Lilies are toxic and potentially fatal for cats. –

   Camels were brought to Canada in 1862 to haul gold. The disastrous experiment ended in only one year after the camels terrorized horses and ate miners’ clothes and soap. 

   Pencils have been painted yellow ever since the 1890s. The world’s best pencil graphite came from China. In China, the color yellow is associated with royalty, so American pencil manufacturers started painting their pencils yellow to indicate they contained high-quality Chinese graphite. 

   King George VI was appalled when the South African government instructed him to only shake hands with white people while on his visit there in 1947. He referred to his South African bodyguards as “the Gestapo”. 

   For nearly 50 years the Catholic church of Spain stole nearly 300000 newborn babies from families and sold them to Catholic families for adoption. Telling their bio parents the kids died shortly after childbirth. 

  Mt. Massive and Mt. Elbert in Colorado are so close to each other in height that their supporters started competing with each other, with Mt. Massive supporters piling stones on the summit to increase its height, and Mt. Elbert supporters climbing the mountain to knock them back down. 

   The coffee taster for Costa coffee has his tongue insured for £10m 

  A woman (Joyce Carol Vincent) was found dead on the couch of her London apartment in 2011, about 3 years after her death. The TV was still running and a mountain of mail had piled up behind the front door. 

  Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon. 

  After the opening of the New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, a rumor came about that the Bridge was unstable and was going to collapse. To prove it was safe, P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants across it on May 17, 1884. –

   Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin was so shocking that it caused heart attacks for some in the audience.

  Pasta puttanesca roughly translates to “whore pasta”. – S

   The Dalai Lama is a self-proclaimed Marxist communist.

   Although English is considered a Germanic language, 60% of the vocabulary is of Latin or French origin. 

  Dalai Lama owns the smallest vineyard in the world, which is located in Switzerland. It consists of only three vines and has an area of 1.67 meters squared. –

    In 2005, an unknown businessman bought a bottle of Dalmore 62 Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky, one of only 12 ever made in 1943, for £32,000 and marched up to a hotel room with some friends and drank it.

  More Africans have access to cell phone service than piped water and electricity. –

   It is illegal to not flush the toilet in Singapore. For failing to flush, you will be fined $150, and police officers have been known to check. – 

   During WWII a fully grown reindeer lived on a British submarine, ate a navigation chart and got so fat that it couldn’t get back out. 

   A single US stealth bomber can carry 16 B83 nuclear bombs. Each of those bombs can produce 75 times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

   There are four bags of astronaut poop on the moon left behind from Neil Armstrong on his Apollo mission to the moon. 

   Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body is bathed and dressed in new clothes every year. His tomb is in the center of Moscow open to public, despite his death wish to be buried next to his wife

  In South Asia, widowed women were once routinely burned alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres. A British general outlawed it, saying “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile, but my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them.”

 Medieval Pope Gregory IX considered cats to be the ‘incarnation of Satan.’ Leading to a mass killing of cats, causing the rat population to swell, thus quickening the spread of the Black Death

   The Yanomami tribe of Venezuela count only up to 2; anything more than that is called “many.

 A piece of Apollo 12 floated around the sun for 31 years only to return to orbit around the earth in 2002 and leave earth’s orbit again. It may return to orbit the Earth in the mid-2040s. –

   In 1994, when the Northridge earthquake knocked out the power in Los Angeles, people contacted authorities and observatories wondering what the strange bright lights (stars) in the sky were. – 

   Crows hold funerals for fellow crows. Often neighboring crows who didn’t know the now deceased crow or even see it die will attend these funerals. –

  In 1798 when Napoleon came to Egypt the Sphinx was buried up to its neck. It wasn’t until between 1925-1936 the french engineer Emil Baraize was successful in clearing the sand to reveal the base of the Sphinx. –

   There was a cow named Big Bertha that drank whiskey, lived until she was 48, had 39 calves, broke two Guinness world records and raised $75,000 for cancer research. She was born on St. Patrick’s day.