15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, March 22, 2025
Sometimes it seems like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. But there are more hours than there used to be. Back in the time of the dinosaurs, the Earth rotated more quickly, which meant each day lasted just 23 hours. Go further back in time, and we reach a point when each day was just four hours.
Now that you have a little more free time than you thought you did, you can spend a few minutes guiltlessly reading the following list of facts. Except for fact number three, of course, which you’d be better off just skipping.
The Poison Cure
In the 1920s, you could buy an ampoule of chlorine gas to use to treat respiratory illnesses. They called it the Chlorine Kilacold bomb, and it supposedly cured 97 percent of colds. Closer study revealed that it didn’t cure anything and instead damaged the lungs.
Brand Loyalty
After Kobe Bryant’s final game in 2016, teammate Nick Young asked him to autograph a pair of sneakers. Kobe threw the sneakers into a nearby trash bin. They were Adidas, and Bryant was under contract with Nike.
Beautiful Practical Effects
One stunt in Deliverance initially involved throwing a dummy in a boat over waterfalls, since sending Burt Reynolds over them would be needlessly dangerous. Then Reynolds insisted on doing it for real. Afterward, he asked how the shot looked. “It looked like a dummy going over the falls,” the director replied.
Four Legs Good
During World War I, the commander of British forces on the Western Front stated that a machine gun was no match for a horse. This belief led him to confidently send a great many men to fight in the Battle of the Somme, resulting in 420,000 casualties just on his side and no real progress.
Universal Language
The board below shows a student’s writing exercise. Their teacher corrected various spelling errors using red ink. The board comes from Ancient Egypt and is 4,000 years old.
Conspiracy Behind the Conspiracy
Franklin D. Roosevelt may not have had polio at all. He had some sort of paralytic illness, and he was diagnosed with polio, but we now suspect he had an autoimmune condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome.
The Real Red Pill
You know that famous scene in The Matrix where Morpheus asks Neo, “What if I told you...?” He doesn’t really say anything close to that line. Someone made it up for a meme years later, and it spread from there.
Sweet Revenge
Françoise Gilot, mistress to Picasso, published a tell-all book about the artist in 1964. In response, Picasso cut off two children he’d had by her. The son, Claude, still wound up in control of the Picasso estate when the man died, and one early move of his was to sell the rights to stick Picasso’s signature on a minivan.
Bursting Your Bubble
Legend tells of how Susanna Hoffs recorded “Eternal Flame” totally nude, having been tricked into thinking this would make her sing better. It made for quite a story, until Hoffs revealed it was just a rumor invented by a promoter, and she’d been repeating it only because it was funny.
Pussyfooting
Be careful wearing two-toned shoes like the ones below if you go to the U.K. They’re called “correspondent shoes,” named after (and associated with) whichever figure in a divorce case committed adultery with one of the parties.
Magic Gel
A “butterfly child” is a child with epidermolysis bullosa, a disease that makes us say their skin is as delicate as a butterfly’s wings. For a long time, anyone with this condition would die young, but we’ve suddenly developed a bunch of new treatments, including a gel containing viruses with modified DNA that you just rub right on the skin.
Gibberish Motif
The song “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III was originally going to be titled “Survival.” The chorus would end with the line, “And it all comes down to survival.” However, the band was itself named Survivor, so a song named “Survival” was untenable.
Extreme Makeover
Some communities, you might know, believe that males should undergo circumcision. Others go further. In the Unambal tribe in Australia, the penis is completely split in two with a stone knife, to make it look better.
And Now a Word
When kids’ TV programs would say something like, “We’ll be right back after these messages,” that wasn’t simply the show choosing to smoothly transition you into the commercial break. These messages were mandated by the FCC, to help children distinguish between the show and commercials.
Man of Culture
When he was in art school in Antwerp, Vincent van Gogh was tasked with copying the Venus de Milo. He drew a torso far wider than the original. “A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis!” he said. He then left the school and never returned.
