12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, April 16, 2024

In 2020, Russian mathematician and jiu-jitsu black belt Vik Mikheev invented wrestling inside of cars: “I and my friends run small tournaments of Car Jitsu to study the aspects of jiu-jitsu application in such a confined space.” America just hosted its own Car Jitsu championship for the first time.

Footage has surfaced of a man describing his experience witnessing the miracle of the first-ever flight of a human: “Well, it was a darn good big kite. That’s what I thought it was.”

It’s long been noted that pizza delivery near the Pentagon spikes when there’s some kind of unannounced military action that the U.S. is involved in, as the Commander-in-Chief and those in the know are holed up in their bunkers watching it unfold like a video game. Indeed, someone on Twitter noted a massive spike in action at the closest Papa John’s, around the time of this weekend’s Iranian drone strikes. Another user also pointed out that traffic at the closest gay bar more than halved at the same time.

Coinstar takes a 12-percent cut of your cash, plus other transaction fees. But there are a bunch of 90-percent silver coins minted before 1964 still floating around, and if you have pennies minted before 1983, you could melt them down and extract their 90-percent copper contents. Or you could just steal a few catalytic converters and call it a day.

Boot industry insiders have noticed a 20 percent week-over-week increase in cowboy-boot sales since Beyonce dropped her debut country album in March. The denim industry, which was apparently in a bit of a backslide, saw a similar and much-needed boost as well.

A guy was walking his dog, Muffin, in a forest in France, when they chanced upon the fossilized spine of a dinosaur that had been recently unearthed by a landslide. It happened in 2022, but was only made public this year. The guy has since quit his job to pursue a degree in paleontology.

Running specially promoted flights that would follow the path of totality during the eclipse is incredible marketing, as well as a once-in-a-lifetime event that’s probably worth shelling out a thousand bucks for. But so many airlines were doing it that, thanks to predictable delays, the airspace got too congested, and air traffic control forced a Delta flight to reroute into boring-ass regular airspace.

The prestigious Just for Laughs comedy festival announced it’s taking at least a year off, if not shuttering entirely, due to bankruptcy. Scammers had spoofed an email account from a management agency that the festival works with, and got them to deposit over $800,000 in a fraudulent bank account.

The Boston Marathon has a proud history, having been technically held every year since 1897. But there’s one race that predates it by five months, and is the oldest continually-run public race in North America: the 8k Buffalo Turkey Trot. Ontario’s Around the Bay Road Race predates that by a couple of years, but they’ve taken a year off here and there for wars, pandemics and other frivolities.

Regional and time-stamped Google data shows that as the eclipse traveled across our great nation, so too did searches for phrases like “eyes hurt,” “my eyes hurt” and “why do my eyes hurt?”

A 2010 interview with the budding megalomaniac described his home as almost exclusively “various shades of blue and beige,” explaining that Mark had recently learned he was red-green color-blind. He confirmed that that inspired his choice of logo and layout: “Blue is the richest color for me. I can see all of blue.”

Washington died in 1799 of a throat infection — and a failure of imagination. Dr. William Thornton tried to convince Martha Washington to let him freeze the big man’s body, then warm him back up with vigorous rubbing, then perform a posthumous tracheotomy to pump some air back in those lungs. The grand finale would be “to transfuse blood into him from a lamb.” This was all in pretty stark contrast to Washington’s dying wish: “I pray you to take no more trouble about me, let me go off quietly.”