12 Bits of Trivia to Wedge Into Your Brain Like a Migraine of Information

The rise of the codpiece in the 15th and 16th centuries coincided with the spread of syphilis. A codpiece’s whole job is to cover up your junk in a fancy way, and it’s very likely that nobility and poor folks alike were happy to have an excuse to hide away the various unseemly symptoms of the STD.

Grüner See is an idyllic park at the base of the Hochschwab Mountains that has all the normal park amenities: benches, bridges, hiking and running trails. But when the snow melts in the spring, there’s a prolonged period of time where the whole thing is completely underwater. It then becomes a popular scuba diving destination.

Most likely, you’ve simply never touched a live wire. But there is a very rare genetic condition that causes people to have no sweat or salivary glands, and no water means there’s no way for electricity to penetrate the body. One man with the disorder, Slavisa Pajkic, has come to be known as the Battery Man — he’ll conduct electricity through his body to cook food or set things on fire.

That’s normally a trite Hinge profile joke, but this guy has data to back it up. Scott Wiener was recognized in 2013 as having the largest collection of pizza boxes in the world — 595 — and he now runs pizza tours and pizza classes in New York City.

Dan Rice was a Civil War-era clown who became wildly popular by making light of the dark news of the day. He briefly ran for president, and made some pretty bizarre claims — mainly, that he invented pink lemonade, that Uncle Sam was based on him and that he was Abe Lincoln’s personal clown.

Known as the “nest of bees” because of its hexagonal shape, and the stinging weapons it held inside, this was sort of like a pack of bottle rockets designed to shoot 32 lethal arrows into your body.

The old trope of a captured spy biting down in just the right way to pop open a cyanide capsule is almost definitely too dangerous to pull off in real life. The CIA has, however, implanted a little Get Out of Jail Dead Card in the ends of a pair of glasses, and once gave a Soviet double agent a pen with some cyanide hidden inside, which he chewed on pensively upon being caught.

When a man was freed from a Russian prison in 2018, he took home a stray cat who had been living there as well. He attached a bunch of hash and amphetamines to the cat’s body, and let it free near the prison. As was planned, the cat found its way back inside, but was apprehended before it could deliver the goods.

Brando became enamored with a flight attendant without even getting her name. He wrote her a letter that started “Dear Lady,” went on to say “by the mystery of genetic phenomena, you have been visited by the gifts of refinement, dignity and poise” and then made sure to neg her “gothic aspects,” calling her “not pretty in a conventionally thought of way.”

Trying to reckon with the fact that chemical and noise pollution from ships is driving whales to suicide, a conservationist group developed an app for the San Francisco Bay maritime community to report whale sightings. Sailors can then reroute so as not to bother (or straight up crash into) whales.

Researchers believe they’ve developed a way to detect Alzheimer’s by studying a person’s writing over several years. Author Agatha Christie and philosopher Iris Murdoch both apparently exhibited the telltale shrinking of vocabulary.

An Austrian racist group called Tempelhofgesellschaft believes their blood is so pure, they actually descended from racist aliens. They’re waiting for their alien ancestors to return and finally help them win World War II.