It's True! (Part Eight)

More True Facts and Trivia adapted from various sources including Readers Digest, That's a Fact, Jack! and True Facts that Sound Like Bull$#*t

You asked for more trivia and true facts so happy to continue this series. Thank you for the comments and suggestions. Without further ado:

• A New York City Restaurant sells a $2,700.00 pizza! Industry Kitchens in NYC South Street Seaport holds the Guinness record for the world's most expensive pizza. It must be ordered two days in advance and is topped with 24K gold leaves, Stilton blue cheese, Hudson Valley Fois gras, Platinum Osetra Caviar, French Perigord truffle and if you want to add Almas Caviar, it can be added for an extra $700.00.

• There's an underwater post office in the South Pacific. It's the Vanuatu Post Office and is off the coast of Hideaway Resort and Marine Sanctuary. It's the world's only under-the-sea post office. Vacationers who want to send a waterproof postcard home can snorkel or scuba dive 10 feet under the ocean's surface. You can tell when the postmaster is on premise when a special flag is raised above the waterline.

Let's get Salty!

• Martin Luther King Jr. paid for Julia Roberts' hospital birth - Back in 1967, Julia Roberts' parents ran a theater school in Atlanta and welcomed MLK Jr. and Coretta Scott King's children as students when they had trouble getting accepted into other schools because they were Black. Martin and Coretta found out that Mr. and Mrs. Roberts couldn't afford the hospital bill when Julia was born, so they returned the kindness the Roberts had afforded the King kids by paying the bill.

• Women in Allied countries wore red lipstick because Hitler hated it. It was well known that Hitler specifically had a thing against red lipstick, so in response, women in allied countries and the resistance proudly wore it as a sign of defiance.

• An author predicted the sinking of the Titanic 14 years before it happened. An 1898 novella entitled The Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson wrote about a fictional ship named Titan that was described as an 'unsinkable' ocean liner that sinks after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. As if that isn't eerie enough, just like the Titanic, the Titan in the book did not have enough lifeboats for all the passengers.

Plenty of ice for the drinks anyhow

• Pilots and co-pilots routinely consume different in-flight meals - This one made sense to me. By eating a different meal, the Captain and First Officer avoid the off chance that both get food poisoning. Somebody had a great idea. (I'll have the Cajun shellfish, and she'll have the suspicious looking poultry dish)

• A dentist invented the Electric Chair - In 1881, a dentist in Buffalo NY witnessed the freak electrocution of an intoxicated man touching a live generator terminal. Dr. Alfred Southwick felt this was a more humane capital punishment than the hanging or guillotine methods used at that time and lobbied with the New York governor mandating electrical executions. Twenty states followed suit.

Shocking but true

• In the book written by L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy was a blonde, not a brunette. MGM dressed Judy Garland in a blonde wig with heavy makeup. But the director thought she looked too brassy and sophisticated to be a rural farm girl and changed the movie version to deviate from the book.

• Cats have their own film festival. A big screen production called Cat Video Fest features a 75-minute compilation of short feline flicks that is sent to hundreds of theatres worldwide annually.

• You can buy someone's lost luggage. There's a business in Scottsdale Alabama called the Unclaimed Baggage Center that has contracts with all the major airlines and buys unclaimed bags that are still unclaimed after 90 days. Some of the most unusual finds in the bags include a shrunken head from the Amazon, a camera from the Space Shuttle, and a 40.95 carat Emerald appraised at $25,000.00. The 50,000 square foot store gets more than a million visitors a year from all over the world.

• Queen Elizabeth I popularized black teeth in the 1500s. The queen has a legendary sweet tooth and her teeth turned black over time from all the sugary treats. Because subjects looked to her as a major influencer in her time, women decided to black out their teeth to copy their queen's smile.

just ewww..

• In Delaware, you can get your marriage annulled if it was done as a joke or prank. Under 13 Del. Code §1506(a)(6), a Delaware court must annul a marriage if one or both parties entered into it as a joke, dare, or prank. This is one of the legally recognized grounds for annulment in the state. It must be done within 90 days of learning the nuptials weren't on the up and up.

• Fiat once sold a car with an espresso machine - the European version of the 2012 500L Fiat came installed with a Lavazza built-in expresso maker. It could only brew when the car was parked and the idea fizzled out the following year.

Don't hit that bump, Eugene...I don't need a McDonald's hot coffee moment

Hope you enjoyed this installment of It's True! Feel free to send me some fun trivia for upcoming posts if you'd like to robertsreader.com@yahoo.com or bobgehman@yahoo.com. And as always, you're welcome to leave a comment below.