21 Of The Best Facts I Learned This Week, From The Origins Of Princess Leia's Hairstyle In "Star Wars" To An Astronaut Who Snuck A Sandwich Into Space

🚨 Warning: This article contains mentions of murder, rape, and other sensitive topics. 🚨

1.Hello Kitty was actually created to sell shoes! Sanrio started as a silk company, and soon switched to selling sandals. They found that the sandals with cute designs sold better, so they hired cartoonists to design characters and thus, Hello Kitty was born.

Sanrio / Via giphy.com

2.China owns all of the pandas in the world. Yup, even if you've seen a panda at a zoo, it's still owned by China. The program started nearly fifty years ago during Richard Nixon's presidency.

So how does a panda rental work? China is able to choose the location they rent the pandas out to. The rental contracts are typically between $500,000 and $1 million, with the money going to panda conservation efforts. Most zoos are given the option to renew their rental after the contract has ended, which is normally set for 10 years. There is currently a bill in Congress to change elements of this law, focused on the stipulation that even if a panda is born abroad, it is still owned by China and must be sent to China within the first few years of life. However, experts believe that a bill like this might threaten conservation efforts.

3.Before city parks became common, people used to picnic in cemeteries. The cemetery craze began in the 19th century when cemeteries began planting gardens and incorporating flowers in their headstone designs instead of skulls. The new trend horrified some, who couldn't believe that others would dine at someone's final resting place. In Denver, the police had to intervene once the cemeteries began to fill with litter.

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4.During NASA's Gemini 3 missions, astronaut John Young snuck a corned beef sandwich aboard the spacecraft. He hid the sandwich in his pocket and shared it with the other crew members. Someone ratted Young out for being a sandwich smuggler, and NASA banned sandwiches from future missions.

5.The space bun look is pretty much synonymous with Star Wars' Princess Leia, but did you know that the iconic hairstyle was actually inspired by the women of the Mexican Revolution? Star Wars creator, George Lucas, said that he looked to soldaderas, or Mexican women who joined the uprising as inspiration since he wanted Leia to resemble a fighter and not a damsel in distress.

LucasFilm / Via giphy.com

While many of the soldaderas wore hats or hair coverings, Clara de la Rocha often wore the two buns on either side of her head. de la Rocha fought alongside her father. The pair seized the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa in 1911. de la Rocha eventually earned the title of colonel for her efforts. Photos of de la Rocha were even featured in Star Wars exhibits as the inspo for Leia's look.

LucasFilm / Via giphy.com

6.The White House built a vinyl collection during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. The collection, which included over 2,000 records, was started by First Lady Pat Nixon, who assembled a committee of music journalists, scholars, and experts to curate the collection, which includes a variety of genres. The artists included range from The Beatles to John Denver to The Clash, with the collection serving as a time capsule to the 1970s.

Bea Miller / Via giphy.com

7.Nobody actually knows how to spell Shakespeare’s name. In fact, The Bard’s name has over 80 different spelling variations. There are no records of him ever spelling his name as William Shakespeare, as he is known today.

8.Rodney Alcala was a serial killer, who in the midst of his killing spree, appeared on an episode of The Dating Game, causing him to be known as The Dating Show Killer. Alcala first began his crimes in Los Angeles in 1968, when he lured an eight-year-old girl into his apartment. She was saved by a passerby. Alcala fled to New York, where he enrolled in film school under an alias. While in school, Alcala studied under Roman Polanski, a director who was charged with the rape of a young girl. Alcala was eventually caught and was put in jail.

Upon his release, he assaulted another young girl, and was sent back to jail. It is believed that after his second release from jail, Alcala went back to New York, where he killed Elaine Hover who was the goddaughter of both Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. By 1978, Alcala had gotten a job at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter, despite his criminal past. He lured women in under the guise of taking photos of them for his portfolio. Many of them were never heard from again. That same year, Alcala appeared on an episode of The Dating Game and won a date with Cheryl Bradshaw. Backstage, Bradshaw declined the date, saying she had a bad feeling about Alcala.

Alcala was caught after murdering a 12-year-old girl and dumping her bones in the woods. When park rangers recovered her remains, they began questioning her friends and formed a composite sketch of Alcala. Using the sketch and what they knew about Alcala's criminal past, authorities were able to pin him down as the murderer. During the trial, Alcala was given the death penalty, which was overturned. A second trial was held. Alcala was sentenced to death once again, but that verdict was also overturned. In 2010, Alcala went on a trial for the third time and represented himself. He was given the death penalty again. While Alcala was conclusively linked to nine murders, it is believed that his true number of victims could be much higher. He died of natural causes in July 2021.

9.While it's shocking to imagine living in a pizza-less world, the dish actually didn't become super common in America until after World War II. Soldiers who were stationed in Italy loved pizza so much that they brought it back to America. Prior to that, Italian immigrant families made pizza in their own homes, but the meal didn't hit the mainstream until after the war.

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10.File this one under: talents pigeons have that I simply don't. An experiment featuring eight pigeons found that after training, the birds could differentiate between the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. Their success rate was higher than that of a human's, with the pigeons being able to correctly guess the artist over 90% of the time.

11.Despite the fact that the Hindenburg airship was full of seven million cubic feet of highly combustible hydrogen, there was still a smoking lounge on board. Passengers could not bring their own matches and lighters on board. Instead, they entered a pressurized room that prevented any hydrogen from getting through, where a single lighter was kept.

Visual Smugglers / Via giphy.com

These precautions couldn't save the airship from tragedy. The Hindenburg burst into flames on May 6, 1937. Experts believe that the ship caught fire due to both a hydrogen leak onboard and inclement weather. Miraculously, 61 of the 97 passengers survived the fiery wreck.

12.Milton Hershey, the inventor of the Hershey bar, cheated death on the Titanic. Hershey had written a $300 check to reserve a room on the ship. Business in the chocolate world must have been booming in 1912, because Hershey and his wife dipped out on the trip due to work committments, likely saving their lives.

13.The Super Soaker is the world’s bestselling toy, but for years, its creator didn’t receive a single cent from the toy’s sales. Lonnie Johnson was awarded $72.9 million in a settlement with Hasbro for the unpaid royalties.

Johnson invented the Super Soaker in 1982 while working on a totally different project. "I was working on a new idea for a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon," Johnson told CNN. While experimenting with different nozzles, he realized that he could create a water gun. Johnson also invented the Nerf Gun, so you should probably thank him for a lot of your childhood fun.

NBC / Via giphy.com

14.TBH, this might be the cutest fact I've ever read. Dogs "play-sneeze" when they're having a good time. The sneezes also indicate to other dogs that their rambunctious behavior is only play.

15.In 1901, Valdimar Ásmundsson translated Bram Stoker’s Dracula into Icelandic. The issue? They actually made significant changes to the plot, meaning the people of Iceland were essentially reading Dracula fan fiction for nearly 100 years. Dutch author and historian Hans Corneel de Roos cracked the case, and said that some suspect that Stoker collaborated with Ásmundsson on the Icelandic version. de Roos also said that he believes the Icelandic version, which is called Powers of Darkness, is actually a better book than the OG Dracula.

Giphy / Via giphy.com

16.In Finland, the punishment for most minor infractions is based on the day-fine system. This means that the fines for crimes like speeding, littering, and disturbing the public peace are determined by the amount you could spend in a day based on your income. The wealthier you are, the more your speeding ticket is going to cost.

17.Yoko Ono was fascinated by Salvador Dalí's surrealist work and offered the artist $10,000 for a single piece of hair from his famous mustache, which she wanted to store in a custom box. Dalí notoriously jumped at any moneymaking opportunity, so he agreed to Ono's request.

After thinking about the situation, Dalí decided that he didn't want to give Ono his hair, because he believed that she was a witch who would use his hair in a spell. Instead, he sent his assistant out to pick a single dried blade of grass to give to Ono instead, who supposedly believed it was one of Dalí's actual mustache hairs.

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18.Although Freddie Mercury died just before Wanye’s World was released in 1992, he was given a VCR with the flick's infamous head-banging scene that featured Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Mercury supposedly loved the scene. At the time, Queen didn’t have a huge fanbase in America, but Mercury believed that the inclusion of the song in the film would spur a Queen comeback in the United States.

19.Outback Steakhouse was founded in Tampa, Florida by four Americans who had never even visited Australia. The group came up with the concept for the restaurant after seeing a surge in popularity for Australian culture following the release of Crocodile Dundee in 1986. Gotta hand it to 'em for giving us the Bloomin' Onion!

20.McDonald’s announced the redesign of their McFlurry cup in 2006 after the British Hedgehog Preservation Society launched a six-year campaign against the old container. According to the group, the hedgehog’s head could easily get stuck against the lid of the old cup, meaning they wouldn’t be able to get out, leading to dehydration, starvation, and even death. McDonald’s said they carried out significant research during the redesign process to ensure that no hedgehogs would be harmed by a McFlurry cup in the future.

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21.And finally, Emma Gatewood, often referred to as Grandma Gatewood, shocked the world when she became the first woman to walk the Appalachian Trail solo in one season. Gatewood took up hiking at age 67, after her 11 children were grown and out of the house. After she saw an article in National Geographic about the trail, she became determined to conquer all 2,168 miles.

In 1955, she told her children that she was "going on a hike in the woods," and set off on her first journey along the Appalachian Trail. Gatewood ultimately did the entire trail three times, completing her final trek at age 75. She also hiked 2,000 miles of The Oregon Trail, hiking an average of 22 miles a day on her journey. Grandma Gatewood is viewed as a pioneer of long-trail hiking.