12 Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, April 10, 2024

A United Airlines flight from Houston to Seattle was quickly diverted to Dallas when a service dog dookied all over the cabin shortly after takeoff. It took the crew two hours to clean the carpet with paper towels, but the smell still lingered and most of the food on board went bad during the delay.

The island of Alicudi is in the midst of a goat crisis, as the goat population is now six times the human population. The mayor has decided to make all goats 100 percent free if you can get them out of there.

The Russian republic issued a ban on any music that falls outside of 80 to 116 beats per minute (which most pop and dance music from the West generally does, coincidentally). Local artists have been given until June to rewrite any of their work that’s currently too fast or too slow.

Neuralink’s first human patient, a 29-year-old quadraplegic, said he’d read about “how awful it was, monkeys like picking out their implant and rubbing it on the ground and all sorts of stuff,” but after speaking with leaders at the company, “I realized how just wrong all that is.” Of course, “all sorts of stuff” very much did happen, and was documented by the California National Primate Center, who contracted with Neuralink. Nevertheless, the patient has a confident reply ready for anyone who reminds him of the carnage: “Y’all are a bunch of idiots.”

Brain maladies can be hard to diagnose without cracking open a skull and rooting around in there. So it’s becoming more popular for scientists to develop and study organoids, pieces of brain that are 3D printed from stem cells.

Zimbabwe’s economy is locked in a seemingly endless battle with hyperinflation. Over the last 16 years, they’ve bounced around between the Zimbabwean dollar, exclusively foreign currencies, bond coins, bond notes and something called the Real Time Gross Settlement dollar. Hopefully the new one, called the ZiG, does the trick.

A newly published study has concluded that, based on the dregs found at the bottom of ancient wine containers, the most popular type was orange wine (which also happens to be very popular right now). It’s a process where white wine grapes are fermented with the skins on, providing tannins and pigmentation that make a bread-y, apple-y, walnut-y flavor and an orange-y hue.

Apple engineer Walter Huang died in a 2018 crash that was found by the NTSB to have been at least “partly” due to his Tesla’s autopilot accelerating into a barrier for reasons unknown. Tesla just reached a secretive settlement with Huang’s family on the day the trial was set to begin, which conveniently will keep key evidence out of the public eye. Apple had been working on an autopilot electric vehicle since 2014 which, if nothing else, makes ya think!

1962’s Chrysler Turbine featured a pretty futuristic turbine engine that flipped modern science on its head: It didn’t need features like pistons and cooling systems, and could run on oddly green substances like soybean oil and perfume.

Fox News hosts volleyed one of the most inane, least inspired immigration fear-mongerings in recent history. Dana Perino said, “The Southern border will be directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun for nearly four minutes,” and Bill Hemmer responded that the increased tourist traffic would be “a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.”

McBride left Hollywood to start a production company, Rough House Pictures, in South Carolina. It’s been referred to as a “comedy commune,” because he hangs out with his best friends, has feasts and goes on boat rides, and produces pet projects that aim to completely eschew mainstream entertainment.

Peter McIndoe, who created the faux conspiracy theory that all birds are actually government spy drones to shed light on the idiocy of right-wing conspiracy theories, is trying to make the jump to deliberate political activism. He’s raised $750k for his production company, Fifty Stars, which he hopes to be the left’s answer to conservatives like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, who have been poisoning the brains of bowtie-wearing Gen Z incels so successfully.