15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, November 23, 2024
In 2009, Ken Basin appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and everything came down to the last question. “For ordering his favorite beverages on demand,” said the host, “LBJ had four buttons installed in the Oval Office labeled ‘coffee,’ ‘tea,’ ‘Coke’ and what?”
Had Basin answered “Fresca,” he’d have won a million. Instead, he answered, “Yoo-Hoo,” and he lost everything.
Trivia is important, so read the following bits right away.
Twitter Network
In 2002, Nokia had a pretty big share of the market, and everyone knew the “Nokia song” that was the phones’ default ringtone. Birds in Copenhagen were even observed incorporating the tune into their mating calls.
The Ol’ Dipstick Maneuver
If you find yourself in a wrestling match, beware of your opponent trying a move called the oil check. This is when your opponent sticks one finger up your butt, to shock you. We probably need an official rule against this, say activists.
Cheer Up
You underestimate how much people around you like you. Not literally everyone underestimates this way, but a bizarrely high number of people do, and we refer to this as the Like Paradox.
Quick Learner
Trainers tried to get a dolphin named Kelly to clean dead birds from her pool by giving her fish in exchange for them. Then Kelly started killing gulls so she’d have more to exchange for fish. She saved a portion of her fish to attract gulls to kill, and then she taught her child to do the same.
Stick Season
Russia’s Soyuz rockets are lit using matches. You wouldn’t think something this high-tech would use a wooden stick for ignition, but it did in the 1960s, and it still does today.
World of Engineering
World’s Worst Power
While most people have three types of cone in their eyes, some people have a fourth. By some estimates, that means they can see four times the colors as anyone else, which means 100 million extra colors. Unfortunately, when we actually test them against normal people, they don’t really see color much better at all.
Diss Tracks
“Yes! We Have No Bananas” was a huge hit in 1923. It was so big that the 15th-biggest song of that same year was a follow-up called “I’ve Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues.” It was about someone sick of hearing the song “Yes! We Have No Bananas.”
Mother Will Faint
We’ve all heard that it’s dangerous to put metal in the microwave. But some grades of stainless steel are safe in the microwave, and any metal that’s totally smooth is likely fine, which is why you can buy big metal bowls that are totally microwave-safe.
British Cooking
A man got cooked in a hospital oven in England earlier this year. It was a mystery at first how he got in there. Investigators concluded he’d tried to escape the hospital by climbing to the roof, then he crashed through the roof and landed in the oven.
Nostalgia Fallacy
In Germany, they have a stereotype that Sweden is an unspoiled place to live, a belief that’s known as Bullerby syndrome. It’s named after a series of Swedish children’s books that are set in a village in the 1930s, so most of Sweden might not be like that.
Rabén & Sjögren
Frog, In Your Throat
A frog closes its eyes when it swallows. That’s because it retracts its eyeball back into its head, so its eye can press down and help the prey down the frog’s throat.
Brotherly Love
Nero’s brother Britannicus dropped dead at a dinner party in the year 55, possibly having been poisoned by Nero. Nero told the guests this shouldn’t interrupt the festivities, so they ignored the dead man and went on eating.
Local Delicacy
Evliya Çelebi, a 17th-century Ottoman explorer, was fed honey once in a village. He was confused at all the hairs in it. The host explained that his father had recently died, honeybees had colonized the area around the corpse’s crotch and the honey came from there. The hairs were the dead man’s pubic hairs.
Inversion Therapy
When the PlayStation 1 bugged out, plenty of users got it working again by flipping it upside-down. They didn’t know why this helped. The issue was the laser slowly got misaligned over time, and turning it over let gravity pull it back into place.
Old Time SEO
A quack doctor set up a spa in a California town in 1944 and convinced residents to change the town's name to Zzyzx so it would be “the last word” in health. He claimed that zzyzx was the last word in the dictionary, but it was a nonsense word he’d made up. He was later convicted on multiple charges and ditched the town to move to Vegas.
