12 Deliriously Boring Bits of Trivia to Knock You Out Before Dental Surgery

The Unarius Academy of Science — an organization that swears it’s not a religious cult — taught for years that aliens would visit Earth and usher in an age of prosperity in 2001. When that didn’t happen, it said 9/11 scared them off. It also teaches “interdimensional physics” and claim to have in its possession a 10,000-year-old crystal skull named Max.

Flip or Flop host Tarek El Moussa got a weird piece of fan mail, explaining that a visible lump on his neck could be thyroid cancer. He got it checked out, and that’s exactly what it was. After undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, he was able to invite the fan onto his show to thank her on camera. 

The city of Hirado suggested trapping a bunch of sperm whales in a relatively small swath of ocean, somehow, then breeding them in this semi-captivity, and erecting whale-visiting infrastructure so tourists can watch them do whale things. This is separate from NPR’s 2009 April Fool’s joke about an in-land whale farm.

Studies have found that sperm have odor receptors, so our best guess at the moment is that the sperm sniffs its way to the egg. 

But like, in a bad way. Some users have woken up to find a huge mess in their kitchens, and pieced together that they had cooked and eaten an entire meal — usually high in calories — while they were asleep. My official prediction: YouTube grindset gurus will be promoting Ambien binges by 2025.

The Moby Dick guy had some egregiously kind words for The Scarlet Letter guy, once writing to him, “Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours. Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine.” He later wrote to a friend, “Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He… shoots his strong New England roots in the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Scholars believe that Melville eventually got the hint that his love was unrequited, and left Hawthorne alone.

Feuer Buech, a manuscript on various weapons of war, described a tactic where a party attacking a city might kidnap local cats, set them on fire and let them run back to their homes, igniting countless fires in hard-to-reach places. 

Britain’s highly secretive spy organization, the Special Operations Executive, loved to outfit its agents with tobacco pipes that contained hidden weapons. Two of their favorites were the knife pipe and the tiny gun pipe.

Dating back to the fifth century, the chakram is a circular weapon with a sharp outer edge, which would be thrown overhand with enough force to sever limbs.

The Rougarou is a Louisiana werewolf who can switch back and forth between its forms at will, and in the 17th century, it was believed to specifically attack Catholics who didn’t fast during Lent. The Bible makes no mention of werewolves, so this guy just took it upon himself to hunt down lapsed Catholics for some reason.

William Kempe was a wildly popular clown, renowned for his improv. Think of him as an Elizabethan Chris Pratt. He worked with Shakespeare a fair amount, but when Kempe started getting too big for his britches, Shakespeare wrote Kempe’s characters out of his plays. At one point, Hamlet even says that clowns need to shut up and quit improvising, which is thought to be a direct shot at Kempe. Kempe, for his part, wrote a book about some stupid clown stunt he pulled, and got Shakespeare’s ass by referring to him as “Shakerags.”

“Hamburger” Harry Sperl was recognized by Guinness in 2014 for having the largest collection of hamburger-related items on the planet, clocking in at just under 4,000 trinkets. He used his Guinness notoriety to get an entire Hamburger Museum off the ground, where he’s amassed over 10,000 items, including a waterbed and the custom Hamburger Harley.