12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, November 12, 2024

City Council legislation allowing for crossing at all points of the street has gone into effect in New York City. Application of the previous law was remarkably (but not surprisingly) racist: In 2023, 90 percent of jaywalking tickets were given to Black and Latino people.

DNA collected in 1988 from an endangered black-footed ferret named Willa was used to create a clone, named Antonia, who successfully birthed two children. It’s the first time a cloned animal was able to give birth in the U.S.

A study found that kidney cells can be prompted by chemical signals to change up their modus operandi and perform memory functions, similar to brain cells.

Italy’s Lake Como is selling jars of “lake air,” which are canned on-site and cannot be purchased online. Scooping up air from a tourist attraction is the best way I know to save a fart from an American retiree who’s finally traveling the world.

The next time you’re accosted by a villainous rogue, you can hit ‘em with “derf” (a 1400s term for an evil boldness), “skelm” (a 1600s word for rascal) and “nitheful” (an Old English word for wicked).

Forty-four of the world’s 50 most expensive wines come from France, with Leroy Musigny Grand Cru going for an average of $37k, and as high as $227k per bottle.

RFK Jr. wants to ban it, but the CDC named fluoridated water one of its 10 major public health wins of the century, and studies have shown that it saves Americans nearly $7 billion per year in dental expenses.

The National Institutes of Health have recommended no more than 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. Studies showing ill effects of the substance start at more than twice that amount. The only time a person is exposed to that much fluoride in the U.S. is when it occurs naturally in groundwater.

It’s become a nursery rhyme about three guys taking a bath at sea, which is already little weird, but it may have started in the 14th century when “tub” meant “brothel,” and there was a slightly different throuple rub-a-dub-dubbing in there.

As the Tech Guild is striking for higher wages, union supporters are asked not to play Wordle and whatever else they have going on over there. Members of the Guild have released a series of privately created mini games people can pass the time with, including Strikle, a non-struck Wordle.

Listening to the pleas of women the world over, the fashion industry has unleashed a brand new garment that they hope will be the item of the year: the “scoat.” It’s a coat with a built-in scarf.

We can learn a lot about architecture from what was buried in Pompeii, but we went a little too far extrapolating social customs from the positions of dead bodies. Archaeologists are beginning to do DNA testing on some of the more famous body configurations, and finding that what we thought were nuclear families were just random groups of strangers, and people we thought were surely sisters sharing a final embrace were a completely unrelated male-female pair. Also, that one guy almost definitely wasn’t cranking his hog.