factoids & other things of interest

in the mid-1980s, an intoxicated Mick Jagger phoned Charlie Watts’ hotel room in the middle of the night asking “Where’s my drummer?”. Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs, and punched Jagger in the face, saying: “Don’t ever call me your drummer again. You’re my fucking singer!”

Fact: Armadillo shells are bulletproof
In fact, one Texas man was hospitalized when a bullet he shot at an armadillo ricocheted off the animal and hit him in the jaw.

Canadians say “sorry” so much that a law was passed in 2009 declaring that an apology can’t be used as evidence of admission to guilt.

There were two AI chatbots created by Facebook to talk to each other, but they were shut down after they started communicating in a language they made for themselves.

If you point your car keys to your head, it increases the remote’s signal range. This works by using your brain to act as a radio transmitter.

The spiked dog collar was invented by the Ancient Greeks to protect their dogs from wolf attacks.

A man with severe OCD and a phobia of germs attempted to commit suicide with a gun to his head. Instead of killing him, the bullet eliminated his mental illness without any other damage. The afflicted man, now a straight-A college student, tried to kill himself five years ago, when he was 19 years old, said Dr. Leslie Solyom, a psychiatrist at Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. The man, identified only as George, washed his hands hundreds of times a day and took frequent showers, Dr. Solyom said. The behavior had forced him to drop out of school and quit his job.

Vanilla flavoring is sometimes made with the urine of beavers.

There is a company in the U.K. that offers “being hungover” as a valid reason for calling off work. They are allotted four hungover days per year.