12 Magically Delicious Bits of Trivia We Can’t Let This Freaky Little Leprechaun Get His Mitts On

A rare copy of the Odyssey at the University of Chicago Library had obscure notes in the margins that didn’t appear to be in any known language. The university held a contest in 2014, challenging people to decipher it, and one guy figured it out: It’s a highly specific shorthand invented by 17th-century explorer and linguist Jean Coulon de Thévénot, translating the story into French.

Akodessawa Fetish Market in Togo is the world’s largest voodoo market. It’s a one-stop shopping experience for all your animal skull, animal carcass and voodoo doll needs.

To launch their flagship store in South Korea, LG stuffed a bunch of vouchers for free smartphones into balloons, and let ‘er rip across the countryside. People showed up with BB guns — one guy brought a “pointed staff” — to shoot them down. Twenty people were injured, and LG agreed to cover their hospital bills.

“Mouth Lip Tea” is a quack medicinal treatment for weight loss (among other things). Its whole deal is that the leaves are plucked by a worker’s mouth, and dropped into a wicker basket on their chest. Likely as a viral marketing stunt, a local recruitment ad leaked, showing that the pickers had to be athletic virgin women with at least C-cup bras.

The mighty capital of the Roman Empire survived for over 1,000 years, but its downfall came because someone straight-up forgot to lock a gate. During an Ottoman siege, soldiers saw some Turkish flags flying through the back door, freaked the hell out and ran home to their families, effectively throwing in the towel.

Believing Tesla’s claims that he’d invented a “death beam,” Japan got to work trying to make one of their own. They kind of succeeded, creating a laser that could zap someone dead from half a mile away. The only downside was that the target would have to stand completely still for 10 minutes. 

The whole point of women surrounding themselves with a flock of identically clad friends was originally to confuse any evil spirits who wanted to curse the bride on her wedding day. More practically, it was a good way to keep an ex-suitor from sabotaging her, or a kidnapper from yoinking her and holding her for ransom.

Cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale brought the novel idea of a comfortable couch to the U.K. in 1748. At the time, the only comfortable place to lounge in someone’s house was their bed. Ipso facto, if people had two comfortable places to hang out, they’d spend their days sleeping and fucking until they wasted away into horny little piles of dust.

Someone in a prison print shop made an extremely subtle tweak that took a couple of years for anyone to notice. There’s a cow on the state seal of Vermont, and a prisoner snuck a secret pig in among the cow’s spots. The decal was printed and installed on 30 cop cars before they caught it.

Who would have guessed that history’s biggest triangle simp was a really weird guy? He founded a religion that forbade the eating of beans (just in case they contained the souls of the dead), and commanded followers to smooth out the indentations their bodies left on their sheets and pillows, or else.

When they realized that pressing lettuce caused it to secrete an oddly familiar milky substance, Ancient Egyptians got right to work designating a God of Lettuce (Min), and bottling his aphrodisiac lettuce jizz. 

In a 2007 marketing stunt, Dr. Pepper left cryptic clues to a commemorative coin worth $10,000. As people started narrowing down the coin’s location, they flocked to Boston’s Old Granary Burying Ground. The groundskeepers, who hadn’t been given any notice, scrambled to make sure no one disturbed the graves of John Hancock, Samuel Adams and its other notable residents.