12 Completely Random Facts For You To Learn Something New This Week

The Catholic Bishop of Orlando is also technically the Bishop of the Moon.

1. Under Catholic law, the Bishop of Orlando, Florida, is most likely also the Bishop of the Moon.

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Catholic canon in the 1960s said that if any new territory was discovered, the bishop in charge of the place where the expedition started from would become the bishop of the new territory by default. Therefore, since the Apollo 11 mission launched from Cape Canaveral, the Bishop of Orlando (whose diocese also covers Cape Canaveral) became Bishop of the Moon when the Apollo mission landed there. The story goes that Bishop Donald Borders made this claim when he visited the Pope after the moon landing, but it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek.

2. Mel Brooks' handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame have six fingers on his left hand. Mel wore a prosthetic sixth finger as a joke for the handprint ceremony.

Mel Brooks @MelBrooks

I desperately need to wash my hands.

07:30 PM - 08 Sep 2014

3. Leonard Nimoy came up with the idea for the "Vulcan nerve pinch" because he didn't want to perpetuate violence with guns.

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That's according to Marc Cushman's These Are the Voyages books, about the making of the original Star Trek series.

4. Technically, France has more time zones than any other country.

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If you include France's overseas territories (like French Polynesia or Wallis and Futuna), then all of the land owned by France uses 12 different time zones. That's more than even Russia, which has 11.

5. A Hawaiian House member introduced a bill last year to raise the legal smoking age to 100.

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House member Dr. Richard Creagan introduced the bill, which would have required the legal smoking age for cigarettes to be raised to 100 by the year 2024. It didn't pass. The bill notably would not have included cigars or e-cigarettes. Two years prior, in 2017, Hawaii successfully passed a bill to raise the smoking age to 21.

6. Wisconsin allows you to drink if you're under 21, as long as a parent or legal guardian is present and gives their permission.

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The licensed establishment (in this case usually a bar or restaurant) has to be OK with it as well. Similar laws exist in Ohio and Texas. There's no minimum age stated in the law, so theoretically you could be a beer-guzzlin' sixth-grader in any one of those three states.

7. George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels upon which Game of Thrones was based, attended the first-ever New York Comic Con when he was 15 years old.

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According to the book The 1964 New York Comicon: The True Story Behind the World's First Comic Book Convention by J. Ballmann, Martin was one of roughly 56 attendees at what is largely considered to be the first official comic book convention. Len Wein, one of the convention's organizers, even claims that Martin was the first person to buy a ticket, though that's unconfirmed.

8. Obesity prevalence in the US has gotten so high over the past 30 years. Colorado and Hawaii, the states with the lowest obesity rates in 2018 (20–25%), have higher rates than Mississippi, the state that had the highest obesity ranking in 1990 (10–14%).

cdc.gov

As of 2018, the prevalence of adults with obesity in Mississippi had increased to an estimated 39.5%.

9. New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that reached and photographed Pluto in 2015, carries some cremated ashes of the man who first discovered Pluto.

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Clyde Tombaugh was the first person to spot Pluto in 1930. He died in 1997, shortly before his 91st birthday, but some of his cremated remains were placed on New Horizons for its mission almost 10 years later. In 2015, the spacecraft accomplished its flyby of Pluto, and it is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt, nearly a billion miles past Pluto.

10. At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Arthur Weasley takes Harry to the Ministry of Magic via a phone booth entrance. To activate it, Arthur enters 6-2-4-4-2 on the keypad...that spells out "magic."

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11. Remember this scene in Spider-Man? It wasn't CGI. Tobey Maguire actually caught all that stuff on the tray (it was stuck to his hand with an adhesive) after 156 takes.

Sony

12. One 17-inch pizza is more food than two 12-inch pizzas.

NBC

All you gotta do is calculate the area of the pizza. So if all you care about is the amount of pizza and not the toppings or anything, always go with the large.

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