12 Bumps of Trivia to Snort Directly Into Your Dome

At what was probably the peak of his three-year heroin and cocaine binge from 1989-1991, Slash thought Predator-like creatures were chasing him with machine guns and harpoons. He broke a glass door to escape them, held a maid hostage, briefly, as a human shield and hid behind a lawnmower. He was still messed up when the police arrived, so he explained all of the above to them with a straight face.

They have a few familiar traditions that they ball into one weird block party. They’ll go door-to-door as if caroling, except they’re dressed in Halloween costumes, and they’ll just dance on your porch until you guess who they are. The homeowner can play 20 Questions with them, but they’ll answer using ingestive breathing — sucking wind inward while they speak. If you do guess correctly, you have to invite these freaks into your house and hang out with them.

They had a bunch of cute little games to either initiate or imitate a courtship. In “Marriages and Divorces,” singles would get paired up like they were speed dating, but had to write and perform a character sketch that illustrated each of their strengths and flaws. They would then request to be married or divorced, and a (pretend) judge would grant or deny their request. If denied, the players had to pay a (real) fine. In “Marriages,” a dude would propose marriage to single lady, while playing the part of a celebrity. Then they’d have to explain why that celebrity — certainly not they themselves! — wanted to marry that particular girl.

From the 1700s all the way up to 1964, it was common practice to grind up mummy parts and make a brown paint out of them. Edward Burne-Jones’ famous piece The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon used Mummy Brown, although he reportedly had no idea. His widow said that when he found out he had a tube of mummy, he “insisted on our giving it decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored in the green grass at our feet, and we all watched it put safely in.”

The PDSS2 gene controls the production of proteins that metabolize caffeine, so people with certain variations of this gene can handle a whole lot more coffee than normal. Similarly, a pair of gene mutations that are often found in tandem cause a person to metabolize alcohol more quickly at first, and then suddenly slow way down. This causes them to get drunk super fast, and then to accumulate toxins over a long period of time, causing a long and horrible hangover.

The Sellafield nuclear plant in the U.K. is one of the most toxic buildings in the world. When coal workers struck in the 1970s, the government responded by making Sellafield work overtime. To keep up with energy demands, they were forced to haphazardly dump nuclear waste into two rooms. They finally began cleaning it up in 2009, a process that’s slated to take over 100 years.

We’re no royal apologists here. We’re just surprised that the Royal Crown let off 17-year-old Arthur O’Connor with one year in prison (and 20 lashings with a cane) when he aimed an unloaded pistol at Queen Victoria’s head from point-blank range in 1872.

There are a few boulder fields in Pennsylvania, and one randomly in Montana, where the big heavy rocks make a cymbal-like clang sound when struck with a hammer. Researchers can’t agree on why it happens. Weirder still, one of these sites is at the top of a hill, with no higher cliffs around, baffling geologists as to how a debris field that could normally be attributed to a rock slide ended up that high.

George Frandsen has the world’s largest collection of fossilized droppings, that weigh as much as four pounds and are up to 400,000 years old. Anything dropped more recently than 10,000 years old he considers “too fresh” for his collection.

The CIA developed a false rubber scrotum — with realistic wrinkles and hairs and everything — that hid a small radio. The idea was that agents could sneak it through a less-than-thorough strip search, if caught, and then unpack their beanbag when in private to call for help.

If not, then turn back now. The man loved to prescribe cocaine for absolutely everything, and especially for spicing things up in the bedroom. Here’s what he wrote to his fiancee, Martha Bernays: “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

Some testicular cancers can be detected by using common, over-the-counter pregnancy tests because they cause a buildup of the hormone hGC, which is normally found in pregnant women.