15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, May 4, 2024
We’ve got a photo of a baby animal wearing clothes below. And while that sounds adorable, you might instead find this photo horrifying. Or maybe you will find it adorable — we don’t know. We won’t know till you see it.
You’re also going to see some information about retrofuturism, as well as about a German man being put in his place, so we guess you're guaranteed to be in for a treat after all.
Sweet Sweet Fantasy
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Not been bound and abducted lately? No worries — you can hire a company to grab you and lock you in their cellar for four hours. If you want them to make it extra scary and have them nab you using a helicopter, that’ll cost extra.
German Rocket Science
NASA got the idea of counting down to launches from a 1929 German film, Woman in the Moon. It’s not strictly necessary for them to count backwards, but it’s certainly dramatic.
The Abandoned Mistress
“Mrs.” has the letter r in it, though “missus” does not. That’s because it was originally an abbreviation for “mistress,” a title that only fell out of favor once people started using it to mean “extramarital partner.”
Hard Mike
The show To Catch a Predator often asked targets to bring Mike’s Hard Lemonade with them to meetups. Viewers suspected this was a product placement deal, but Mike’s didn’t like the association at all and contacted the show to ask them to stop featuring the product.
Taken at the Flood
To this day, James Scott says he is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Authorities convicted him 30 years ago of sabotaging a levee and making the Mississippi River flood. The alleged motive: He wanted to trap his wife at her diner job, giving him time to party.
Get No Re-Stent
Rodney Dangerfield underwent heart-valve-replacement surgery in 2004. A reporter asked him how long hospitalization would take, and he said, “If all goes well, about a week. If not, about an hour and a half.” All did not go well, and he died in the hospital.
Pool’s Gold
The ocean contains 15 million tons of gold. That’s around 100 times as much gold as has been mined across all of human history. Only problem is, it’s so dilute, we have no economical way of harvesting it.
Dashboard of the Future
Cars have long included electrical ports that could light cigarettes. In 1968, the lighter company Ronson went further. They unveiled a device for your car that stored 20 cigarettes and dispensed lit cigarettes at the push of a button.
Exposure
An employee at a German museum tried a stunt to get famous: He hung one of his own paintings in the museum, without permission. This didn’t work at all. The museum noticed it immediately, fired him and filed criminal charges.
Hide and Suck
A cow won’t nurse any calf other than its own. But you can fool it into nursing some other calf, by making the new calf wear the skin of the cow’s dead child. This also works with goats.
Mosquito’s Best Friend
People don’t install bug zappers outside as often as they used to. We realized that these devices kill an endless number of harmless insects but are consistently terrible at attracting any of the biting insects we really want to kill.
Joke Candidate
The Soviet Union actually held elections in 1949. Voters had a total of one candidate to choose from. In protest, a beekeeper simply wrote “comedy” on his ballot. Naturally, for this, he was sent to a gulag.
Saint-Sang
The French were very unsatisfied upon witnessing the first death by guillotine. It wasn’t bloody enough, they said.
Silly Rabbit
The body positivity movement is being funded by junk-food makers. If you see an Instagrammer saying diets don’t work and there’s #NoShame in eating sweet food, that might be because they’ve been paid by the makers of Trix cereal.
Tunnel Snakes
In 1916, New York was building a tunnel under the East River. Compressed air broke out of a tube and blasted workers upward. One guy went through the roof, through the river bed, through the river and up in the air. He was fine, so he went straight home afterward.