12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, March 1, 2024

In 2008, the 33-year-old baseball superstar announced he’d gotten married by holding up a hand-drawn picture of his new wife. All he’d say is, “I met somebody who felt right. That was it.”

Binchotan is a white charcoal that releases very little smoke, which is great for cooking, but still releases carbon monoxide, which is bad for humans. The combination means an under-ventilated room can fill up quickly with odorless poison. Still, it’s often used with extreme care indoors by restaurants and households.

A baffling legend involves King Arthur allowing some random, sneaky kid to pull a TikTok prank at court. He has all the women try on his magic mantle, which contorts to reveal her favorite sex position somehow. Only one young, sickly virgin passes the test, and is given the magic mantle as a reward. She swiftly donates it to the Arthurian version of Goodwill.

America catches a lot of flak for our stubbornly stupid units of measurement. But official Australian documents refer to a “sydharb,” which represents the amount of water in the Sydney Harbor (562,000 megaliters). Sounds mighty useless in a recipe setting, doesn’t it?

The once-idyllic Dreamland Park opened in the 1930s, but closed down a couple decades later for getting tangled up with the mafia. It then became a destination for local teens to go make out in peace, until a brutal double murder shook the community in 1969.

The Badwater Ultramarathon in California starts at an elevation of -282 feet and finishes at 8,360 feet. It’s 135 miles in temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. 

To cross over into Duat, ancient Egyptians believed you had to curry favor with the Ferryman. But Pharaohs believed they didn’t have to debase themselves, and instead threatened to “leap and sit on the wing of Thoth,” meaning: I’m going to talk to your boss, and he’s going to smite you.

Christine and Lea Papin were two maids who, in 1933, fought back against gross maltreatment and brutally attacked Madame Lancelin and her daughter. They scratched out their eyes and beat them to death, presumably in that order. They didn’t try to run or hide; they just went back to their room when the ordeal was over. In court, the two were eerily silent, speaking only occasionally in monosyllabic whispers.

In 2022, Parton went on a podcast and said, “I don’t really know if they were written in the same night. When we found an old tape, they were on the same cassette.”

Dargavs is a large necropolis where over 100 stone structures were built in the middle ages to look like houses, giving the foggy hillside cemetery the look of a haunted village.

All the nasty shit that went on in the Tower of London caused its inhabitants to scratch their names and cryptic messages in the wall. Still visible today are musings like “As virtue maketh life, so sin causeth death” and “The day of death is better than the day of birth.”

To see if exposure to moon dust could somehow jack up human life, they crushed up moon rocks and stuck them inside of animals in all kinds of ways. They dumped the particles in aquariums, fed it to cockroaches and injected it into mice. Only the oysters died, but they determined that was from something non-Moon related.