My speaking audiences always tell me how much they enjoy the useful trivia and unusual anecdotes that pop up during my presentations. In many cases, the stories are ones I found while researching the subject. However, I often find fascinating information while looking for something completely different! Below, I offer 10 such nuggets for your enjoyment.
10 Things I Learned While Looking up Something Else
10. Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe 
met each other. I imagine that must’ve been a very odd and interesting conversation! Click here for details
9. The complex language of the impossibly beautiful island 
nation of Iceland is so pure that students in school today can easily read Icelandic sagas from the year 1000! Have you ever seen American students struggle with Shakespeare? (Point of reference: Hamlet was written in 1603!) Iceland has proudly retained and honored their unique history. Of course, being an isolated island, they’ve been able to limit outside influences on their culture for a long time. Click here for details.
8. President Obama is related to Brad Pitt, George W Bush, Dick Cheney,
and President Harry S Truman. Wouldn’t that make for an amazing family reunion sometime! Click here for details.. In a humorous response to being informed that Dick Cheney was a relative, a spokesman for President Obama replied: “Every family has a black sheep,”
7. Only one human being has ever been known to 
have been hit by a meteorite. Ann Hodges was 34 and napping under a quilt on a couch in her home in Alabama when a nine pound meteorite crashed through her rook and hot her. When we say that something is improbable, we often remark that the chances are like getting hit by lightning. But if we want to say that something is truly rare, we should compare it to being hit by a meteorite! Mrs. Hodges, the woman who had been hit, ended up in a legal battle over possession of the meteorite, lost her marriage and had a nervous breakdown. Click here for details.
6. The warm, welcoming and isolated little islands of Bermuda which is are in the Atlantic Ocean over 600 miles away from the Caribbean – actually have no indigenous people. Bermuda was completely uninhabited until 1609, when a British ship wreck landed the first permanent inhabitants of the island. Click here for more details. Mark Twaindearly loved Bermuda and famously said: “You can go to heaven if you want to. I’d rather stay in Bermuda.
5. It has been reported that the movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has made more money than any other film in history. That conclusion is based on faulty reasoning. If you adjust for ticket prices and inflation, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ranks #15! That is because average tickets prices
have increased dramatically over the years. Likewise, inflation changes the value of a dollar over time. So if you assign all tickets and equal price, what is the the all time movie box office leader? “Gone With The Wind!” Click here for details.
4. One of the reasons there are so many deaths from tornadoes in Oklahoma is because almost no homes in Oklahoma have basements! It has to do with the soil. Click here for details. I consider this very useful trivia!
3. William the Conqueror was so fat that his body would not fit into a coffin. Attendants shoved and pushed and forced his stomach down into the casket. unfortunately, during the state funeral, his stomach exploded, filling the church with such a foul stench that they had to evacuate! How embarrassing! Click here for details.
2. Velcro was invented after a scientist became fascinated by the burrs that stuck to his dog’s fur! 
After studying the process, he was able to find a commercial application for it. That is real genius! Click here for details.
1. There is a fabulous tale about the invention of play-doh! I simply love this story. I first learned about it in the movie “How D0 You Know” (Click here to see the scene. It runs three minutes) And I was so interested that I looked it up and found out the story was true. I mentioned it on my “Motivating Movie Quotes” post. (Click here for that page.)
(1) Re: Movie gross. I feel movie attendance should be reported in tickets sold rather than $ amounts, for relevant comparisons, as you note. (2) I always had my children look up a second word whenever they had to go to the dictionary for anything.
Using ticket sales alone as a means of comparison is not accurate. People began paying to go to the movies in the 1920s, when the population of the United States was under 120 million. If you looked at ticket sales as a percentage of population, you might have a more correct comparison. The comparison chart that I offered looks at two factors. The first is, what was the cost of an average movie ticket in the year the film premiered. Secondly how has inflation changed the cost of the ticket so that we can compare it to tickets purchased in other years.
For instance, in 1939, the year that “Gone With The Wind” & “The Wizard Of Oz” premiered, the average price of a movie ticket was $.25. “Gone With The Wind” sold its tickets for one dollar each during its first weeks of premier.
In today’s money, that quarter is worth $4.03 and the dollar would have the equivalent buying power of over $16.
What I thought was interesting on the chart was that the first movie made after the year 2000 to appear on the chart comes in at number 14!!