The guillotine was still available to French Courts when Star Wars was released. As an extra, the last public guillotine execution in France, was of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann in 1939. 17 year old Christopher Lee was in the crowd watching, and would later go on to play Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus in the series.
Couple of big disasters that I remember reading about (but had to Google to get the specific stats for for on here) In 1991 a butter fire in Madison Wisconsin dairy plant led to 3000 people being evacuated from their nearby homes; took over a week of constant battling by 70 firefighters to extinguish and caused $80million worth of damage. In 1919 there was a molasses flood in Boston that killed over 20 people and injured 150 and caused a wave of mollasses to go down the streets at 35mph destroying everything in it's wake. Turns out "as slow as mollasses" is actually pretty fast. Papers at the time called it the Boston Molassacre.
Incidentally... Despite no fire in space, you can still shoot modern guns. Modern ammo contains it's own oxidizer to provide the oxygen necessary to ignite the gun powder.
A large percentage of coral sand on coral sand beaches (such as in Hawaii) is produced by Parrotfish picking at chunks of coral, digesting the edible parts and pooping the rest out as sand. So if you go somewhere tropical with white coral sand and lay on the beach ... Remember you're sunbathing in parrot fish poop!
In the 1996 Monaco GP, only 3 drivers managed to finish the race. In the 2005 US GP only 6 drivers actually started the race. (Most drivers pulled out over safety concerns)
If you got ejected into space without a suit you wouldn't actually freeze very quickly. As it's a vacuum you won't radiate much heat. Your bodily fluids will also stay inside and you won't burst like in movies. You'd probably suffocate. Your saliva would boil but it won't be hot.
I wish I'd known that 15 years ago. Could potentially have saved me a lot of grief. Who knew my teenage son would become a teenager aged 2.
Eating celery uses more calories than you get from it. Apple seeds release cyanide when crushed or digested.