12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, July 8, 2024

A Dodgers bat boy palmed a line-drive foul ball that was headed for the dugout, and that easily could have beaned star batter Shohei Ohtani.

Inventor David Aguilar was born with only one arm, and spent his childhood building prosthetic limbs out of LEGO. One allowed him to do push-ups, another granted him the dexterity to pick up a sandwich, and he’s published a tutorial on YouTube showing others how to recreate his inventions.

After having to publicly cop to declining sales (thanks to trendy athletic shoe companies like Hoka and Brooks), Nike lost $28 billion in brand value in a single day.

The FDA just approved the second-ever treatment for the disease, a drug called donanemab that targets plaque buildup in the brain. It costs about $32,000 for a year’s worth of treatment, so start saving now.

Firework imports to the United States peaked in 2022 at $600 million, but it looks like they’ll only hit about $350 million this year. Analysts believe fireworks are an industry that boomed during the pandemic, but that the public has since lost interest in, alongside alcohol, cleaning products and home gym equipment.

Installed in the brick wall of a home in 1793, the little stone gloryhole in Mayorga has been recognized as the oldest post office box that’s still actively in use.

Scientists have been puzzled to find that tiny islands aren’t disappearing, despite the world’s oceans measurably rising due to climate change. They’ve discovered that 89 percent of Pacific and Indian Ocean islands have remained the same size, or even grown slightly, because new wave patterns are crushing coral reefs, creating sediment that effectively expands the island’s surface area.

A New York resident purchased a Lamborghini Miura in the 1980s, had it shipped over from Italy and placed in “static storage” inside his living room. It was recently removed (by tearing down an exterior wall), and is expected to fetch $2.5 million at auction.

This year, 12 people out of 7,000 applicants were selected to attend Hot Dog High, a two-week educational seminar for those selected to be “hotdoggers,” or official operators of the six Wienermobiles.

Viscose is a wood pulp-based fabric that’s currently the fashion industry’s third-most popular material. But it takes about 300 million trees per year to keep up with demand, and a lot of those are coming from old-growth forests in Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Australia.

Ants have been observed giving each other amputations if a limb becomes irreparably damaged, in order to “maximize the survival chances of the injured.”

Google has already broken its promise to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030, because the absurd energy demand of A.I. (the tech industry’s next big thing that no one asked for) has caused its carbon footprint to grow by 48 percent.