proclaiming, “Richard Nixon asked a reporter to watch panda sex.” I’m really tempted to provide some context here, but you know it’s against the rules that we made up.

Adding bubbles to your bath keeps the water warm for a longer amount of time. Almonds and peaches are in the same genus. It was prophesied that England’s Henry IV would die in Jerusalem; in fact, he died in the Abbot of Westminster’s house in the so-called Jerusalem Chamber. Chet Hanks went to Northwestern University. Sharks have existed longer than trees on Earth. At least we can’t rule out ancient forests. In a galaxy far, far away, a group of pugs is called a grumble. In the English language, four is the only number whose meaning is equivalent to the amount of letters in its name. The Red Vineyard at Arles is the only named Van Gogh painting known to have sold in his lifetime. The longest-serving justice in U.S. Supreme Court history is William O. Douglas, who sat on the bench for more than 36 years.

Figuratively speaking, after establishing himself as a media magnate, William Randolph Hearst became a congressman representing New York’s 11th district. The French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, and the Spanish-American War were each brought to a close by peace agreements known as the Treaty of Paris. George Dewey is the only American to receive the title Admiral of the Navy. Beethoven reportedly made sure that his morning coffee was always brewed from exactly 60 coffee beans. Jerry Springer was born in London’s Highgate tube station during World War II. There are approximately 200 semi-feral cats roaming the grounds of Disneyland. A newborn blue whale can gain as much as 10 pounds an hour from nursing. During Andrew Jackson’s funeral in 1845, his pet parrot had to be removed because its swearing was disturbing attendees.

According to PBA rules, a bowling ball can have up to 11 holes. The piece of metal on the end of a pencil that holds the eraser is called a ferrule. Giraffes have the highest blood pressure of any mammal. For more than 50 years, the band ZZ Top was composed of Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill, known for their trademark long beards and their usually beardless drummer, Frank Beard. In 1810, the production of nails represented 0.4 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product. On average, Finns consume over 20 pounds of coffee per year, more than five cups per day. People in Germany eat over 400 tons of meat from kebab shops every day. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice had a pet snake named Emily. The spots on Holstein cows are like human fingerprints, unique to each individual.

Playing the violin for an hour burns about 170 calories. When making shuttlecocks for badminton, the most prized feathers are said to come from the left wings of geese. Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine are the only siblings to have won lead acting Oscars. Scientists are working on potty training cows. Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt once left a White House event in full evening dress to take a quick flight to Baltimore. Dutch speed skater Ireen Wüst is the only athlete to have won an individual gold medal at five different Olympic Games. Mozart was a Freemason. The Nazi Party banned Felix Salten’s “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” believing that the deer’s story could be read as an allegory for the struggle of the Jews in Europe.

Saguaro cacti can grow to be more than 40 feet tall, but it can take a decade for them to reach just one inch in height. While imprisoned in the Tower of London, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote “The History of the World.” Nicolas Cage once spent $276,000 on a dinosaur skull, then found out it had been stolen from Mongolia and gave it back. Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president to have obtained a patent. In 2013, while competing at Wimbledon, Roger Federer was told to change his shoes because their orange soles violated the All England Club’s dress code. That distinctive smell we associate with rain is known as petrichor. Cowboys linebacker Chuck Howley is the only player from a losing team to be named Super Bowl MVP. Africa is the only continent with land in the Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, Eastern Hemisphere, and Western Hemisphere.

Jazz legend Louis Armstrong sometimes signed personal letters “Red Beans and Rice, Yours.” Captain Henry Morgan, the pirate that inspired the spiced rum brand’s name, was knighted in 1674 by English King Charles II. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy in 1822 after a visit with fellow poet Lord Byron. Byron was a literary celebrity who received piles of fan mail, a phenomenon his wife dubbed “Byromania.” While growing up, a young David Fincher was neighbors with George Lucas. Jupiter makes a full rotation on its axis in only 10 hours, making it the fastest spinning planet in the solar system. Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn. Martin Luther King Jr. received a C in public speaking at Crozer Theological Seminary.

In 1864, residents of Leicester, England, became known as “Balloonatics” after their incensed response to a performance by aeronaut Henry Coxwell. In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel was spending up to $2,500 a month on rubber bands. Yoda was partly modeled after a photo of Albert Einstein. Ann Jarvis, the creator of Mother’s Day, started a petition in the years after its adoption to put an end to the holiday. When Frederick Baur, the man who invented the Pringles can, passed away in 2008, some of his ashes were buried in one. When I die, I would also like to be buried in a Pringles can. The human nose is capable of detecting approximately one trillion scents. Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts. The space between your eyebrows is the glabella. John Quincy Adams liked to skinny dip in the Potomac River.

The Wife Carrying World Championships take place each year in Sonkajarvi, Finland. The dot over a lowercase “i” is called a tittle. As part of David Hasselhoff’s divorce settlement, he retained ownership of the catchphrase “Don’t Hassle the Hoff.” Newborn elephants suck their trunks for comfort. In 1349, King Edward III banned football in England on sunny days. The Eiffel Tower leaned slightly towards the shade. Sean Connery turned down the role of Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings.” High schools in New Zealand are allowed to keep up to a pound of uranium on their premises for educational purposes. Maya Angelou was the first Black woman in San Francisco to be employed as a streetcar conductor.

Barry Manilow did not write his hit song “I Write the Songs.” Between 1912 and 1948, Olympic medals were awarded for architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the capital of the United States for one day in 1777. Actor Bela Lugosi was buried in full Dracula costume, cape and all. Rejected ideas for Disney’s Seven Dwarfs included Chesty, Burpee, Hickey, and Awful. There are more than 200 corpses frozen on Mount Everest. Newborn babies have nearly a hundred more bones than full-grown adults. Winston Churchill called American prohibition an affront to the whole history of mankind. Flowers first appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago. The United States’ first dog park was established in 1979 in Berkeley, California.

Ancient Rome’s Laws of the Twelve Tables decreed that the punishment for composing or singing a song that slandered another person was death. On average, September is the worst month for the U.S. stock market. In 1806, a woman named Mary Bateman claimed that her chicken was laying eggs prophesying the end of the world. It turned out that she was writing messages on plain eggs and then forcing them back up into the bird. Not as bad as the woman who gave birth to rabbits—I’ll just leave that out there for everybody to think about. Salvador Dali claimed that he used the same pomade for his mustache as Marcel Proust. Gaius Caesar supposedly ordered the future Emperor Vespasian to be covered in mud as punishment for his subpar job keeping the streets clean as magistrate.

When Thomas More refused to acknowledge Henry VIII’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon and the king’s role as head of the Church, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. In a nice break for More, the sentence was commuted to decapitation. Anne Boleyn was already pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth I during her coronation in 1533. Owls eat small prey whole and then vomit up indigestible parts like bones and fur. As a young man, Patrick Swayze appeared as Prince Charming in the exhibition “Disney on Parade.” In 1746, Britain made it illegal for most men in Scotland to wear kilts; first-time offenders could be imprisoned for six months without bail. Composer Gustav Holst referred to astrology as his pet vice.

In 2004, as part of a promotion for the movie “Ocean’s 12,” a diamond worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was embedded into a car driven by Christian Clément at Monaco’s Grand Prix. Clément got in an accident on the first lap of the race, and the diamond hasn’t been seen since. Krakow, Poland’s 1610 community regulations suggested giving bagels to women in childbirth. Brian “Young Gun” Krauss set a Guinness World Record by spitting a cherry pit over 93 feet during a 2004 competition. The two-wheeled, one-passenger cart used in harness racing is known as a sulky. In 1988, Steffi Graf became the first tennis player to achieve the so-called Golden Slam, winning all four Grand Slam singles titles and an Olympic gold medal in the same year. In 2021, Paralympians Diede de Groot and Dylan Alcott won their own Golden Slams.

Most bulldog puppies are delivered via C-section. William Shakespeare’s wife was Anne Hathaway. Incisor teeth never stop growing in rodents. A so-called red tide is caused by a proliferation of microorganisms like dinoflagellates. Any animal with hooves is known as an ungulate. After discovering Uranus, William Herschel was made King George III’s private astronomer. The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen for the discovery of X-rays. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed calculus in the 17th century. Alessandro Volta discovered methane and built the first electric battery. Norwegian Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to the South Pole.

Nellie Bly was a pioneer in the field of investigative journalism for her work going undercover in a New York City insane asylum. ABBA and Celine Dion both won the Eurovision Song Contest. It was said that the politician Cato the Elder eventually took to ending any statement he made in the Roman Senate, no matter what the topic, with the pronouncement “Carthage must be destroyed.” The peak of Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth. The last monarch of the Habsburg dynasty was Karl I of Austria. The Florence-born Catherine de’ Medici was the mother of three French kings. The city of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was previously known as Leningrad and Petrograd.

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s beagles were named Him and Her. Mexican War hero Porfirio Diaz launched a revolution against Mexico’s president Benito Juárez in 1871, demanding among other things that presidents be limited to one term. Diaz eventually served seven terms as president himself. Genghis Khan established freedom of religion in the Mongol Empire. Attila the Hun died the same night as one of his weddings. Catherine the Great’s birth name was Zofia Frederica Augusta von Anhalt-Zerbst. Princess Alexandra of Bavaria believed she had swallowed a glass piano as a child and went about her life carefully to avoid shattering it.

17th-century British diarist Samuel Pepys kept a tame lion that had been given to him as a gift. To minimize the demands on labor during World War I, Woodrow Wilson had sheep graze on the White House lawn instead of having humans mow it. Comedian Dana Gould hosts a web show as Dr. Zaius from “Planet of the Apes.” During the Meiji Restoration, the samurai class disappeared in Japan; many former samurai took on civil servant or teaching jobs instead. Simón Bolívar helped Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia all achieve independence from Spain. During Japan’s Edo period, women would blacken their teeth around the time of their wedding and shave their eyebrows after giving birth to their first child.

Nancy Astor was born in Virginia and became the first woman to take office in the British Parliament. Florence Nightingale was born in Florence, Italy. The “T” in Booker T. Washington stands for Taliaferro. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Emperor Claudius was bullied before rising to power; people would throw olive and date pits at him if he fell asleep after dinner and would sometimes put slippers on his hands while he slept, hoping he’d rub his face with them. It took around 2 million years for the population of humans on Earth to hit 1 billion; the next billion happened in about 120 years. We’re now on pace for an additional billion every 12 years.

When the Turco-Mongol leader Tamerlane was trying to invade Delhi, the sultan equipped elephants with chain mail for protection. Tamerlane put hay on his camels’ backs, set the hay on fire, and forced the camels toward the elephants, who ran away from the danger, stampeding their own troops in the process. The first woman to serve in the United States Senate was Rebecca Felton, but the first woman to be elected senator in the United States was Hattie Caraway. FDR’s son Elliott wrote more than 20 mystery novels, many featuring his mother Eleanor as the detective. In 1795, Poland was temporarily partitioned out of existence.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, progressive delegates tried to nominate Julian Bond for vice president of the United States, even though he was seven years below the minimum age for the position as defined by the Constitution. In 1977, Bond hosted “Saturday Night Live.” The man often called the liberator of Chile was named Bernardo O’Higgins. The easternmost and westernmost places belonging to the United States are both called Point Udall. England and Scotland were united as a single state in 1707 under the Stuart Queen Anne. North Korea recognizes Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il as its eternal leaders; since both men are dead, some consider North Korea the world’s only necrocracy.

The court pelota is played on is known as a fronton. The basket you catch and throw the ball with is known as a cesta. J and Q are the only letters that don’t appear in the symbols or names of any elements on the periodic table. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is bigger than Mercury. The first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was Sinclair Lewis. Toni Morrison was 39 years old when her first novel was published. The writer George Sand and the composer Frédéric Chopin had a years-long romantic relationship. Leo Tolstoy’s descendants celebrate a bi-annual family reunion at his house museum in Russia.

Pamphleteer Thomas Paine was an aide-de-camp to Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene. Robert E. Lee’s dad was nicknamed “Light Horse Harry.” Today, the letter H in the American military alphabet is “Hotel.” At various points in the past, it was Howe, Hypo, and Have. The white stork is the national bird of Ukraine. For the first 30-plus years of television broadcasting in India, there was only one channel available. There’s an island made of recycled mollusk shells off the coast of Senegal. Forty percent of the world’s pepper production happens in Vietnam. In the Ethiopian calendar, a year comprises 13 months.

Every year on August 20th, thousands of Hungarians celebrate a procession alongside the millennium-old embalmed right hand of King Stephen I. Belarus is