12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, March 18, 2024

Someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto invented it in 2008, but no one knows who Nakamoto actually is. Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has long claimed that he’s the real Nakamoto, but a U.K. court just ruled that he’s not the guy.

“Pope Joan” was supposedly a brilliant scholar who dressed as a man and worked her way up to the very top of the Catholic Church. In her second year of Popedom, she became pregnant, and delivered a child in the middle of the street during a procession. In shame and rage, the church removed all mention of her from their records — and maybe killed her. This story was taken to be fact for centuries, although modern scholars largely consider it legendary.

Paul Alexander had lived in an iron lung since being paralyzed by polio at age six. From inside of the machine, which he referred to as both “my friend” and “my enemy,” he got a law degree, became an author and more recently amassed a huge TikTok following.

Chaetopterus pugaporcinus is a type of sea worm that looks like a big, inflated ass balloon. The name roughly translates to, and the creature is often referred to as, “pigbutt worm.”

Guinness has confirmed the largest blueberry in known history was recently grown in Australia. It’s .71 ounces and about the size of a golf ball.

The Bible describes the Ark as made mostly of wood panels that had been gilded on every side. One engineer has said this is proof that it acted like an electrical capacitor, and that the two statuettes on top were a negatively charged angel and a positively charged angel. This helps explain why people reportedly died if they touched it wrong or even just got too close.

In the 20th century, grave robbers searching for buried treasure outside of Panama City only found a bunch of lower-class gravesites. Later, in the 21st century, archaeologists uncovered an incredible find: an entire familial line of chieftains from a previously unknown civilization, all of whom were wearing full golden ceremonial armor. One of them was laid to rest on a bed of 15 regular people, who appear to have been killed via pufferfish.

In 2013, an L.A. cop took a motorcycle-mounted machine gun to an elementary school, and, predictably, some kids figured out how to fire it off. Three kids were slightly injured by the gun itself, but two others were hospitalized in the ensuing stampede.

Toward the end of the Incan Empire, succession disputes became a huge problem because rulers were popping out a ton of kids with their mistresses. They eventually settled on the idea that a baby with twice the family blood had twice the claim to the throne, which incentivized royal inbreeding.

Latvian inventor Valerian Abakovsky nearly revolutionized rail travel in 1921 with an invention he called the Aerowagon: a train with an airplane propeller at the front. He successfully piloted a prototype from Moscow to Tula, but the train derailed at high speed on the return trip, killing everyone on board.

Pripyat Amusement Park was almost fully built, and scheduled to open less than a week later, when the disaster at nearby Chernobyl Power Plant displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The park opened prematurely, for one day only, to help residents cope as they packed up their lives and waited for buses to come and get them out of there.

Hall, alias “Roy Fontaine,” was a career criminal who eventually settled on a pretty good grift: gaining employment as a butler to the ultra-wealthy, stealing their stuff and running off to his next gig. He eventually began dabbling in murder, which proved to be his downfall. His final victim caught him mid-heist, prompting him to kill both of his employers, a heist accomplice and even his own brother. That was too many bodies to hide, and he was caught and sentenced to life in prison.