15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, October 19, 2024
As Halloween approaches, our mind goes to scary stuff. To people getting murdered and otherwise dying horribly. To mysterious disappearances and mysterious conspiracies. And to clowns, of course, and if the clown isn’t a killer, that’s arguably even scarier, because in that case, what exactly are they getting out of it all?
Read on to also learn about why you should record your daily routine and why you should never record gorillas.
Chilling End
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A guest at a Chicago hotel party in 2017 popped into the building’s walk-in freezer. She was unable to get out and died there. The hotel later settled a lawsuit for $10 million, since it turns out you aren’t supposed to have an unsecured death room that the public can stumble into.
Gone Horribly Right
The big bang theory remained quite shaky until 1965, when scientists detected cosmic background radiation that lingered in space. They weren’t looking for it when they detected it. They had just built a new radio receiver and noticed a whole lot of unwanted noise, which turned out not to be a flaw in the invention.
Weed Killer
A New York marijuana grower set up a bunch of piano wire traps around his crop in 2013, evidently to protect it from intruders. This really backfired: He got caught in one of his own traps, which cut his head off.
Clean Sweep
In 1978, someone had the idea of hand-pump soap dispensers, but he couldn’t get a patent on it because the hand pump was an existing invention. So he bought every hand pump that manufacturers could produce for one year — 100 million of them. For a year, no one but him could make new bottles with the device.
Needed a Bigger Boat
John Williams is known for writing some of the most famous film scores. He also wrote the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. The original theme song, at least — the producers later decided they could do better and replaced it with the tune we know today.
CBS
Love Conquers All
In 2019, a Florida man killed his father, mother and brother one night. The motive appeared to be that his family were trying to wean him off his connection to a camgirl, to whom he’d already paid $200,000.
Absentminded Professor
The Bunsen burner was named after Robert Bunsen. In the 1940s, while he was at the University of Marburg, he once proposed to a woman, who said yes. Then he spent a few days in the lab and forgot that he’d done this. He now proposed to her again, and she was so angry that he didn’t remember that she cut ties with him.
Eating Your Sadness
In the Sulu Archipelago, you can buy loris tears and drink them. To obtain them, keepers insert a skewer through the animal’s anus and out its mouth, then keep it alive and collect the tears as it cries.
The Best Medicine
Though clowns are generally known for murdering children, there have been exceptions. In 1970, a massive avalanche killed tens and thousands of people in Peru, and many of the survivors owed their lives to a clown. Three hundred children were visiting a circus, and when the earthquake struck, a clown led them to higher ground before the avalanche could hit them.
Crash for Cash
The Mary Celeste was famously found adrift in 1872 with the crew vanished, but its story didn’t end there. The new captain later sank it on purpose, for the insurance money. He narrowly escaped conviction then died three months later anyway.
via Wiki Commons
Crystal Clear
Kosher salt, despite the name, is not salt that’s specifically allowed under Jewish dietary regulations. All salt is kosher — there are no religious laws against any type of salt. “Kosher salt” instead refers to salt that’s large and coarse, and free of additives, which means it’s been useful in preparing kosher food.
Bad Meets Evil
LIDAR guns are more powerful than traditional radar for police who track speeders. Police departments originally got these guns as donations from insurance companies. Increased citations without increased collisions meant companies could raise rates without raising payouts.
Rule, Britannia!
You might have heard that the length of a marathon goes back to some race in Ancient Greece. That’s not quite true. That Greek race was 25 miles. Marathons are instead now all exactly 26 miles and 385 yards, simply because that’s the distance from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium in London.
Just Plane Scary
In 1987, a plane crashed near Warsaw, killing all 183 aboard. Due to the way the aircraft failed, everyone aboard knew they were going to die for roughly the last half hour of the journey. The last words that came in over the radio from the crew were, “Good night! Goodbye! Bye! We perish.”
Donkey Work
While making 1994’s video game Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo went to the zoo and spent hours recording actual gorillas. This was a “complete waste of time,” according to someone in the sound department, as the gorillas there made no usable sounds and also produced no interesting movement.