12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, June 3, 2024

People were getting especially rowdy at this year’s French Open, so organizers have opted to ban alcohol sales at the event. The final straw seems to have been one jerk spitting chewing gum at Belgian player David Goffin.

This year’s national spelling bee came down to a tiebreaker. But bee traditionalists, including last year’s winner, aren’t happy with how it went down. The final contestants were each given an opportunity to spell as many words as possible in 90 seconds, which certainly turns it into more of a sport than the back-and-forth battle of wits the competition is supposed to be.

Apparently, you can just buy the “most complete and best preserved” stegosaurus fossil ever found, if you have $6 million and a vacant 11-foot by 20-foot space.

The black market for copper is going nuts lately, as it’s very useful in EV batteries and other green tech. Since telecom companies have switched to fiber optics, there are about 800,000 tons of copper wire just sitting around underground, and the companies are looking to start digging them back up and turn a $7 billion profit.

It’s thought that one single-celled organism and one bacterium merged forces about 2.2 billion years ago, creating mitochondria. A billion years later, a similar process created chloroplasts. And scientists just witnessed a microscopic algae consume a bacterium, creating a new tiny organ that helps the plant cell harvest elements from the air.

The average teacher’s salary in the U.S. is $69,000, which doesn’t sound half bad, but is actually 5 percent lower than 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The top states for teacher salaries are California, New York and Massachusetts, all of which average over $90,000. The lowest-paying are West Virginia, Florida and South Dakota, which all average under $55,000.

Someone recently leaked a list of abbreviations the FBI was using a decade ago to decipher social media chatter. It includes such commonly used phrases as JAPAN (“Just always pray at night”), TAGL (“There’s a good lad”) and WTFT (“What the French toast? (polite WTF)”).

After two high-profile and horrifying turbulence incidents in a single week, which killed one person and injured dozens more, Emirates just slapped some turbulence detection tools onto its planes. Seems like those should be standard issue, no?

In 2015, Amazon unleashed an elaborate espionage scheme, originally called “Project Curiosity” and later renamed “Small Business Insights” to sound less sinister. They had agents go to conferences undercover and even started a shadow company called Big River Services International, or BRSI. They’d sell items as BRSI on competing marketplaces like eBay and Etsy, and track how their rivals were doing business.

After a limited trial run this past tax season, the federal government is officially starting to expand its free tax filing system, Direct File, with hopes of wider availability in 2025.

South Korea has required all company-owned cars that cost more than $58,000 to use bright green license plates, making them stick out like a sore thumb. There was a rash of rich businessturds using company-owned cars for personal excursions, and writing off lavish trips as professional expenses. Business luxury car registrations dropped 27 percent in the first few months of the policy.

Japan’s Kyoto University teamed up with a forestry company to build a small wooden satellite using traditional techniques that don’t involve screws or glue. Wood is a great material for spacecraft, as it won’t rot in a vacuum and will harmlessly char into a bunch of ashes when it reenters.