The Weirdest Things You Could Only Find at Your Grandparents House

Tomato Pincushion

This must be the thing women are given on the day they pass their Grandmother's acceptance exam because literally every single one had this strange little pincushion. There's actually an interesting story behind it, though. According to folklore, placing a tomato on the mantel of a new house guaranteed prosperity and repelled evil spirits. If tomatoes were out of season, families improvised by using a round ball of red fabric filled with sand or sawdust. The good-luck symbol also served a practical purpose—a place to store pins.

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The More You Know

  • Pilots and their co-pilots are required to eat different meals before flights so that they don’t both end up with food poisoning.
  • The world's most densely populated island is the size of two soccer fields.
  • If you take all the letters from the word "wizard" and swap them with opposite letters (a->z, b->y), it spells wizard backwards.
  • A Nepalese doctor has restored the sight of over 100,000 often poverty-stricken people in the last thirty years across Asia and Africa using a 5 minute procedure and an inexpensive artificial lens.
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