15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, November 16, 2024
This past week was particularly hard, as it lasted seven entire days. But it could have been worse. You could have ended up like the woman in the Xi’an elevator. You could have found yourself in the same position as Casanova’s unfortunate acquaintance. You might have made the same mistake as California man Joseph Tartaro, or you might have ended up like one rhino did in a Bangladeshi zoo.
Find out about them all below, along with more encouraging news about that rash on your leg.
Kitchen Nightmare
A scientist in 1846 spilled two acids over the table and mopped them up with his apron. As soon as the apron dried, it caught fire. This sounded like bad news, but he’d stumbled on nitrocellulose, which would be used for ammunitions and then for film.
Royal Wedding
A random couple, who were having a low-key civil ceremony in 2012, sent Buckingham Palace an invitation, inviting the Queen to come to their wedding. When the day came, she actually did show up.
Composer v. Composer
The song “All by Myself,” by Eric Carmen and later covered by Celine Dion, uses the melody of a classical piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Since it’s a classical tune, Carmen figured it was in the public domain and free to use. He was wrong, and the Rachmaninoff estate successfully claimed a portion of royalties.
The Long Wait
Elevator maintenance men in Xi’an got a month off for the new year in 2016. As a result, a woman who got stuck in an elevator remained there for a full month and starved to death before anyone checked in on her.
Tabula Rasa
A toy manufacturer named Coleco released a computer called the Adam in 1983, to work alongside its games console. This computer had a few issues. For starters, it would emit EMPs, which wiped the memory of storage media nearby.
Null Exception
A man in 2016 got a vanity license plate labeled “NULL,” planning to get a second one for his wife’s car labeled “VOID,” as a gag. As a result, every time police saw a car without plates and wrote the number down as “null,” this guy got stuck with the ticket, adding up to $12,049 in fines.
Fake Pass
Popular history tells of how the NBA banned Michael Jordan from wearing the new Air Jordan sneakers, and Nike got around this by paying the fines and letting him go on wearing them. Only years later did fans reviewing tapes notice that, in reality, Jordan never wore those sneakers at a game, not even once. He wore an older model, done in the same colors, but the story of the ban pushed sales to Air Jordans.
Endurance Sport
When rhinos mate, the female first chases the male for hours. This is a courtship ritual called “bluff and bluster” because both parties do want to mate, as far as we can tell. But the aggression goes wrong sometimes and may kill the male.
Death’s Touch
A rival once set up a prank so Casanova would fall into a pile of mud. Casanova responded with a prank of his own, which involved digging up a corpse, cutting off one arm and touching the man with the dead hand while he was in bed. The scare gave the man a stroke, which paralyzed him for the rest of his life.
Placebo Contagion
If you get a rash from poison ivy, and you scratch it, that won’t spread the rash. Your rash will spread on its own, sure, but your scratching has nothing to do with that.
Another Brick
Along with some more obvious creative liberties, the recent film Reagan depicts Margaret Thatcher cheering on the call to bring down the Berlin Wall. In reality, she personally urged Mikhail Gorbachev to keep the wall up, saying that German reunification risked destabilizing Europe.
Upside-Down World
If you gently push the lower corner of your eye, over the lid, a black spot will cover your field of vision — in the opposite upper corner from where you pushed. That’s because the image of the world is inverted when it hits the retina, and you mentally flip the whole thing to perceive it the way you do.
Unattended Package
Doha Airport discovered a newborn baby in a garbage bin in 2020. The only way they could think of to get to the bottom of how it had got there was to strip search passengers to determine which one had recently given birth.
Russian Reversal
In Russia, they have a meme about British scientists, in which “British scientists” are credited with stupid or ridiculous discoveries. The origin appears to be British news reports that (misleadingly) mock research projects, and these reports reached Russia and gave a reputation for dumb endeavors to Britain overall.
Protest Name
For a while, the town with the shortest name was Y, Arizona, named for its Y-shaped road junction. But then they learned that state law said all town names had to be three letters or more. So, they switched to a new name: Why.
