22 Facts I Learned This Week That Pretty Much Shattered My Entire World View

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

1.In 2001, Beaver College changed its name to Arcadia University, partly because anti-porn filters blocked access to the school's website. The school's name had even been the focus of jokes on Saturday Night Live. The university held focus groups and polled thousands of former students to gauge what people thought the new name should be. When the change was announced, over 800 former students requested replacement diplomas featuring the university's new name.

2.While we all know Domino's as one of the biggest pizza chains around, it was slow-going at the start. Brothers Tom and James Monaghan bought a pizzeria in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with hopes of turning it into a larger chain. James decided he wasn't cut out for the pizza business and quit to become a mailman, giving his half of the company to his brother in exchange for a Volkswagen Beetle. Four years later, Tom changed the name to Domino's, and the chain found huge success.

3.There is a thriving colony of parrots in New York City. The monk parakeet, also known as the Quaker parrot, was first spotted in Brooklyn in the 1960s, and has since been seen in the Bronx, Queens, and occasionally Manhattan.

The parrots are unusually good at adapting to new environments, which makes life in New York City easier for them. They build their nests virtually anywhere, but tend to gravitate toward grassy areas with lights for warmth, meaning they're typically spotted around baseball fields.

4.During the 1913 Indianapolis 500, Jules Goux, a French driver reportedly drank three bottles of champagne during the race, and ended up winning. Goux didn't speak any English, and allegedly drove up to the pit stop for a tire change and told the crew in French, "Fetch me a pint of wine, or I'm done." His requests were honored, and Goux ended up cruising to victory. Despite this, drivers were banned from drinking alcohol while racing in 1914.

5.Robert Hansen, also known as the Butcher Baker, was a serial killer who used to kidnap women, set them loose in the Alaskan wilderness, and then later hunt them down to kill them.

Hansen first began committing crimes in the 1960s. He first burned down a school building as revenge for being bullied in high school, and then began committing sexual crimes against women. After he was released from jail in the 1970s, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife. While in Anchorage, Hansen began kidnapping sex workers at gunpoint. After raping the women, he would set them loose in the wilderness, making them think they had escaped, and then would later hunt them down and kill them.

After Hansen was caught, police found a map in his home with "X" marked over the spots where he buried the bodies. It was revealed that he had raped or assaulted an estimated 30 women, and had killed 17. He was sentenced to over 400 years in prison without the possibility of parole. He died in prison in 2014 of natural causes.

6.Despite the name, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was actually invented in New York. So why call it Philadelphia? At the time of the company's founding in the 1880s, Philadelphia was known for their high-quality dairy, so the brand decided to include the city in the name as a clever marketing tactic.

7.During the Woodstock festival in 1969, the dynamic duo of Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young realized that the charter plane they flew in on had landed at the wrong airport. In danger of missing their sets, Hendrix and Young decided they would drive to the festival. The problem? There was nobody at the airport who could drive them. Hendrix, Young, and Young's attorney decided the only way to arrive on time would be to hot wire a pickup truck that was in the airport's parking lot, allowing the performers to arrive on time. Young later said it was his fondest memory of the entire festival.

8.On December 20, 1921, John Tierney, a construction worker, died during the construction of the Hoover Dam when his crew got caught in a flash flood while surveying a potential building location. He was the first person to die during the dam's construction.

Exactly 14 years later, on December 20, 1935, Tierney's son, Patrick William Tierney, was working on a crew that was wrapping up construction on the Hoover Dam when he fell to his death at Arizona's Black Canyon. He was the final person to die during the construction of the dam, 14 years to the day of his father's death. Both John and Patrick's names appear on a plaque at the dam.

9.We've all been in a theater with a crying child, haven't we? Back in the day, this problem was avoided because movie theaters used to have "cry rooms," which were small, soundproof booths that allowed parents to sit with their crying children while still enjoying their movie.

TCM / Via giphy.com

10.Your average 2x2 Lego is actually so strong that you could build a 2-mile-high tower before the bottom brick would fail. In fact, scientists have concluded it would take a maximum force of 4,240N to break the bottom brick. That means the tower would be comprised of 375,000 Legos, measuring in at 2.17 miles tall and weighing in at about 950 pounds. In case you're wondering, that's taller than Mount Olympus. However, experts agree that the tower itself would buckle long before, even if the bricks all remained intact.

11.While Pixar normally keeps their projects under wraps during production, a driver for the car service Pixar uses to pick up talent from the airport figured out the company was making Soul because he noticed that he was driving more Black people to Pixar's headquarters than he ever had before. The movie's director, Kemp Powers, said that the driver frequently asked him about the movie, but he had to stay quiet for the most part. "He's like, 'I ain't never picked up this many Black people and brought them to Pixar. He's like, man, you know y'all doing a Black movie.'"

Pixar / Via giphy.com

12.Nas listed his 7-year-old daughter Destiny Jones as a producer on his 2001 album Stillmatic to ensure that she would make residual money from the record. The album peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200.

13.Director George Miller had his wife edit Mad Max: Fury Road, because he wanted the movie to look different from the typical action movie. Margaret Sixel, despite never having cut an action movie before, ended up winning an Oscar for her work on the film.

14.This one might have you actually paying attention to that pesky junk mail! In 1995, Patrick Combs received a $95,000 check as junk mail. He deposited it into his account as a joke, but much to his surprise, the "check" met all of the legal criteria for a check and the $95,000 was deposited into his bank account. Once it was revealed to be a fake, Combs still got the money, because the bank had missed their deadline to correct the error. He ended up giving back the money, and turned the experience into a motivational speaking career.

HBO / Via giphy.com

15.Pete Maravich, known as Pistol Pete, was an NBA player who had been famously quoted as saying that he didn't want to play basketball for 10 years and then die of a heart attack when he was 40. Maravich was forced to retire six years into his career after he was injured.

After leaving basketball, Maravich became a recluse, saying he was searching for a new meaning in his life after leaving basketball. He ended up adopting evangelical Christianity, and even returned to the court through his church. In 1988, at age 40, Maravich's quote eerily came true after he had a heart attack and died while playing a pick-up game at his church. An autopsy later revealed that Maravich had a heart defect.

16.Cat lovers, I've found your next vacation. Japan is home to a dozen cat islands — places where cats significantly outnumber people. Most of these islands are in remote fishing villages, and the cats tend to stick to abandoned homes, but there has been a significant increase in tourism to the islands. In some of these islands, the cat to human ratio is 6 to 1.

17.James K. Polk was the only US president who campaigned on the idea that he was only going to serve one term. Luckily for him, he was known for fulfilling all his major campaign promises, including the acquisition of California, New Mexico, and Oregon. In fact, some considered him the most efficient and effective president since George Washington. Polk died three months after his term ended, making his retirement the shortest of any president.

18.Of Uranus’s 27 moons, a whopping 25 of them are named after Shakespeare's characters. While it's unclear who exactly started this tradition, astronomers have made sure to keep up with the precedent as new moons are discovered.

19.In today's installment of facts that are extremely disturbing: People used to believe that the blood of the freshly executed was a health tonic. If that's not horrific enough for you, people would pay executioners to let them drink it warm, even going so far as to line up at execution sites in search of fresh blood.

FX / Via giphy.com

20.The children's classic Green Eggs and Ham actually began as a $50 bet. Bennett Cerf, Seuss's editor at Random House, challenged the writer to pen a book using no more than 50 different words. He did it, and the book went on to sell millions of copies. This wasn't the only time Seuss was limited by word choice: The Cat in the Hat was written from a list of 348 words that educators used to teach children to read. Seuss ended up only using 236 of them.

21.Koala fingerprints are so close to humans' that they could taint crime scenes. Their prints are unique to each animal, and contain the same whirls and loops as human fingerprints. So why are their prints so similar to ours? Their hands function very similarly to human hands, and the way they grasp things created the print similarities.

22.And lastly, Gloria Swanson was more than just an actor who bridged the gap between the end of silent films and the rise of talkies — she also saved Jewish inventors during World War II and was a vegetarian pioneer.

During World War II, Swanson felt her career was fading. She decided to turn to entrepreneurship, and began to develop her own companies in hopes of finding something that would stick. When she heard about Jewish inventors looking to flee Germany as the Nazis gained power, she helped them flee under one condition: They had to work for her. She paid them and hid them in her husband's home in Paris. Although Swanson eventually returned to Hollywood, one of the engineers she rescued went on to create the talking typewriter.

Swanson was also an advocate for vegetarianism during a time when it wasn't very widespread. She was known for bringing her own meals to public functions, and lobbied against pesticides and hormones in food, long before organic meals were in fashion.