Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
In 2007 Russia planted their national flag underwater in hopes of securing the arctic’s potential natural resources. “This isn’t the 15th century,” one foreign minister said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’
When USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev visited IBM’s Silicon Valley research facility in 1959 he showed indifference to computing technology, but he was so impressed by their buffet style cafeteria that he instructed factories across the Soviet Union to implement the self service dining concept.
The US Govt. used shell companies to import Titanium from the Soviet Union, to build the Blackbird SR-71, so they could spy on the Soviet Union.
Pre-dissolution Soviet comedians had to have all their jokes approved by the Department of Humor. Jokes about politics, religion, and sex were banned, which left mostly jokes about animals.
Russians considered the winter when Napoleon invaded Russia to be “a relatively mild winter”.
In a project called Pleistocene Park, some Russian scientists are trying to restore a small region of Russia to the way it would’ve looked ~10,000 years ago.
The “Tetris” tune is actually a 150 year old Russian folk song in which a street vendor flirts with a customer while haggling over goods.
There is a city in Russia so contaminated with nuclear waste, that people check their food with a Geiger counter before purchase.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s first words to the U.S. President upon meeting in 1995 were, “Do you think O.J. did it?”
Spoken by 200 people in central Siberia north of Mongolia, Ket language is considered to be in the same language family as Navajo. That would make Ket speakers the only remaining members in Eurasia of the original population that colonized the Americas.