If you’re bored with the news of the day, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 25 of the strangest facts from around the world. **#23 is the creepiest thing we’ve ever read.**
**#1. Jailbird Robert Shepard took hygiene to the extreme to break out of a West Virginia jail in 1994. Evidently feeling a little cooped up while awaiting trial for robbery, he patiently braided together minty waxed dental floss, wove himself a rope to get over an 18-foot prison wall, and made his escape.**
**#2. Keds claims that their canvas shoes are the first to earn the nickname “sneakers”. In 1917, an advertising agent noted that their flexible rubber soles let you sneak up on people — much harder if you were wearing the stiff click-clacking leather soles of the day – presumably to scare the bejeezus out of them. It was a crueler time.**
**#3. In Denmark, there is a tradition of treating certain friends like pastry: if a Danish person reaches their 25th birthday without marrying, you cover them with cinnamon. Sadly the tradition does not include any powdered sugar or apricot jam.**
**#4. As we sweat into the dog days of summer, you can thank Oakland kid Frank Epperson for helping you cool off with a popsicle. In 1905, the forgetful 11-year-old put soda mix, water, and a wooden stirrer in a glass and accidentally left it outside on a cold night. When he found it the next morning and slid a block of flavored ice out of the glass, sweet relief was born.**
**#5. In the hills of northeastern India, Ziona Chana presides over the world’s biggest family. It’s composed of his 39 wives, 94 children, 14 daughters-in-law, and 33 grandkids, who all live in his four-story lavender mansion.**
**#6. When he died peacefully at age 79, Tran Van Hay could look with satisfaction at his loving family and accomplished career as a Vietnamese traditional herbalist. And also at his hair, which was over 22 feet long and weighed over 23 pounds. He’d stopped cutting it at age 25 and felt that it inspired him to live a simple, contented life.**
**#7. Ah, Brazil! Soccer, sexy swimsuits, a gorgeous multicultural society that has now destroyed all its claims to sanity by putting peas on pizza. Green peas are one of the most popular pizza toppings in the country, and we don’t speak enough Portuguese to even ask why.**
**#8. You mock horses for having long, goofy-looking teeth. Don’t be so mean — throughout a horse’s life, its teeth never stop growing. Also, horses can’t really understand it when you make fun of them. Stop talking to horses, it’s weird.**
**#9. He had the beard and the yoga, but not the fixed-gear bike or the sleeve tattoos. Henry David Thoreau wrote his famous “Walden” in the 1850’s while living alone by the shores of a Massachusetts pond, and may have been America’s first enthusiastic practitioner of yoga.**
**#10. This may not be news to CSI devotees, but hair can provide a huge amount of information to scientists and cops alike. It keeps a record of everything that’s been in your bloodstream for as long as it’s been growing, but it will conceal one secret: a man’s hair can’t be distinguished from a woman’s, at least under a microscope.**
**#11. Japan has a tiny population of Christian believers, but a huge population of people who run out and grab a bucket of chicken every Christmas. Finger-licking Japanese can thank a KFC ad campaign from the 1970’s for starting what is now a national tradition.**
**#12. Nobody walks all over Muhammad Ali. And nobody walks all over his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, either – by the champ’s special request, his is the only star that is mounted not on the sidewalk but on a wall. Hey, would you say “no” to Muhammad Ali?**
**#13. The Chinese government didn’t put up with any Mayan Apocalypse nonsense. As the supposed end of the world neared in 2012, 93 people were arrested in China for spreading dire rumors about the coming fake catastrophe.**
**#14. The pleasant community of Oakville, Washington was briefly the grossest place in America. On August 7, 1994, a strange rain of gelatinous blobs fell from the sky, and a rash of townspeople came down with flu-like symptoms. Oakville is once again a healthy town, but the mysterious blobs have never been explained.**
**#15. A pint or two dark, smooth porter beer hits the spot. But a million pints was enough to kill eight people when a sudden explosion tore through a London brewery in 1814, inundating the neighborhood and destroying homes.**
**#16. The horrific carnage of World War I stole the lives of millions, and stole something else very precious from Hungarian soldier Paul Kern: sleep. After recovering from a head wound, Kern lived a normal life but was never able to sleep again.**
**#17. Ooh, cybercheating. Sexy chats with someone who isn’t your spouse. Both halves of a Bosnian couple thought they’d found secret, illicit romance in an online chatroom in 2007, only to find out they’d been texting each other all along. They promptly accused one another of being unfaithful, and both filed for divorce.**
**#18. How much would you pay to silence Justin Bieber? Students at a Chicago high school played “Baby” on the school intercom, over and over, until their classmates had raised $1,000 in donations to a local arts center. The fundraiser took three days to meet its goal, helping save the arts center but doing untold damage to their fragile young minds.**
**#19. The chameleon uses its patience and color-shifting ability to camouflage itself while hunting for tasty bugs. It also can’t hurt that these friendly lizards use tongues as long as their own bodies to catch insects.**
**#20. You had better cry, and make those tears convincing: after the death of Kim Jong Il, North Koreans who didn’t participate in organized mourning events and show genuine sadness at his passing were reportedly sentenced to six months in labor-training camps.**
**#21. It’s been over 40 years since human beings have walked on the moon. Gene Cernan was the last moonwalker to date, and in the final minutes of his 1972 mission the Apollo astronaut knelt and drew his daughter’s initials, “TDC”, in the dust.**
**#22. China is an epic nation. Go big, or go home – or maybe you won’t be able to get home at all, like the drivers unlucky enough to be traveling on Highway 110 in August 2010. They found themselves stuck in a traffic jam that went on for ten days.**
**#23. The rocky peaks of Mount Everest have claimed many climbers’ lives, and it’s often too risky to retrieve their bodies. The slopes of the mountain are the final resting place for over 200 climbers, and many bodies are still visible, preserved by the cold and the thin, dry air.**
**#24. Nebraska is famous for its wide-open spaces, small towns, and devotion to Cornhuskers football. So when the University of Nebraska team takes the field – having sold out every single home game since 1962 – the 87,000 seats at Memorial Stadium form the third largest city in the entire state.**
**#25. Hummingbirds are so small and fast that people often mistake them for insects. You could even mistake the Cuban Bee hummingbird for a flipped coin – the tiniest bird in the world, it’s so small that it weighs less than a penny.**
