15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, August 3, 2024
International Friendship Day was this week, and we trust you did nothing to mark the day. Friends don’t need a special occasion to celebrate. They hang out regardless. That’s what friendship is.
Instead, we should have a holiday devoted entirely to facts, and should celebrate it by sharing facts. Actually, scratch that. Facts, like friendship, should be shared routinely, with or without a holiday. Every day is Fact Day, and so, here’s today’s fact supply…
Car Accessory
Georgia charged a mother with vehicular homicide in 2011. She didn’t own a car and wasn’t driving during the incident. They charged her for jaywalking with her child, an incident that ended with a van hitting the kid.
Dirty Money
Waste that comes from airplanes can’t just be taken to landfills. There are too many issues with customs and quarantines. So, it has to be incinerated, at the airport itself. Luckily, by charging airlines for this service, the airport makes a profit.
Prime Rib
One species of newt defends itself by stabbing its own ribs out through its skin. The skin also secretes poison, and the exposed ribs inject this poison into an attacker’s mouth.
Participation Trophy
The Olympics used to have tug-of-war as a sport. In 1912, Britain got the silver medal. That’s even though they placed last. Only two teams showed up, so Britain won a medal for coming in second.
Finders Keepers
Two dogs in New Zealand stumbled on 19 bags of cocaine on a New Zealand beach in 2019. They weren’t police dogs, just two pet dogs out for a walk. They responded to the discovery by peeing on the cocaine.
Angel Dust
The song “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan is famously sad, thanks to the ASPCA ads, but few people have any idea what it’s really about. The song is about Jonathan Melvoin from the Smashing Pumpkins fatally overdosing.
No Such Luck
One famous stat says that 70 percent of lottery winners go bankrupt in seven years. Someone just made that up. A panelist threw that stat in at a think tank meeting in 2001, and everyone started repeating it, with no data backing it up.
Call From Inside the House
To scare their kid off strangers, in 2015, Missouri parents hired someone to kidnap him and scare him with a gun. That way, the parents could lecture the kid afterward about why he shouldn’t have got in that situation. Police arrested the parents, who pleaded guilty to child endangerment.
Oompa Loompa Doompety Do
It really is possible to fall to your doom in a chocolate factory’s liquid chocolate. It happened to New Jersey man Vincent Smith in 2009, and he didn’t survive the experience.
Potent Potables
Paul Curry had a great year in 1989. He appeared on Jeopardy! and won — twice. He also met the woman who’d later be his wife, Linda Kinkade. But it seems that neither of those triumphs stuck, because he went on to poison her for the insurance money.
Oxygen Media
Where Everybody Knows the Law
In the 1990s, airports around the country had bars with animatronics modeled after Norm and Cliff from Cheers. They had no permission from the actors behind the characters, who sued all the way to the Supreme Court to shut the bars down.
Bills, Bills, Bills
A French customer had a phone bill of €117.20 for a month in 2012. The phone company encountered an error, though, and they instead issued her a bill for €11,721,000,000,000,000. It took a while to convince them that this was a mistake.
Skríða á Skíðum
Vikings loved skiing. They skied when hunting and also for fun, and they even had a goddess of skiing. Her name is Skaði, and one fight she had with Loki is responsible for all earthquakes.
Basket Case
In the 1940s, Nigeria banned women from hosting political demonstrations. Undeterred, activists now started calling their demonstrations “picnics,” attracting tens of thousands of participants.
The Dumpling Exception
The U.S. had a largely open immigration policy at the start of the 20th century, but it specifically restricted the immigration of Chinese laborers. Then, in 1915, they added an exception to that restriction: Chinese restaurants could import Chinese laborers. This is why the country wound up with so many Chinese restaurants.
