12 Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Al Pacino Method Acted Himself Into Real-World Disability
To get into character for his part as a blind man in Scent of a Woman, Pacino walked around set with a cane and deliberately unfocused eyes. This caused him to fall into a bush and scratch his cornea, leaving him temporarily blind in one eye.
Did the Cherokee People Eradicate a Bunch of White Walkers?
The Cherokee have a legend about a group of short, pale-skinned, blue-eyed people who were so averse to sunlight that they slept all day and prowled the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia by night. All that’s left of them is the ruins of a stone wall and a plaque that claims a Welsh prince arrived 300 years before Columbus and became their leader.
The Most Expensive Sneaker Sales of All Time
The “Dynasty Collection,” eight shoes worn by Michael Jordan over the course of eight seasons of NBA playoffs, was sold at auction for $8 million. The most expensive single pair ever sold were also worn in-game by Jordan, and sold for $2.2 million. If angel numbers and numerology are involved in a purchase, you know this sale’s gotta be a good idea!
The Cybertruck’s Latest Easter Egg: A Built-In Death Drive
A video is going viral of a Cybertruck owner demonstrating how a piece of his gas pedal came loose, and wedged itself perfectly into a crease in the floorboard, causing it to be physically stuck in pedal-to-the-metal mode.
MrBeast Sued His Own Ghost Kitchen Because Users Called the Food ‘Inedible’
MrBeast Burger is a “virtual brand run out of kitchens near you.” That means it’s a ghost kitchen, which is when big brands like Applebee’s make up multiple fake restaurants on delivery apps to make you think you’re supporting local businesses. MrBeast Burger got thousands of scathing reviews, and now MrBeast and his business partner are suing each other.
The World’s Oldest Beer Is Making a Comeback
The oldest known beer recipe comes from the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, who lived in ancient cities 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. There’s been a renewed effort to practice and perfect their most popular bread-based beer recipe, which was described in a poem to their goddess of beer: “Ninkasi, it is you who handle dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics.”
L.A. Is Working on the Largest Overpass in the World — For Animals
Parts of the 101 Freeway will be closed for weeks at a time over the next couple of years to complete construction on a massive wildlife crossing. The idea is to safely usher mountain lions down the Santa Monica Mountains to the Simi Hills, so they don’t have to sprint across 10 lanes of traffic.
‘Pube Vigilance’ to Be a Uniquely American Distraction at This Year’s Olympics
The official, Nike-designed uniform for the U.S. women’s track and field team is basically a one-piece bathing suit. As retired runner Lauren Fleshman put it, “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance.”
Was There Widespread, Coordinated Cheating at the Beijing Half Marathon?
Spectators noticed what appeared to be a group of three runners from Ethiopia and Kenya deliberately slowing down and allowing Chinese runner He Jie to pass them near the finish line. One of the runners straight-up said that they were hired to set the pace for He to break the Chinese half marathon record, and that he didn’t expect to be considered a competitor himself. It’s unclear how legal that whole situation is, and organizers are investigating what, if any, rules were broken.
The ‘Guest Star’ From the Year 1006
On the night of April 30, 1006, a supernova occurred in the constellation Lupus, that was noted in records from China, Japan, Iraq, Egypt and parts of Europe. Researchers believe they’ve seen references to it in petroglyphs from North America as well. It was about 16 times brighter than Venus, making it the brightest known event in the night sky in recorded human history.
One Woman Donated 209 Pints of Blood
For comparison, an adult woman contains around nine pints of blood at any given moment. Eighty-one-year-old Josephine Michaluk has been donating blood since she was 22, and was recently confirmed by Guinness as having donated more blood than any other woman in history.
Free Birth Control for All (Rats)
After Flacco the escaped owl died, and his autopsy showed he was chock-full of rat poison, there were renewed calls to find less poison-y ways of controlling New York City’s rat problem. They’re moving ahead with a pilot program to feed a birth control called ContraPest to wild rats. It’s a compound that messes with both ovaries and testicles, and tastes like bad meat (their favorite).