Fun Facts – 01 October 2014

– During World War II, the crew of the British submarine HMS Trident kept a fully grown reindeer called Pollyanna aboard their vessel for six weeks (it was a gift from the Russians).

– The northern leopard frog swallows its prey using its eyes — it uses them to help push food down its throat by retracting them into its head.

– The first man to urinate on the moon was Buzz Aldrin, shortly after stepping onto the lunar surface.

– Some fruit flies are genetically resistant to getting drunk — but only if they have an inactive version of a gene scientists have named “happyhour”.

– In 1567, the man said to have the longest beard in the world died after he tripped over his beard running away from a fire.

– The Dance Fever of 1518 was a month-long plague of inexplicable dancing in Strasbourg, in which hundreds of people danced for about a month for no apparent reason. Several of them danced themselves to death.

–  Vladimir Nabokov nearly invented the smiley.

– In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over whether a police officer called Bob Geary was allowed to patrol while carrying a ventriloquist’s dummy called Brendan O’Smarty. He was.

– Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he had beheaded several hours earlier. He’d tied the man’s head to his horse’s saddle, but while riding home one of its protruding teeth grazed his leg. He died from the infection.

– The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads; its buildings are connected entirely by canals and footbridges. 

Courtesy of Buzzfeed.com