12 Smooth Pebbles of Trivia to Skip Across Your Brain-Lake

When the as-of-yet-unnamed element polonium was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband, she named it after her homeland of Poland.

Turns out Michelangelo’s life, for a brief period, was closer to his Teenage Mutant Turtle namesake’s than you’d expect. While hiding from Pope Clement VII, he lived in a secret underground chamber beneath the Medici Chapels. It was a good hiding spot too, given that it wasn’t discovered until 1975.

Mostly due to scenes of full-frontal nudity, Hair was banned from being performed in cities across the U.S. in its early years.

Say the name “Morpheus” these days and people immediately imagine tiny sunglasses. The name Morpheus is actually taken from a Greek God, and a fitting one: He's the god of sleep and dreams.

If Martin Scorsese hadn’t decided to switch the name to Goodfellas, we’d all be familiar with a mob movie called Wise Guy. The name was changed because there was a police drama of the same name airing on CBS at the time.

The Pixar film Finding Nemo caused demand for pet clownfish to skyrocket across the globe.

You might be forgiven for assuming that bowmakers, or bowyers, also handled arrows. That was in fact, a different job, handled by a “fletcher.” So if your last name is fletcher, you probably have a family history of arrow creation.

Ronald Reagan had a fierce jelly bean habit, owing from him using the treats to quit smoking. As such, he ordered three and a half tons of the candy for his inauguration, in the three classic patriotic colors. One problem: Jelly Belly only had red (Very Cherry) and white (Coconut) hued beans. They added blueberry so that they could complete the patriotic color wheel.

Despite their ferocity, male lions are a pretty lazy bunch. They spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping.

An “Apgar score” is a score that a newborn receives from tests performed at one and five minutes after birth to determine their general health.

When they were naming malaria, they didn’t yet understand mosquitoes’ role in the disease. They thought it was caused by diseased air, or in Italian, mal aria.

Somewhere, Van Gogh is shaking his earless head at Iowa. Despite the fact that they’re generally considered aesthetically delightful, sunflowers’ dominant growth have earned them ire in the state of Iowa and other areas.