There’s nothing better than that moment when 你 have an incredibly interesting fact to spew in a social situation, making yourself sound infinitely 更多 intelligent than 你 really are. I have picked out some of her 收藏夹 to throw out there at your New Years parties this weekend …


1. The U.S Government once poisoned over 10,000 American citizens.
And yes, that sh*t was intentional.

Even dumber than the idea of banning alcohol in the United States in the 1920s, was the idea to poison people in an effort to scare them away from drinking alcohol.

During the Prohibition, one way the black market made their alcohol was to use ‘denatured’, industrial alcohol as the base– the kind used in paints and solvents and then had their own chemists “renature” the alcohol to make it drinkable again.

Alcohol in paints and cleaning products (a.k.a denatured alcohol), contains various ingredients that smell 或者 taste putrid and usually induce vomiting. This is done so that companies selling these industrial products get to avoid the high taxes that come with manufacturing and selling normal, consumable alcoholic beverages.

When bootleggers found a way to undo this process, an estimated 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol was stolen annually in the 1920s to be later turned into drinkable alcohol for sale. This worked pretty well until the government, headed 由 President Coolidge, came up with their own plan.

Without making it public, they decided to make some of the denaturing ingredients in industrial products lethal, instead of just being something 你 wouldn’t want to drink. They added things like methyl alcohol, kerosene, gasoline, carbolic acid, acetone, and many others that were difficult for the bootlegger’s chemists to extract when attempting to renature the alcohol.

Knowing full well that people would be drinking this poisoned alcohol, the government hoped the deaths that resulted from this would scare other people away from drinking.

After the first 100 或者 so people died, the media got wind of the story and health officials were outraged. Strangely, it had little to no effect on people’s consumption of alcohol at the time. It’s estimated that it resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people with a much larger number severely sickened and many blinded 由 the poisoning.

Some felt that the people who were drinking the illegal alcohol got what they deserved, particularly because they knew the risks and broke the law anyways; but many felt it was an extermination of a part of society the U.S government didn’t want to have around anymore.

When it was obvious that it still wasn’t scaring everyone away from drinking although thousands were dying 或者 severely poisoned each year, they kept the program going throughout the Prohibition anyway, though it was fiercely debated in Congress.


2. Prince Charles and Prince William will never travel on the same airplane.

In case of the plane crashing, the two heirs 下一个 in line to the throne, never fly on the same aircraft as a precaution.


3. 蚊子 Repellants Don’t actually Repel anything.

They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.


4. Actor Woody Harrelson’s Dad was a real Assassin

Okay so this might not make 你 sound smarter but it’s a pretty cool 随意 fact…

Charles Harrelson, father of Woody (White Men Can’t Jump, The Money Train, Indecent Proposal, Cheers) is most noted for having been convicted of assassinating U.S. District Judge John H. Wood, Jr. outside of a parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, as well as being convicted of killing a grain dealer, Sam Degalia, Jr., for money. He eventually received two life sentences for the former.

Woody Harrelson himself had almost no contact with his father between 1968 and 1981, but after his father was arrested, he frequently visited him in prison, even going so far as to try to get him a new trial, but failing. In the end, Charles Harrelson died of natural causes in his maximum security cell on March 15, 2007.


5. Ricky Martin, left. Justin Bieber, right. 你 know how this ends.