12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Stubbs the cat was elected mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, and served for 20 years. During his tenure, he was viciously mauled by a local dog, but made a miraculous recovery and continued to govern for years thereafter.

Ferguson makes no secret about his party boy past. He dropped out of high school at 16, and started drumming in punk bands, including that of future Doctor Who Peter Capaldi. He got sober in 1991 after a bartender let him crash at the bar, thwarting a poorly planned suicide attempt.

Fifth-century theologian St. Augustine of Hippo wrote of the six days of creation that “we should not think either of those days as being like the ones governed by the sun.” He also declared “all kinds of animals, plants and trees are born and develop in time,” and compared life on earth to the branches of a tree. Basically: Life has developed and split off into new creatures, constantly and innumerably, over an extremely long period of time.

In 1983, in support of the growing gay rights movement, a group calling themselves the “Parker Sisters” developed a game called Gay Monopoly. It was basically the same as the original, but you’d use gay game pieces like a leather cap or a stiletto, and build gay things like bathhouses. Parker Brothers did not find this fabulous.

To get to Aaru, you had to traverse the mythical “12 lands of hell,” which sound a lot like Yellowstone National Park. You have two paths to choose from, there are lakes of fire and walls of iron, and tons of creepy critters constantly trying to murder you.

Mary Roberts Rinehart is often credited with kicking off the whole “the butler did it” thing in her 1930 novel The Door. Later, in 1947, her personal chef became enraged after not being promoted to butler, and fired a gun at her from point-blank range. The gun misfired, and the chef was then subdued by some other butlers.

Parton says she modeled her aesthetic off of a woman she adored growing up, who got no respect from other adults: “I thought she was so beautiful. And everybody used to say, ‘Oh, she ain’t nothin’ but trash.’ Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up: trash!”

NASA once captured what appeared to be flashes of lights from inside of a crater on the dwarf planet Ceres. People went nuts, hoping it was alien civilization, but scientists have shown that it’s, boringly, very consistent with either ice patches or salt crystals.

The first case prosecuted based on fingerprint evidence in the U.K. was that of Harry Jackson, who was convicted of stealing billiard balls due to his fingerprints being found on a windowsill. A letter to the editor published in The Times said, “Scotland Yard, once known as the world’s finest police organisation, will be the laughingstock of Europe it if insists on trying to trace criminals by odd ridges on their skins.”

Al Jazirah Al Hamra in the UAE was a thriving fishing and pearl trade town, before it was very abruptly abandoned in 1968. The logical, historical reason is that workers fled the industry to make money in oil, or that environmental damage destroyed their fishing prospects. Whatever the reason, former residents, nearby locals and ghost hunters say it’s now inhabited by malignant desert djinns.

Mosquitos famously live outside. But one species evolved around World War II to thrive in the subway system, adapting several traits to help them survive there. For example, they subsist off of primarily human blood (as opposed to birds and small mammals).

Having already conquered the solar system and solved the mysteries of outer space, NASA decided to spend its resources deciphering the story of a funny-looking iceberg. Satellite images showed a nearly perfectly rectangular iceberg in 2018, and scientists wanted to confirm their hypothesis that it had broken off of its mother berg that way. They traced its journey backward and found that it had, against all odds, been whittled down to this tabletop shape by a unique gauntlet of icebergs and ice shelves.