15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, September 21, 2024
In 1917, William Inge wrote, “The aim of education is knowledge, not of facts but of values.” But then, William Inge ended up locking himself in his Mercedes and suffocating to death, so you don’t need to listen to everything he said. We tend to think you should educate yourself with knowledge of facts whenever possible. So, here are some facts about crime, balloons and explosions in the sky.
Pants on Fire
Jeans used to have a rivet in the crotch, since that’s a major point of strain in the fabric. The only problem is that this rivet proved to be a powerful conductor of heat, bringing hot metal to wearer’s sensitive regions when they sat next to a campfire.
Wow, That Took Off Quickly
Escalators aren’t named for escalation. Instead, the word “escalate” comes from escalators. Escalators came first (the name played on “elevators”), and then people made up the word escalate after that.
Not Newsworthy
We discovered three new moons of Jupiter in 2022. We’ve given up giving them cool Greek names, though, and we’re just calling these tiny new ones names like “S/2022 J 3.”
Stronger Than You Can Imagine
A German gardener died in 2019 but left behind multiple traps to hurt his enemies. An explosive log injured a woman he’d been arguing with. More seriously, he left another explosive item disguised as a trinket so another enemy would pick it up, and this boom proved fatal.
Filthy Lucre
Under the Guano Islands Act of 1856, any American who finds an unclaimed island with guano on it has the right to claim it in the name of the United States. The act was never repealed, and people were still invoking it as recently as 1997.
Sometimes Forget
Henryk Siwiak was murdered one night in Brooklyn, and authorities didn’t make solving this crime a priority. That’s because Siwiak had the misfortune of being murdered on September 11, 2001.
Give Me a Break
One reason Kit Kat became such a hit in Japan was its name means “surely win” in Japanese. That wasn't planned. The name Kit Kat really came from an 18th-century man named Christopher Catling.
Congressional Immunity
1838, a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives was found guilty of “excusable homicide” for killing another representative with scissors. The House expelled him for the murder, but the people elected him back at the first opportunity.
Forbidden Fruit
It’s illegal to derive the drug DMT from the Australian plant known as Buffalo Sallow Wattle. The issue here isn’t just the drug’s legal status. It’s the plant’s status. It’s critically endangered, growing only on a single mountain face.
Time Traveler
A German spy who came to Canada during World War II lasted a grand total of 12 hours. He showed up in a small town, smelling of diesel from his submarine and tried to pay for things with currency from the 1910s. He surrendered to police the first time they questioned him.
Rain Man
A team in Texas launched 156 pounds of explosives into the sky in 1891, theorizing that this would make it rain. They savvily chose to do so shortly before it was going to rain anyway, which let them take credit for the drizzle that followed.
The Mods Are Crazy
When the FBI discovered a dark web site hosting child abuse material in 2008, they decided to keep it running for two weeks. Traffic quintupled during this time, because it appears that the FBI ran the site more competently than its original owners did.
Full of Hot Air
In 1844, a New York newspaper reported that a pilot had for the first time crossed the Atlantic Ocean by air — not in an airplane but in a balloon. They retracted the article a couple days later when they learned that the journalist (some guy named Edgar Allan Poe) had made the whole thing up.
Lost in the Sauce
If you’ve been eating Sriracha sauce for years, you’ll notice the taste suddenly changed. For decades, they used one variety of pepper, made by one ranch, but that partnership fell apart, and it turns out peppers aren’t interchangeable.
The Wrong Target
A scammer named Keniel Thomas phoned a retiree in 2014, telling him he’d won $72 million and needed to just wire $50,000 to claim his winnings. When the target didn’t take the bait, Thomas lost his temper and said he’d burn the guy’s house down. He didn’t realize he was talking to the former director of the FBI, who went on to arrange the scammer's arrest.
