12 Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, March 28, 2024

In 1948, a small circle in Portland, Oregon was earmarked for a lamp post. The post was never installed, but a local reporter planted some flowers there and named it after his column, “Mill Ends.” Mill Ends Park was officially dedicated decades later, in 1976, and is recognized as the smallest park in the world at 452 square inches.

Ceramic hexagons that rained to the ground after two failed launches of SpaceX’s Starship are selling on eBay: $30 for a shard, and up to $4k for a whole piece.

Some of the rich dipshits who have turned Mount Everest into a bus station bathroom have started bringing their small children to base camp. It’s still a far cry from the summit, and these kids are mostly being carried, but taking two-year-olds on a 14-day, low-oxygen hike on the face of a mountain revered as sacred to the local Sherpas is kind of an inconsiderate way to rack up clout, no matter how you look at it.

The first known use of symbolic gesturing was just observed in birds. Mating pairs of some Japanese birds will perch outside of their home before entering, and researchers have noticed a specific wing flutter that appears to indicate an “after you” gesture.

One bridge in particular, the 140-year-old Miller’s Run, keeps getting wiped out by box trucks that ignore the many height warning signs leading up to it. A municipal administrator has indicated that truck drivers blindly following GPS are putting covered bridges all over the Northeast at historic levels of risk.

In 1948, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game embarked on a very post-World War II conservation effort. They couldn’t get pack animals to carry the beavers to a habitat deeper in the woods, so they developed parachute boxes designed to land safely and open on impact. Seventy-six beavers went on this bold mission, and 75 survived.

Chips Ahoy is on a marketing blitz, begging for a pat on the back for their revolutionary new chocolate chip recipe. It basically amounts to: more cacao, more vanilla extract and perhaps slightly less of whatever waxy secretion passes for chocolate in America.

The state of South Carolina has accrued a $1.8 billion surplus in its bank account, and it has no idea where it came from. It sounds like a nice problem to have, but it’s likely the latest in an embarrassing string of bookkeeping mistakes the state and its hired accountants keep making, including a $3.5 billion billing error in 2023.

A study found that America’s mortality rate dropped .5 percent for every 1 percent rise in unemployment between 2007 and 2009. It seems to come down to air pollution: The fewer people driving to work, the better the air quality.

The balsa wood door that Rose pried Jack’s lifeless body off of just sold for $718,750, while the shaving cream dinosaur egg container from Jurassic Park sold for $250k and Carrie Fisher’s blaster from Return of the Jedi sold for $150k.

The Barkley Marathons is a bizarre endurance test that consists of several loops around a huge tract of land in Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park. Contestants are given a map and a compass by the race’s mysterious founder, which they use to locate a bunch of books hidden around the property. They have to tear out a page corresponding to their bib number to prove they made it to each one. Only 20 runners have ever completed the race, including Jasmin Paris, who just became the first woman to do so.

A recently unearthed home in Pompeii had an attached bakery, which had a stone inscription telling patrons to vote for a guy named Aulus Rustius Verus. Researchers believe this was a relatively common practice: Candidates would pay businesses to advertise for them and their causes.