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    44 Facts To Help You Make It Through Today

    The world is an unrelenting nightmare and each day plunges us further into an abyss of sadness and dismay. Except when it doesn't! Sometimes everything is actually OK! These are some of those times.

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    1. Gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson was blinded by his mother as a child, and later died homeless and penniless. Almost 60 years later the Voyager I left our solar system with a recording of this song — "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" — on board.

    He'll now always be remembered as an ambassador for life on our planet.

    2. A train-obsessed 6-year-old boy once applied for a job at the British National Railway Museum. They hired him as their "Director of Fun."

    3. Cows have best friends that they spend all their time with.

    4. Farmers in the U.S. have stopped growing as much tobacco, and have started growing more chickpeas as smoking has become less popular and hummus has become much more popular.

    5. Hundreds of new trees grow each year because of forgetful squirrels losing track of where they bury their nuts.

    6. Customs declarations were made on behalf of the Apollo 11 Crew when they returned from the moon. Among the things declared were "moon rock" and "moon dust."

    7. Scotland's official animal is the unicorn.

    8. Also, the Loch Ness monster is a protected species, thanks to a provision in the Scottish Protection of Animals Act of 1912.

    9. Otters hold hands while they're sleeping so they don't float away from one another.

    10. Also, they've got a special pouch that they keep their favorite pebble in.

    11. Loving someone and being loved in return makes wounds heal faster, due to the release of oxytocin in the blood.

    12. There's a special penis sleeve built into space suits. NASA had to change the names of the sizes from small, medium, and large to large, gigantic, and humongous because astronauts kept only choosing large and the sleeves kept slipping off.

    13. Norway once knighted a penguin. His name is Sir Nils Olav.

    14. Dolphins have names for themselves and for one another.

    15. Seahorses hold onto one another with their tails while traveling together, and mate with the same partner for life.

    16. During an endurance race through the Amazon, a stray dog sat down with a group of racers as they ate lunch. The dog then joined the team for the rest of the grueling 430-mile race, refusing to leave their sides. One of the racers adopted the dog and flew it back to his home in Sweden.

    17. During the Apollo 17 mission, astronaut Gene Cernan wrote his daughter's initials on the moon. "TDC" is still up there, and will be long after Gene and Tracy Cernan are gone.

    18. The nation of Bhutan uses "gross national happiness" as a key indicator of the country's success.

    19. There are more libraries than McDonald's restaurants in the United States.

    20. When a Florida sheriff's office accidentally ordered a rug with the typo "In Dog We Trust" on it, they sold the rug at auction for almost $10,000, and donated the proceeds to a local animal shelter.

    21. A Chinese millionaire named Xiong Shuihua once bulldozed an entire village of wood huts that he grew up in. He replaced the huts with luxury condos, then invited the poor residents of the former village to live in them for free in order to repay them for showing him kindness when he was young.

    22. Most domesticated house cats run faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest human.

    23. Martin Luther King Jr. got into a pillow fight in his hotel room the morning before he was assassinated.

    24. Puffins mate for life, and are called "pufflings" when they're babies.

    25. Penguins mate for life too, and male penguins "propose" to their mate by presenting them with a small, prized pebble.

    26. Humans and bananas share about 50% of their DNA.

    27. One day in 1930, the BBC announced, "there is no news today," and just played piano music during the evening news.

    28. Mice, rats, and penguins are all ticklish.

    29. The Roman Emperor Caligula once declared war on the ocean. After his "victory" his men collected seashells as war trophies.

    30. Gorillas can dismantle poachers' traps, and have been seen doing so in Rwandan forests, protecting their clans from hunters.

    31. The Croatian government once wrote off the debt for its 60,000 poorest citizens in order to give them a new start.

    32. Honey doesn't spoil. A sealed container of honey will never go bad.

    33. A buttload is an actual unit of measurement. (It's a volume equal to two large casks of liquid, which is 126 gallons.)

    34. Oklahoma officially recognizes the watermelon as a vegetable, and not a fruit. It's also their official state vegetable.

    35. The president of Malawi once sold the country's presidential jet for $15 million and used the money to feed the poor and plant new crops in his country.

    36. There's a massive cloud of alcohol floating in space that's about 1,000 times larger than our solar system. It contains about 400 trillion trillion pints of booze.

    37. There's nearly a 100% chance that at least one molecule you drink in a cup of water once passed through a dinosaur (and Cleopatra).

    38. Some worms communicate by snuggling.

    39. Also, butterflies taste with their feet.

    40. An Australian man named James Harrison has been donating his blood for nearly 60 years. Thanks to a rare antibody in his blood that cures Rh disease, it's estimated that he's saved the lives of over 2 million babies born with the disease.

    41. There's a name for that feeling you get when something is so cute that you just want to squeeze it. It's called cute aggression.

    42. There's a law on the books in Connecticut that declares that a pickle has to bounce in order to legally be called a pickle.

    43. A Canadian man once walked into a Tim Hortons, where he bought a coffee for himself as well as the next 500 customers.

    44. And finally, the original official website for the Space Jam movie still exists, and hasn't changed since 1996.

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