12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, June 14, 2024

The town of Willaston in the U.K. holds an annual event where people from around the world compete to summon worms from the ground, through methods like dancing, “grunting” and “fiddling.”

New York publication The Lantern published a piece that contains the first known instance of “Josh” as a word for goofing around: “The squint eyed chap’s been jossin’ ye.” An 1845 piece in The St. Louis Reveille shows it was also in use to mean "ridicule”: “Look out in future, and if you must Josh, why, give a private one.”

Daniel Ek, the tech dweeb responsible for holding all your favorite music hostage and letting you visit it for a monthly ransom, has a net worth of $4.9 billion. Jay-Z, the richest musical artist alive, has about $2.5 billion.

Denmark has recalled three flavors of Buldak spicy ramen, which is only about twice as spicy as Tabasco sauce, because their spice levels could cause “acute poisoning.”

When the Apple Car didn’t work out, the company challenged that department to make a housecleaning robot instead. They say a humanoid housekeeper is a decade away, which sounds optimistic to me, but a smaller iPad with a robotic arm and an A.I. personality may be closer than we think.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court shot down a lawsuit filed by the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white mobs torched the wealthy neighborhood of Black Wall Street. In the words of Homer Simpson, “You hear me? No comeuppance!”

Our best telescopes and satellites aren’t going to be able to zoom in until we see Ewoks scurrying around in some far-off forest. According to NASA, detecting alien life would be a years-long process of combining “unambiguously detected biosignatures, data from multiple missions and observatories, and extensive atmospheric modeling efforts.” But they’re working on a big ol' telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

Earlier in the week, hot dog eating champ Takeru Kobayashi announced he was retiring due to no longer being capable of feeling the sensation of hunger. Then Joey Chestnut was booted from the annual Nathan’s contest for eating a meatless hot dog. Netflix, never one to pass up an opportunity to exploit suffering, swiftly locked them both in for a head-to-head Labor Day eat-off.

Two German parents vacationing in Italy found that their toddler loved to paint in the hotel’s activity room. They took the opportunity to make him a viral sensation, and his followers are buying his work for up to $7,000.

An expensive and elaborate space telescope, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, was just launched in 2023 in a joint effort between the U.S. and Japan. But a single door that won't open all the way is blocking the telescope's view, keeping new insights about dark matter and the origins of the universe just out of reach. Open the pod bay door, HAL!

A YouGov poll found that the three most unacceptable plane activities are: 1) leaving your seat during turbulence; 2) getting drunk; and 3) letting your kids play in the aisle.

The three activities that bother people the least are: opening your laptop on the tray table, waking up your neighbor to get to the bathroom and summoning the flight attendant for a drink. Inconceivably, 6 percent of respondents said that putting your laptop on the tray table is unacceptable.