WEIRD FACTS

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Amy and Katie Elliot are twins who were born in 2013 in Ireland, 87 days apart.

The twins’ mother, Maria, went into labour four months early, giving birth to Amy at 24 weeks. Both babies were not expected to survive, being so premature, but amazingly Maria’s contractions stopped after Amy was born. Amy survived in intensive care an incubator while Katie remained in Maria’s womb. Doctors are unable to explain why the contractions stopped in that generally when a woman begins delivering twins, the uterus contracts and expels both babies within an hour.

Maria visited Amy every day in intensive care whilst still carrying Katie and was allowed to hold Amy at 5 weeks.

Maria was induced on 27th August at 36 weeks and gave birth to Katie, who was fine.

Maria refused to register Amy ‘s birth until Katie arrived, being twins she wanted to register them together. According to Maria: 'But as you can imagine, registering them caused quite a stir. Their certificates say: Amy Elliott, Twin one, date of birth 1 June and Katie Elliott, Twin Two, date of birth 27 August.”

The Guinness Book of Records has recorded the births as the 'longest interval between the birth of twins'.

Previously the Guinness World Record title was held by Peggy Lynn of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania in the USA who gave birth to a baby girl, Hanna, on 11 November 1995, but she did not deliver the other twin, Eric until 2 February 1996, 84 days later.

Amy (left) and Katie (right) with mother, Maria; father, Chris; sister, Olivia and brother Jack

Starting school

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The initial lunar landings saw a lot of firsts, especially the very first Apollo 11 mission. There was the first famous moon walk by Neil Armstrong, the first country to land on the moon, the first word spoken from the moon, and so the list goes on.

Lesser known is the fact that Buzz Aldrin, the Lunar Module pilot and the second man to set foot on the moon, was the first to . . .

Well, it wasn’t actually like that.

Aldrin urinated into a special bag in his space suit, before climbing the Apollo 11 lander’s ladder.

“Everyone has their firsts on the moon, and that one hasn’t been disputed by anybody,” he said in the 2007 Apollo-program documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.

By the way:

Condom-like cuffs (see pic below) allowed the Apollo astronauts to pee into a bag. These were designed only for men. To defecate, they used a different rudimentary plastic bag system. The whole process could take up to 45 minutes. "Defecation and urination have been bothersome aspects of space travel from the beginning of manned space flight," an official NASA report on the Apollo space missions reads.

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Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance.

She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100 people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night.

So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with weak hearts started to die.

By the end of August 1518 about 400 people had experienced the madness. Finally they were loaded aboard wagons and taken to a healing shrine. Not until early September did the epidemic recede.

This was not the first outbreak of compulsive dancing in Europe. In fact, there had been as many as ten dancing epidemics before 1518, one in 1374 engulfing many of the towns of modern day Belgium, north-eastern France and Luxembourg.

It has been suggested that this was an outbreak of mass hysteria. In 1518 the poor of Strasbourg were experiencing famine, disease and spiritual despair on a scale unknown for generations. Trance states are more likely to occur in people who under extreme psychological distress, and who believe in the possibility of spirit possession. All of these conditions were satisfied in Strasbourg in 1518.

The city's poor were suffering from severe famine and disease. Crucially they believed in a saint called St. Vitus who had the power to take over their minds and inflict a terrible, compulsive dance. Once these highly vulnerable people began to anticipate the St. Vitus curse they increased the likelihood that they'd enter the trance state. And once in it, they acted out the part of the accursed: dancing wildly for days at a time. The epidemic, I is suggested, was a result of both desperation and pious fear.

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Sigurd the Mighty, a ninth-century Norse earl of Orkney, was killed by an enemy he had beheaded several hours earlier. He'd tied the man's head to his horse's saddle, but while riding home one of its protruding teeth grazed his leg. He died from the infection.

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The Dutch village of Giethoorn has no roads; its buildings are connected entirely by canals and footbridges.

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A family of people with blue skin lived in Kentucky for many generations. The Fulgates of Troublesome Creek are thought to have gained their blue skin through combination of inbreeding and a rare genetic condition known as methemoglobinemia.

Following the opening up of railroad tracks and motorable roads, the blue-skinned Fugates began to move to other communities and inter-marry people without the blue-skin gene. As time went on, fewer and fewer people with the condition were born and the blue skin condition disappeared altogether.

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The first American film to show a toilet being flushed on screen was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

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O.J. Simpson was supposed to be the Terminator, the T-800. James Cameron didn’t cast him because, he said. the footballer was "too pleasant".

By the way:

One afternoon during a break in filming, Arnold Schwarzenegger went into a restaurant in downtown L.A. to get some lunch and realized all too late that he was still in Terminator makeup - with a missing eye, exposed jawbone and burned flesh:

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