12 Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, June 6, 2024

Coldplay vowed to cut the carbon footprint of their tours in half, and they successfully reduced it by 59 percent on their most recent tour. They traveled by train as often as possible, and got an assist from fans who would pedal stationary bikes and jump on kinetic stages to generate electricity.

Pericles the donkey just won a $10,000 grant for his medical care on the occasion of his 30th birthday. He was used by animators as a model for Eddie Murphy’s character, after retiring from his first career as a service animal for skittish thoroughbreds.

What stings worse is that he was pretty bad at it. Tucupita Marcano was banned from the MLB for life after a sportsbook noticed he was using their service and ratted him out. He had bet on his own team 25 times, though in each instance he was out with an injury. And he only won 4.3 percent of the time.

An advisory panel has recommended swatting down MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, despite the drug appearing to be wildly successful. Eighty-six percent of participants in a clinical trial saw a reduction in their symptoms, but the panel had some concerns. Mainly, participants could tell whether they had a placebo based on whether or not they were tripping balls.

A woman serving on a jury for a $40 million fraud trial said another woman visited her at her home, gave her a sack full of $120,000 cash, and offered more if she voted to acquit. The juror notified the court, and was dismissed from the case.

Narendra Modi looks like he’s going to win a third term as Indian prime minister, as the ballots in the largest vote in human history are being counted. He recently claimed he was chosen by God to run the country forever, but the people have given him a shockingly narrow victory. His Bharatiya Janata Party will likely lose their majority, which will gum up the works for his divinely ordained agenda.

Max subscription prices are getting jacked up (as much as $20 per month), a few weeks before House of the Dragon returns. They expect people to shell out a Jackson to watch the second season of a sequel to a decade-old show that ended in the toilet.

A gleeful young woman hucked a banana milkshake in the face of big-time Brexit boy Nigel Farage as he was announcing his candidacy for the Essex seat in the general election. He was previously milkshaked in 2019. The flavor wasn’t widely reported.

In a desperate bid to attract and retain Gen Z, Meta is framing itself as a portal for navigating real life. They’re trying to bundle Facebook Marketplace, which has seen some success with younger users, with other features like Dating. Meanwhile, they’re testing unskippable ads on Instagram, and users are united in their loathing and outrage.

Aurora hunters have noticed an odd purple and green ribbon in the sky, documented as far back as 1911. It took a Facebook group in 2017 to finally figure out exactly what was going on. It’s now thought to be a ribbon of super hot plasm floating at an altitude of 280 miles, which the Facebook group named Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.

In 2017, Saudi royal Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud shelled out $559 million (adjusted for inflation) for da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.

Researchers in Ann Arbor are developing an A.I. that can detect playful barks from aggressive barks, in hopes of untangling the mystery of animal communication. Wake us up when we can play on a basketball team full of dogs like an inverse Air Bud.