15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, October 5, 2024
They say you need an education to succeed, but consider the case of William J.A. Bailey. He dropped out of Harvard before graduating and simply declared himself to be a medical doctor, and no one knew enough to question him. He made lots of money running his own businesses, and he also ran IBM during World War II.
However, he ended up dying painfully, and also killed other people, all as a result of his chosen vocation, so maybe the traditional educational route isn’t so bad. Find out exactly what he did below, along with some information about feet, sheep and cannibalism.
Everything’s Snicker in Texas
Eighty-five percent of Snickers bars in North America are made in one Mars factory in Waco, Texas. You might think they could distribute production among facilities nationwide, but nope.
Interference
Gamma-ray bursts are explosions billions of light-years away, and they’re the highest-energy events of any kind, across the whole universe. We first discovered them, not by gazing out into space but by searching the Earth for evidence that the Soviets were testing secret nukes.
Just Joshin’ You
When an eight-year-old kid named Maddie went missing in Florida in 1998, many volunteers got together to search for her. Even other kids joined in, including a 14-year-old named Josh. The search party was disappointed to later learn that Josh was the one who murdered her.
Suffering from Success
Before he called himself DJ Khaled, DJ Khaled went by the name “Arab Attack.” This was a questionable name in any era, but then came 9/11 and he realized that the name definitely had to go.
How the Sausage Is Made
You might know that vegetarian diets consume less resources than eating meat, since you eat plants directly instead of eating animals that eat plants. But when it comes to chickens, we’ve become very efficient at converting feed to meat. It takes less than two pounds of feed to produce one pound of chicken.
The Coffin Torpedo
In 1878, a new invention promised to protect your coffin from graverobbers. It was a pipe stuffed with gunpowder, and it was triggered by a tripwire. If a graverobber tried to breach the coffin, the gun would fire.
Vitamin D Students
In 2017, a poll revealed that 17 million Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. This was shocking, until you realize that the poll was nonsense and was released by a marketing firm to get people talking about milk.
Away From It All
Some services claim to identify the geographic location behind any IP address, but they don’t always get it right. For one such service, every time they couldn’t figure out the answer, they’d return one address of a farmhouse in Kansas. As a result, police investigating cases kept visiting this one house and disturbing the family who lived there.
Feet Smell
If you rub garlic on the soles of your feet, you’ll soon taste garlic in your mouth. It’s not because your feet have tastebuds. It’s because garlic enters your bloodstream through your soles and circulates up toward your head.
Died As He Lived
Radium can cure anything, said a New Jersey inventor named William J.A. Bailey. He practiced what he preached, imbibing Radithor, which was a solution of radium isotopes. Radithor’s radiation hurt many people, and it hurt him as much as anyone, as it gave him fatal cancer.
Sweet Escape
Sugar is naturally white, so long as it’s pure. In the days before purified sugar, people turned to other means for bleaching sugar. For example, they’d use the bones of dead soldiers.
Nifty Fifty
“Five-0” is slang for police. It comes from the show Hawaii Five-0, which originally aired in 1968. But the “Five-0” in that title didn’t refer to police in general, though the show was about police. It referred to Hawaii being the 50th state.
Symphonic Universe
1958 brought the world two silly novelty songs: “The Purple People Eater” and “Witch Doctor.” It also brought a crossover song called “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor.” It wasn’t a huge hit, but the other side of the single was “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper.
This Guy Has Balls
A man in Montana has been sentenced to six months in prison for smuggling sheep testicles from Kyrgyzstan, so he can clone sheep. An earlier sentencing memo actually congratulated him on the cloning part, since managing that was quite impressive.
P-Hacking
D.J. Cooper, who played basketball for Ohio University before going to Europe, had to take a urine test in 2019 to check for doping. He cheated the test by using his girlfriend’s urine. Unfortunately, the clinic was able to tell the urine wasn’t his, because the girlfriend happened to be pregnant.
