12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, May 14, 2024

The Pocket Book of __ was a popular series of joke books in the mid-20th century, and the Boners edition was a series of hilarious blunders, illustrated by Dr. Seuss. 

The Nike Cortez, launched in the 1970s, was arguably the shoe that turned Nike into the behemoth it is today. It enjoyed a big-time resurgence in the 1990s when Forrest Gump revealed that they were the key to his cross-country treks. Nike brought them back briefly in 2022 for their 50th anniversary, and have just announced another limited reissue.

Miami Beach police bought a Rolls-Royce and decked it out in cop shit, with the explicit aim of scraping the bottom of the barrel for fascists enforcer types: “Recruiting police officers in this country today is a difficult thing to do. Using this car to help us do recruitment is gonna be great.”

As our solar system was still settling, proto-Earth had a collision with a Mars-sized object that left two huge chunks of planet matter rattling around deep inside the slowly-cooling orb. Each is about twice the size of the moon, and their constant jostling and settling appears to be what’s responsible for the Earth’s plate tectonics.

Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, is currently under construction, much to the chagrin of anyone who has to live there, and the flora and fauna who used to live there. The government is hiring social media influencers to move to the new city, and talk about how fun it is, and how many ecosystems they didn't kill to build it.

The last glacier in Venezuela has been downgraded to an “ice field,” a milestone in the erosion of the global ecosystem as we know it.

North Yorkshire, England’s town council declared that they have to remove punctuation from all street names, because periods and apostrophes were making it harder to search their official databases. As new signs have begun rolling out, locals have graffiti’d their punctuation back in. One postal worker who’s particularly fond of St. Mary’s Place said it “riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.”

A skeuomorph is an obsolete feature of a physical item that’s left in for strictly aesthetic reasons. Spokes on car hubcaps? No reason for those, they just feel natural, because wagon wheels had spokes forever. The little handle on a jar of maple syrup? That was helpful when maple syrup bottles were much bigger and heavier, but now they just make your bottle look quaint and fancy. 

A Massachusetts woman won a million dollars off of a $10 lottery ticket, and used her windfall to buy a car she’d had her eye on. Ten weeks later, she won again. Since she’d already fulfilled her biggest lotto fantasy, she said this one is going entirely into her savings.

The Social Security Administration announced the most common baby names of 2023, and the winners remained unchanged in the last several years: Liam takes the crown for boys for the seventh year in a row, while Olivia topped the girls’ list for the fifth consecutive year.

French company Seabike has designed a unicycle-looking device that uses bike pedals to power a propeller. It’s one million times dorkier than the Onewheel.

A survey of how Americans spend their days found that teens spend less time socializing than 60-, 70- and 80-somethings. Our socializing precipitously decreases from our teens to our 30s, but then swings back to record highs every decade for the rest of our lives.