12 Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Casey, Illinois is the number one tourist destination for people who want to see unnecessarily large versions of stuff. One resident alone has built 14 things that have qualified as the “world’s largest,” including a wind chime, a truck key and a swizzle spoon.

Vegging out, zoning out, dissociating — whatever you want to call it, Gwyneth Paltrow’s mediation app has a new “eyes-open meditation” feature. Don’t worry, it’s “A.I.-assisted.” She recommends taking a few minutes here and there to stare at her A.I. abomination while at work, on a Zoom call or even “walking down the hall.”

We’ve never really pinpointed the evolutionary origin of hair, but researchers who conducted a recent study believe it can be traced it back to amphibians, who evolved long before mammals. In particular,y hair seems to be related very closely to frog claws. 

American officials overseas have been reporting strange symptoms, like headaches, nosebleeds and an odd vibrating sensation, since 2016. Havana Syndrome is pretty devastating, and a huge mystery, but a five-year-long study has come back with a big ol’ shrug emoji. All they can say conclusively is that they haven’t detected any brain damage.

There’s a rare mutation that causes the occasional grasshopper to have large swaths of bright pink all over its body. There’s no apparent evolutionary advantage to it, since being pink in a green world would make you very susceptible to predators. The little kid who caught this one said, “When I was littler, I saw one in a book. I thought it would be cool to have.” Hypothesis: confirmed!

Wilbert Roy Widdicombe and Robert George Tapscott were the sole survivors of the merchant ship Anglo Saxon, which was torpedoed by the Germans in 1940. They drifted on a small sailboat for 70 days before they bumped into the Bahamas. Widdicombe tried to eat his shoe, which went about as badly as it possibly could, and the two survived on seaweed and fish from then on.

Suman Mulumudi, whose parents are both doctors, developed a smartphone app and a 3D-printed device that’s able to detect weak heartbeats better than a standard stethoscope, and produces a visual chart of the signals it picks up.

In 1995, after meeting with the Dalai Lama, Ford testified in support of Tibetan independence in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Those are a few of the Chinese government’s least favorite things, and he’s been banned from the country ever since.

There’s a tradition of fake-spitting at the happy couple as they walk down the aisle after sealing the deal, usually three times, which is supposed to ward off evil spirits.

Raggare is a Swedish classic car, rock ‘n’ roll and beer culture where people like to throw big ol’ tailgates and go nuts with all three of those things. They really love the Confederate flag, for reasons of “rebellion,” and certainly not due to extreme whiteness.

In 2014, a tourist found a washed-up dolphin carcass on the shore. It’s tragic and smelly, but not entirely uncommon. This one, though, had two heads. Even stranger, scientists took it away for further study, but were extremely squirrely about where they’d brought it.

Businessman Harry Gordon got in some financial trouble, and to avoid humiliation and possibly violent repercussions from gangsters, faked his own death by abandoning his champagne-soaked yacht off the coast of Australia. He managed to travel the world on a fake passport before settling down near his hometown, where he, obviously, ran into his brother on a popular hiking trail. He was eventually caught, spent a year in jail and published a book about his whole adventure.