15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, February 15, 2025
This week started off strong, with police intervening to stop Ed Sheeran from performing on a public street. But what happens when the police don’t act, and it falls to artists themselves to keep the peace? And what happens when the offender who needs to be stopped isn’t a singer but a murderer?
We’ll have answers to those questions below, along with facts about two different yellow liquids.
Dirty Bird
Every so often, millions of blackbirds descend upon the town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. In 1974, one infestation grew so troublesome that the Army came up with a counterattack, which involved dousing the birds in detergent, dropped from planes.
Lived Experience
Stu Rutherford was an IT guy by profession, and when the crew of What We Do in the Shadows brought him on to their production, he thought they were hiring him as an IT guy. They never gave him a script, just general instructions, so he never understood that he had a real role (as the character “Stu the IT guy”) right until he saw the finished movie.
Put Your Phone Down
People used to pay to stream live performances to their homes as early as 1881. They didn’t use screens for this, of course, or even radio. Instead, people tuned in to live theater over the telephone line.
Work Is Never Over
Kanye West’s song “Stronger” had an extra verse that never made it into the final version. It reveals that the singer, acting so arrogant at the club, is newly unemployed, having been fired for being arrogant at work.
Bronze Hot Wheels
Wheeled vehicles have been around for around 5,000 years. That’s also around how long toy wheeled vehicles have been around, based on a toy car found in a Turkish dig site in 2017.
I’d Sign Me
You might know the song “Goodbye Horses” best from appearing in Silence of the Lambs, in the scene where Buffalo Bill dances to the camera. The only reason any of us know it is that singer Q Lazzarus drove a cab for a living and was playing her own song when director Jonathan Demme entered as a passenger.
Something Has Awoken
The planet Mars emits a humming sound, which was picked up by the lander InSight in 2018. Scientists have ruled out wind, so the cause behind the low-pitched noise remains unknown.
Oh, Bother
When he wasn’t painting, Thomas Kinkade was famous for peeing on things, to mark his territory. Once, when drunk, he peed on a statue of Winne the Pooh in Disneyland, saying, “This one’s for you, Walt.” He later died of alcohol poisoning.
Dun Dun Da Da
The classic Mission: Impossible theme contains two long notes followed by two short notes. In Morse code, two dashes translate as “M,” while two dots translate as “I.”
Prepare to Dye
When margarine became popular, the butter industry lobbied for a law banning margarine companies from dyeing their product yellow. Since everyone preferred the look of yellow spreads, some margarine companies responded by selling their stuff with a bag of dye included, so buyers could handle the coloring themselves.
Opposite of Inspiration
Writing music for Footloose, Kenny Loggins originally came up with a song called “No Dancing Allowed.” When he entered the booth to sing it, he was so high on pain pills from a recent accident that the recording went poorly and he called it off. That give him the chance to write a different song instead.
Civic Duty
Serial killer Richard Ramirez’s first clue that the police were on to him was when he saw his photo on the front page of a newspaper in a liquor store. He ran out, and shortly after, a passerby recognized him from the news and hit him on the head with a pole.
Bring in the Bears
The talking animals in Mary Poppins do come from the book on which the movie is based. Except, in the first edition of the book, instead of taking the kids to see animals, she takes them to see people of different races across the world. Thirty years later, the author changed it to remove racist language. Another 14 years after that, she decided it was still racist and changed it again, now changing the people to animals.
Can’t Fight This Feeling
In the movie Cujo, the rabid dog was alternately played by multiple dog actors and a human stunt performer in a dog costume. The stuntman was considerably more reliable, as the dogs kept wagging their tails, forcing the crew to tie the tails down.
Mudslinging
Woodstock ’94 was a very muddy music festival, and when the band Primus sang “My Name Is Mud,” the crowd took this as a cue to pick up piles of mud and throw them. One member of the band calmed the crowd down by saying that, “People who throw things on stage at musicians have small and insignificant genitalia.”
