12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, November 21, 2024

In an effort to combat the mental-health pathogens it’s injected into the brains of teens, Instagram will let users reset the recommendation system that powers its Feed, Reels and Explore algorithms.

Event organizer Billy Coull, who put together the wildly underwhelming, A.I.-produced Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow that went viral, is on the sex offender list after making a fake profile and inundating a woman with unwanted naked pictures of himself.

An Air Portugal flight was grounded for four days while workers tracked down all 134 hamsters, made sure the ferrets and birds who were also in the cargo hold weren’t affected, and checked all the wiring to make sure it hadn’t been nibbled by the fugitives.

Peter Cancro bought a sub shop in New Jersey in 1974 for $125,000, as a high school senior, and skipped college to build his business. A private equity firm just bought a majority stake, valuing it at $8 billion. Cancro has now cracked the top 500 richest people in the world. The big takeaways here are: college is bad, capitalism is good, private equity will save the world.

Pizza Hut’s big holiday gimmick is wine made with “ripe, juicy tomatoes and infused with natural basil” to make it taste like pizza.

Jaguar sales are down 80 percent since 2017, but they know just what to do: take the iconic jaguar out of their logo and switch to a stock Microsoft Word font. That, and start selling electric vehicles that cost twice as much as their gas-powered models. Now we wait for the money to come pouring in.

Researchers studying a lone dolphin (named Delle by locals) have observed it making “thousands of different sounds,” despite living far away from any other bottlenose dolphins. Some appear to be Delle just singing to himself, but others are consistent with attempts at communication.

Experts think it’s a combination of nostalgia and savvy (read: predatory) business practices. Pet owners love the ability to own a toy from their youth, and share it with someone close to them. It also happens to be a very versatile toy; it’s a perfect comfort object for gentle dogs, and a perfect corpse for more aggressive types. Online pet store Chewy sells 20 different Lamb Chop toys, which are low-enough quality that some owners need to purchase five per year.

The sabre-toothed tiger cub was about three weeks old when it died in the Siberian Arctic, and is so well-preserved there are still whiskers on its face.

A big, pungent, messy cheeseburger is one of the most inconsiderate things to bring on a plane, but Delta is about to add Shake Shack burgers to their menus on some flights starting in December.

A dude was on vacation with his family in Barbados when his gold class ring was knocked off his finger while saving his son from a wave. Forty-seven years later, a free diver was using a metal detector on the ocean floor and found the ring. It had the name of a university, a class year and initials, and the diver used those clues to track down its owner.

Airbnb is trying to hold gladiator battles in the Roman Colosseum in conjunction with Gladiator II. Some local lawmakers are enraged at the prospect of turning their cultural heritage into a playground for the wealthy: “We are not in Disneyland, we are in Rome. Every now and then someone seems to forget it.”