random funny fact

WTF Fun Fact 12657 – Daniel Gossett’s Hair Story

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On August 1, 2018, pitcher Daniel Gossett of the Oakland A’s shaved his head following Tommy John surgery. The recovery after this kind of surgery is very lengthy, and Gossett knew his arm would be immobile for a while.

“I was in an arm brace for however many weeks,” Gossett told MassLive. “I was like, ‘Man, I can’t do anything with this hair.’ So I cut it all off.”

However, as baseball players (especially pitchers) are known for their rituals and superstitions, Gossett has decided not to cut it again. At least not for a while.

He was released by the A’s in 2020, but seeing his promise, another team snatched him up. In 2021, he was signed by the Boston Red Sox and played in their minor league system. Pitchers have to work their way back up to the major league teams.

It was at that time that Gossett made the decision not to cut his hair until he was back on a major league team – no matter how long it took.

And it’s taking a while!

The Red Sox released him as well (at the end of 2021). But he didn’t spend long as a free agent. In 2022, the Minnesota Twins signed him to their minor league team.

Now, we’ll have to wait and see how long it takes for him to work his way up, but his hair is still growing – many inches down his back, in fact.

Luckily, it’s healthy, beautiful blond hair and he’s promised to donate it when the time comes.

 – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Meet Daniel Gossett: Boston Red Sox depth starter lives in RV, won’t cut long hair until he returns to big leagues or he can donate it” — MassLive

WTF Fun Fact 12656 – Wilmer McLean’s Role in the Civil War

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People say Wilmer McLean “was perhaps the only man who ever had the first major pitched battle of a war fought in his front yard and the surrender signed four years later in his parlor.”

It’s a strange fact that few people know about the Civil War – but it all started and ended at one man’s house.

Wilmer McLean was a grocer from Virginia, but his farm was one of the first places to see artillery fire on July 21, 1861, in what would later become known as the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) in Manassas, Prince William County, Virginia. That’s because it was being used as a headquarters for Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard. McLean swiftly regretted getting involved after a cannonball fell through his kitchen.

That’s when McLean took his family to Appomattox, Virginia, hoping to never see violence again (and to headquarter his own business supplying sugar to the Confederate Army in a more strategic location).

While he had long retired from the military himself, the war found him again as the Confederates lost and General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant. All they needed was a safe place to meet. And that’s when McLean got a second knock on his new door on April 9, 1865.

A messenger requested to use his home – his parlor, to be exact – for the surrender. McLean is supposed to have said, “The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.” That’s where Lee surrendered to Grant and effectively ended the U.S. Civil War.

McLean may have seen history twice, but his house got ransacked both times as Army members made off with his furniture, knowing it would be a part of history. However, they handed him money as they did it. For example, Major General Edward Ord paid McLean $40 (equivalent to around $700 today) as he made off with the table on which the document of surrender was signed.

If you want to see what McLean’s house looked like before that event, it has been recreated at the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Key Civilians at Appomattox” – National Park Service

WTF Fun Fact 12655 – Alexander the Great and His Horse

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King Alexander the Great spent his entire adult life trying to conquer the world on behalf of Macedonia, and by his side, nearly the entire time was his horse, Bucephalus.

The ancient writer Plutarch wrote much of what we know about the life of Alexander, including the story about how the 12-year-old future king won his noble steed.

A horse dealer tried charging Alexander’s father a very high sum for the horse (to be fair, his father was King Philip II of Macedon). No one had seemed it a good deal since the horse could not be tamed. But young Alexander saw some potential and made a deal with the horse seller – if he could tame it, he could keep it. If not, he would pay the high sum.

Of course, we know where this story goes – Alexander subdued the horse and then rode it into nearly every battle for decades until the horse died during a campaign in India.

As someone who felt he had the right to conquer the world, Alexander left his name all over it, including over 70 cities named Alexandria.

But he loved his horse Bucephalus so much that when it died in 326 BCE, he named a city Bucephala.

The ancient writer Pliny the Elder also wrote about the event:

King Alexander had also a very remarkable horse; it was called Bucephalus, either on account of the fierceness of its aspect, or because it had the figure of a bull’s head marked on its shoulder. It is said, that he was struck with its beauty when he was only a boy, and that it was purchased from the stud of Philonicus, the Pharsalian, for thirteen talents. When it was equipped with the royal trappings, it would suffer no one except Alexander to mount it, although at other times it would allow anyone to do so. A memorable circumstance connected with it in battle is recorded of this horse; it is said that when it was wounded in the attack upon Thebes, it would not allow Alexander to mount any other horse. Many other circumstances, also, of a similar nature, occurred respecting it; so that when it died, the king duly performed its obsequies, and built around its tomb a city, which he named after it” The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2, translation by John Bostock, Henry Thomas Riley.

– WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Bucephalus: The Horse of Alexander the Great” — ThoughtCo.

WTF Fun Fact 12649 – A Considerate Thief

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A thief in Texas stole a lawnmower, but the strangest act caught on camera wasn’t the theft itself but rather the footage of him mowing the victim’s lawn before he took off with the equipment.

He mowed both the front and the back!

The Port Arthur Police Department said Marcus Hubbard stole the lawnmower on April 1, but the theft was no joke. Hubbard eventually did make off with the mower. But police arrived on the scene as he was making off with the stolen property and he abandoned it during his attempted escape.

They’re still looking for Hubbard at this point, so secure your mowers if you live in the area!

Check out the unexpected video below:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Man steals lawnmower, cuts victim’s grass, police say” — WRIC News

WTF Fun Fact 12646 – The Power of the Musical Birthday Card

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Ok, to be fair, there wasn’t much computing power available to the Allied forces during WWII. But it’s really more about something called Moore’s Law.

According to Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Future:

“Moore’s law simply says that computer power doubles every eighteen months. First stated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation, this simple law has helped to revolutionize the world economy, generated fabulous new wealth, and irreversibly altered our way of life. When you plot the plunging price of computer chips and their rapid advancements in speed, processing power, and memory, you find a remarkably straight line going back fifty years. (This is plotted on a logarithmic curve. In fact, if you extend the graph, so that it includes vacuum tube technology and even mechanical hand-crank adding machines, the line can be extended over 100 years into the past.)

Exponential growth is often hard to grasp, since our minds think linearly. It often starts deceptively slowly. It is so gradual that you sometimes cannot experience the change at all. But over decades, it can completely alter everything around us.

According to Moore’s Law, every Christmas your computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of memory and processing speed) as they were the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes truly monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip which sings “Happy Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it?  After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away.  Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3D situations, use more computer power than main frame computers of the previous decade. The Sony Playstation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.“

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Your cell phone has more computing power than NASA circa 1969” — Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

WTF Fun Fact 12644 – The Parrot Who Saved a Dead Language

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German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt embarked on a 5-year exploration of North and South America in 1799. His trip was successful, and when he returned home in 1804, he had an extensive collection of plant and animal specimens

Humboldt also took voluminous notes, including some interesting jottings from a trip through Venezuela in 1800 where he spent some time chatting with a local parrot.

According to Mental Floss:

“According to legend, during his exploration of the Orinoco River, Humboldt met and stayed with a local indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures. The tribe, so the story goes, had a number of tame parrots kept in cages around the village, many of which had been taught to speak—although one, Humboldt noted, sounded noticeably different from the rest. When he asked the locals why this parrot sounded so unusual, he was told that it had belonged to a neighboring tribe, who had been the Caribs’ enemies.”

In other words, the parrot was speaking a different language than the rest. And sadly, the parrot was the only speaker left. The rest of the tribe had been wiped out, and not a single native speaker remained. Just the parrot. It was the last vestige of their linguistic culture.

Being the keen observer and recorder, Humboldt wrote down what the parrot sounded like, transcribing the sounds phonetically and coming out with about 40 words from the parrot’s (and the lost tribe’s) vocabulary.

We’ll never know how accurate the language is, but the notebook holds the last of what we have.

Interestingly, in 1997, an artist taught two more parrots to speak the language based on Humboldt’s notebook.

Some think the parrot’s story is mere legend, but Humboldt recounted his trip down the Orinoco river in his Equinoctial Regions of America in great detail and accurately described the Atures tribe that the parrot spoke the language of. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Parrot That Kept A Language Alive” — Mental Floss

WTF Fun Fact 12643 – The First Sad Clown

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Joseph Grimaldi is often hailed as the first modern “clown.” And while people tend to break down into two camps – those who find them funny and those who find them terrifying – Grimaldi’s story is proof that they’ve always been both.

Joseph Grimaldi had a long and illustrious career marked by extreme emotional outbursts. And one of the reasons we know so much about him is because of his well-written biography – by none other than a young newspaper writer named Charles Dickens.

Dickens gave readers some insight into the brutality of Grimaldi’s upbringing, and in particular, his treatment by his father, Guiseppe, a dentist and performer who moved from Italy to England for a career change.

Abusive to all of his children, he capped off his life by demanding that his daughter cut off his head before he was buried in order to receive her inheritance, all because he was terrified of being buried alive.

He wasn’t any more pleasant to his other nine children either, but only Joseph grew up and created the character of the modern clown. While he gave his all on stage, he would often burst into hysterics between acts and pull himself together just in time to entertain during the second act.

When trying to treat his intractable melancholy, he visited a doctor who had an even more depressing prescription: “relaxation and amusement… perhaps sometimes at the theater;—go and see Grimaldi.”

“Alas!” he shouted, ‘”hat is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.” –WTF fun facts

Source: “Here We Are Again!—How Joseph Grimaldi Invented the Creepy Clown” — JSTOR Daily

WTF Fun Fact 12642 – The Cereal Made for Orange Juice

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May the 4 may be a day that lives in infamy. That’s the day fruit company Tropicana announced it will release a new cereal that you’re supposed to pour orange juice on top of instead of milk. It seems they do not realize that we could have done that all along and have just chosen not to for the most part.

Some people seem excited, while others are disgusted – so in that sense, it’s just like any other piece of random news.

According to the fruit company’s website for the cereal, you can buy your first box of Tropicana Crunch on May 4, 2022. The “Cereal Made for OJ.” (Not Simpson, we assume.)

We’re not sure how you “engineer a cereal” for citrus other than just suggesting it (which is really all it takes for most people), but the company seems oddly confident that the “unforgettable breakfast experience” is going to change breakfast forever.

And why May 4th, you ask? That’s National Orange Juice Day.

We’ll admit that the crunchy honey almond-flavored cereal doesn’t sound bad in itself, but we’ll just let you find out for yourselves how it tastes. – WTF fun facts

Source: “SNAP, CRACKLE… JUICE? NEW CEREAL MADE TO BE EATEN WITH ORANGE JUICE, NOT MILK” — Ripley’s Believe It Or Not

WTF Fun Fact 12641 – A Great Ball of Fire

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The world didn’t end on April 27, 2022, though we’re confident that a few people thought it might after seeing a giant fireball in the sky headed straight for earth at 8 am.

Around 60 people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana saw what turned out to be a meteor, but hundreds of people heard the loud boom. That’s because it exploded 34 miles above a swampy area in Louisiana with the power of 3 tons of TNT. Frankly, we would have just gone back to bed after all that.

NASA confirmed the meteor and verified that pieces of it had been recovered on the ground in Mississippi. At first, they estimated its speed at 55,000mph but later amended it to a more modest 35,000mph.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said the event caused no physical injuries or property damage. However, we’re pretty sure there was at least a little bit of existential damage done to anyone who thought they were about to meet the same end as the dinosaurs.

Because the law states that meteorites belong to whoever owns the property they land on, NASA will not disclose the locations of any of the fragments. (We’re pretty sure someone on Facebook will take care of that.)

NASA also reminded people: “We are not meteorite people, as our main focus is protecting spacecraft and astronauts from meteoroids.” So they won’t be identifying or authenticating any other rocks people claim are meteorites. They also confirmed that Mississippi is particularly meteorite-prone, with incidents occurring in 1854, 1910, 1922, and 2012. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Pieces of ‘fireball’ that exploded while zooming over 3 Southern states are being found on ground, NASA says” — CBS News