Obscure facts ya know!

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Adam Young--otherwise known as Owl City--is an Aspie. I'm guessing he writes his own songs--the lyrics are so quirky that they must have been written by an Aspie.

Janis Joplin had returned to Texas,been in rehab, cleaned up, enrolled in college, and gotten her life on track before she was drawn back into the music world and died less than a year after returning to San Francisco.


Sylkat

Beethoven often composed for multiple instrument textures using sketches on a single stave, and gradually added other parts. His earliest sketches were often bland and predictable, and more distinctive, original, and expressive elements gradually emerged in later sketches.

It's commonly written that Lon Chaney was intended for the title role in Dracula (1931) but died before production. In truth, he was never intended for the part. He couldn't have played it anyway, since he had been signed to another studio. Conrad Veidt was who the studio really wanted before settling on Bela Lugosi.

(source: David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen)

Elizabeth Short, known only after her death as the 'Black Dahlia', was, contrary to media misrepresentation, never a prostitute, nor was she ever in a pornographic film.

Sylkar

Blonde and red hair are actually the same pigment; but with a different "stacking" of the molecule (or so I've heard) which is responsible for the appearance of a different color.

Paradoxically, blondes typically have the highest count of individual hair follicles (maybe if they're lighter, they need more of them?) while redheads actually have the lowest count.

DVD doesn't officially stand for anything, despite claims that it stands for "digital video disc" or "digital versatile disc."

According to one estimate, the total biomass of all life on Earth throughout Earth's history is around the same as the mass of the Earth itself.

Microbes live inside the rock of the sea floor, hundreds of metres beneath the sediment.

Around 80% of life on Earth, by mass I think, lives in temperatures permanently under 4 degrees Celcius. Think about the polar regions plus the ocean floor which is about that Temperature, plus the permafrost in places life Russia. Microbes live deep in the permafrost, making methane.

Two thirds of humans who ever lived are alive now.


Sylkat

That's what I thought too, and there are certainly more people living now than have ever lived all together at once...

But, if you consider how much of human history there has been, and how short human lifespans have been / how cheap life used to be... and thus how fast generations used to pass, large populations in history that have been decimated by war, genocide or disease etc. etc., then you come up with a number more like this:

108 billion individual human beings (homo sapiens) have lived on earth at one time or another.

Source: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011 ... -explosion

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is on the American dime to try to increase donations for polio research after he died. The March of Dimes was named to get people to donate the coin to the White House when he was alive for this purpose.

Jason Patric is Jackie Gleason's grandson.

There is a distinct possibility that Napoleon Bonaparte was the victim of murder, not illness.

The theory is that a trusted aide was paid well to poison him, and that the attending physician was in on the scheme.


Sylkat

Pinball was illegal in major cities until the 1970s.

Really.

Led Zeppelin changed the spelling of their first name from "lead" so fans wouldn't pronounce it "leed".

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode "The Project Strigas Affair", which aired two years before Star Trek began production, was the first time Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner appeared on screen together.

Because of the surprise twist halfway through the movie, audience members were not allowed to enter screenings of Psycho once the movie began.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, the top Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounce it out loud).

Given her proportions, if Barbie were a real woman, she would be 7'2" and her measurements would be 38-18-34. (Yikes.)

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.