12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Rattlesnake bites aren’t fun, but they’re only fatal to humans about 1 percent of the time. In 1933, a rattlesnake lunged at a prospector, who happened to be extremely afraid of snakes, and was confirmed to have died shortly thereafter from cardiac arrest.

Archi is a language spoken by only about 1,200 people in a cluster of small villages in Russia. Among its many quirks, there are technically 1,502,839 forms of any given verb.

Bram Stoker died in 1912, and the first conjecture that Dracula was based on Vlad Tepes popped up in 1958, when some guy realized Stoker had once had dinner with a Hungarian professor who may have talked about Vlad.

At a 2009 concert, a fan in the front row kept throwing dollar bills at Pitbull, who repeatedly told him to stop. Finally, he pulled the dude up on stage. The guy, predictably, hucked a wad of cash in his face, spurring Pitbull to throw a fist back in his.

Dr. Marcel Andre Henri Felix Petiot was ostensibly a resistance hero who would smuggle Jews from Nazi-occupied France to South America. In reality, he’d inject his victims with cyanide, under the guise of vaccinating them in preparation for their trip. His operation was busted up when the Nazis heard about the smuggling part, at which point he fled and took on a different name. After the war, the French government found out about the murdering part, and Petiot was eventually caught and beheaded for his crimes.

After suffering a random fever in 1962, farmer Thai Ngoc says he bizarrely lost the ability to sleep. He’s either a medical oddity for not dying after like a week, or he’s extremely good at hiding naps from this friends, family and extended community. Either way, great work.

The first robot murder occurred at a Ford plant in 1979. Worker Robert Williams tried to manually assist a robotic arm that had begun moving slowly, only for that arm to suddenly clock him fatally in the head.

The top three theories are that it blocks an enzyme that assists in the sensation of pain, it acts as kind of a signal booster for serotonin or it does whatever THC does.

After a botched ransom exchange resulted in the murder of his daughter, Eduardo Gallo dedicated his life to bringing the gunmen to justice. His first hurdle was getting cops to do a forensic test on key evidence, which they initially refused “because it was raining.” From there, he quit his job and went undercover, infiltrating local villages until he found the criminals responsible. Instead of killing them himself, he forced police to set up a sting operation to catch them at their favorite pay phone.

Axel Erlandson was a farmer and self-taught tree-shaper, who would bend and grow all types of trees into various shapes and furniture, which he exhibited as a “Tree Circus.” He was extremely secretive about his methods, erecting large screens to work behind. He wouldn’t even reveal his trade secrets to his children, telling them only that “I talk to them.”

An Ohio woman reported in 2020 that she repeatedly witnessed ghosts having sex in her house: “I never seen anything like this... I mean, ghosts still have feelings? Having sex?”

By tweaking some genes in a polio virus, researchers have been able to create a treatment for glioblastoma that appears to up the survival rate from 4 percent to 21 percent.