Fun Facts That Are

When Filipino gymnast Carlos Yulo won two gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, his country went all out. He received a $550,000 fully furnished condo, $350,000 in government cash, lifetime free buffets, a lifetime supply of ramen and chicken, two café franchises, a Land Cruiser, and free flights for life. Total haul: over $2.6 million.

Jupiter produces lightning bolts up to 1,000 times more powerful than anything on Earth, generated by towering clouds of ammonia and water that don't exist anywhere else in the solar system. NASA's Juno spacecraft discovered that ammonia vapour melts high-altitude ice crystals on Jupiter, creating an exotic 'antifreeze' cloud system that generates these extreme electrical discharges.

James Van Der Beek spent six years starring in Dawson's Creek, filming over 120 hours of television. The internet reduced his entire career to a 3-second crying GIF. Instead of fighting it, he embraced it — launching jamesvandermemes.com with Funny or Die.

While filming Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at Greenwich's Old Naval College in 2010, Johnny Depp received a letter from a 9-year-old girl at a nearby school asking Captain Jack Sparrow for help with a "mutiny" against her teachers. With just ten minutes' notice, Depp arrived at the school in full pirate costume — but advised against the idea of mutiny.

Latvia has the largest gender imbalance in Europe. Women outnumber men by over 130,000 — in a country of just 1.86 million people.

French street artist Le CyKlop has been transforming ordinary anti-parking bollards into bright yellow LEGO-like characters across France since 2014. His 'Angry L'éGO' series started as guerrilla art — painting the posts at night in just two minutes using custom stencils — and has since grown into both unauthorized installations and official city commissions.

In the 1840s, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator with 8,000 parts to compute error-free mathematical tables. The project was too ambitious for Victorian-era resources and was never completed. Over 150 years later, the Science Museum in London built it to his exact specifications — and it worked perfectly.

A male cat named Xiaopi had to be put on a glucose drip after mating with five female cats in a single night at a pet hotel in China. The hotel staff had let the unneutered Russian Blue roam freely overnight, and CCTV footage captured the marathon session.

On very long, boring roads in Australia, they put up trivia signs to keep drivers alert. One sign asks a question, and a few kilometres later another sign gives the answer.

Rupert Grint became an ice cream man after Harry Potter — not for publicity, but because it had been his childhood dream all along.

A man bet $50,000 that someone would streak at the Super Bowl — then did it himself. He claimed he cashed out $374,000 and walked away with a $1,000 fine.

A TV reporter in the Philippines brought her puppy to the studio because no one was home to watch him. During the live broadcast of TV Patrol Southern Mindanao, she kept the sleeping puppy hidden at her feet — with only her upper half visible on camera. Behind-the-scenes photos later surfaced and went viral, showing the little golden pup curled up on the studio floor while she delivered the news without missing a beat.