You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

As the country was reeling from the Great Depression, a local, trusted banker in the town of Quincy, Florida, urged anyone who would listen to invest in Coca-Cola stocks, then selling at $19 per share. Many followed his advice and when the company’s stock boomed as he’d promised, others followed. Soon at least 67 inhabitants (in a town of fewer than 7,000) had become “Coca-Cola millionaires,” making Quincy the richest U.S. town per capita.

[Lee Stewart]

In 1988, a bar owner visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, made a surreptitious addition to the honorees, slipping a photo of his dad wearing a baseball uniform into one of the glass cases. It remained there for six years before anyone detected that it did not belong there.

[Lee Stewart]

Those foil seals added to the top of medicine bottles that can be so annoying to remove was put in place after a rash of poisonings occurred in 1982, in which seven people in the Chicago area were killed after ingesting Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide

[Lee Stewart]

Bottled water expiration dates are for the bottle, not the water. After a while, the plastic will start leaching into the liquid.

[Lee Stewart]

Attempting to end his life by jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a man named Kevin Hines survived but broke his back. While it seemed he would be not long for this world, a sea lion came to the rescue, swimming beneath him and keeping him afloat until the coast guard arrived.

[Lee Stewart]

Considered “the most important single traffic safety device,” the painting of lines down the center of roads was devised by a man named Edward Hines in 1911 when he saw the dotted drippings from a leaking milk wagon and struck on the concept.

[Lee Stewart]

The name “funny bone” comes from the humerus bone, which connects the shoulder to the elbow. However, that’s not the source of the tingling sensation you feel when you bump your elbow just right. It’s actually the result of the humerus bone coming into contact with the ulnar nerve, which is responsible for telling the brain about feelings in the ring and pinky fingers.

[Lee Stewart]

Jeanine Sugawara was devasted when she cracked open a box of Cap’N’Crunch Crunch Berries cereal to find that there wasn’t a single berry to be found in the box. Feeling “tricked” by the cereal company, she sued the Quaker Oats, who owns Cap’N’Crunch, on the ground of false advertising. The complaint was quickly dismissed when the judge reminded her that there is no such thing as a “crunchberry.

[Lee Stewart]

With more than 200 million copies in circulation every year, the IKEA catalog surpasses the Bible, the Quran, and the Harry Potter series to earn the title of the world’s most printed book. The annual catalogs are usually around 350 pages and vary in each of the 72 regions in which it’s distributed. For example, catalogs in Saudi Arabia only feature men in their photos.

[Lee Stewart]

Some people love it and some people hate it, but what is it that makes joint cracking so loud? When joints are stretched, the pockets of gas that get trapped between them are released. When these bubbles of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide escape, they might make a popping or cracking noise.