7 Random Facts You've Probably Never Heard Before
There is an island in the Bahamas inhabited only by swimming pigs!
Conversations are hard. Each week, two-time Jeopardy! winner and awkward silence warrior Terri Pous makes small talk a little easier by giving you random things to blurt out when you don’t know what else to say. Catch up on last week's here.
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A can of Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse ????.
Apparently, citric acid, which Mountain Dew contains in large quantities, can easily erode teeth and bones in as short as a few months. Welcome to your nightmares! This all came to light in a 2012 lawsuit filed by a man who claimed to have found a whole mouse carcass in his friendly afternoon can of 'Dew. Pepsi, Mountain Dew's parent company, hired experts who discounted the man's case by finding that the neon green soda would reduce the rodent to "a jelly-like substance." Therefore, all that would be left of the mouse would be some rubbery skin tissue, certainly not a whole dead mouse. Yum!
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For a short time, the planet Uranus was named...George.
Uranus, arguably the most unfortunately named planet, just can't catch a break, huh? When it was discovered by astronomer William Herschel in 1781, King George III of England was so impressed that he declared Herschel the official Court Astronomer. Herschel repaid the favor by naming his discovery "Georgium Sidus," Latin for "The Star/Planet Of George," or just George for short, in honor of the king. That name stayed in official record books until 1850, when German astronomer Johann Bode suggested the name Uranus, derived from the name of the ancient Greek god Ouranos, to better fit with the other planets' mythological names.
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Movies have to clarify that they're fiction because of a 1930s lawsuit that traces back to none other than Rasputin.
If you've ever seen a movie, you've seen some variation of the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental." Well, that leads back to Grigori Rasputin, aka the creepy healer the Russian royal family relied on in the early 20th century. It all started with the 1932 movie Rasputin and the Empress. Prince Felix Yusupov, Rasputin's assassin, didn't like the movie because it didn't tell his whole story. Yusupov sued MGM for invasion of privacy and libel, and because the movie included a fabricated scene of a character based on Yusupov's wife being raped, he won. MGM was informed that if they had included a disclaimer saying the film wasn't supposed to be entirely realistic, they wouldn't have had to shell out $125,000 to the Yusupovs. With that in mind, MGM started putting very specific language in all of their credits, and other movie studios soon followed.
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