15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, January 18, 2025
It appears that this weekend will see TikTok halt operations in the United States. Our unbiased recommendation is that you take all the time you previously spent on short-form video and redirect it into reading internet articles. The information is far more likely to be true, and you can even click links to more reliable sources to read further.
If you like videos because you have a short attention span, that’s no reason to abandon reading. In fact, our lists of trivia tidbits cater to you most of all. In just the next few minutes, you’re going to learn a whole lot, about wine, trains and falling 500 feet.
Kobe’s Recent Invention
Japan first raised cows to pull heavy objects back in the second century. It took another 1,500 years for them to decide to start using such bovines for milk and for beef.
On the Run
Paul McCartney recorded the Wings album Band on the Run in Lagos, Nigeria. Muggers then attacked him and stole the demo tapes and his lyric sheets, so he decided maybe he should try recording in London next.
Good Job, 47
A window cleaner fell off a 47-story skyscraper in 2008 and survived. It helped that he was clinging to his falling window washer’s platform rather than falling totally freely, but even so, doctors called his survival unprecedented and almost impossible.
Training Data
Swiss train stations traditionally have axle counters to note whether a train has gone by. If a Swiss train has 256 axles, axle counters mess up and think the train doesn’t exist. 255 is fine, as is 257, but 256 messes them up so is not allowed.
Refined Palette
Farmers feed chickens specific diets to make their yolks more orange or more yellow. That works well because buyers in some places think one color tastes better, and other places think the other. In reality, if farmers changed the color intentionally, the two taste the same.
Exact Quote
Recent ads for Gladiator II use a clip of Denzel Washington saying, “They don’t make films like this anyone.” The clip comes from a longer interview where he actually says, “I don’t want to say they don’t make films like this anymore.”
Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
In movies, an assassin might kill a hospital patient by injecting a single air bubble into their I.V. line. In real life, it takes a whole lot more than one tiny bubble to kill someone — which is good, or else a whole lot of patients would die.
Quick Time Events: Origins
Gamers have been responding with buttons to graphics since before games could generate graphics themselves. The 1974 game Wild Gunman didn’t use computer graphics but a 16mm film.
Clean Recording
Kurt Cobain went back to his high school and worked as a janitor for a while when he needed money. The janitor who appears in the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a nod to this. Then that same guy appeared in the video for the “Weird” Al parody of the song, “Smells Like Nirvana.”
Eye Ay Ay
LASIK is advertised as a permanent fix. Sometimes, however, patients will suffer regression, in which their eyesight reverts to how it was before. Unfortunately for patients looking to research the issue, search results are dominated by the LASIK clinics themselves.
The Change You Want to See
For years, there was an urban legend about the video game Civilization, which said that the character Gandhi tended to launch nukes more than any other leader. The legend turned out to be completely untrue, and players’ willingness to believe it shows just how limited everyone’s memories are.
Do the Propaganda
Years after recording their album American Idiot, Green Day got around to changing the title track’s words in concerts. Now, they don’t sing, “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda.” They sing, “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”
RIP Momma
The Momma in 1987’s Throw Momma from the Train has a funny speech impediment. That was actually the result of tongue surgery that actress Anne Ramsey had had for her cancer, and she died less than a year later.
Peanut Butter D-Cup
In 2013, a porn studio put out a series of videos that were titled after Ben & Jerry’s flavors. They were not very discreet about this, naming the series “Ben & Cherry’s,” and the ice cream company successfully sued to shut them down.
California Love
Wine experts worldwide used to laugh at wine made in America. It took a special blind taste test between Napa wines and French wines, remembered as the Judgment of Paris, to change the world’s mind. California won in every category.
