Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
The first African-American whose name appeared on ballots as a candidate for President of the United States was Clennon King in 1960. He was called the Black Don Quixote for his efforts and was committed to an insane asylum in 1958 for applying to the University of Mississippi.
In 1988, a man named Robert W. Faid published a book mathematically “proving” that the Antichrist was Mikhail Gorbachev, with odds of exactly 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1. He later won an Ig Nobel prize for it.
Then PM of Australia, Ben Chifley, would regularly receive calls on his secret direct line from housewives trying to order meat as the number was similar to the local Butcher’s. Instead of embarrassing the callers, Chifley would take down their orders and pass it onto the Butcher.
There was a 1700s politician named John Strange, and his epitaph reads, “Here lies an honest lawyer, and that is Strange.”
In 1853 a candidate for governor in California accidentally campaigned in Oregon so they named the town after him.
Robert F. Kennedy took up a paper route as a young boy. However, he had the family chauffeur driving him, so that he could make his deliveries in a Rolls-Royce.
A digital time capsule “A Message From Earth” was transmitted to the planet Gliese 581c and included a message by actress Gillian Anderson consisting of images of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Jesse Jackson, Jr. and his wife were sentenced to jail for using $750,000 in campaign money for over 3000 personal purchases that included a Michael Jackson fedora and cashmere capes.
Jerningham Wakefield, a New Zealand politician was such a notorious drunk, his friends would lock him in Parliament overnight to keep him sober enough to vote the next day. However, this failed in 1872 when his political enemies began lowering bottles of whiskey down the chimney.
The German Parliament building has a glass dome above it that people can walk over. This is to remind the politicians that government should be transparent, and the people are always above them.