12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, April 19, 2024

PaintCam is a security camera that’s equipped with paintballs that it can spray at trespassers, or UPS delivery people, or squirrels who get too close. Users have the option to upgrade from paintballs to tear gas pellets.

In 2004, a great white shark was tracked traveling from South Africa to Australia. She’d traveled 6,900 miles in 99 days, the fastest recorded trek of a sea animal. After that, her tracker fell off, and scientists lost her. They expected her to hang out in Australia for a while, but she popped back up in South Africa again just a few months later.

Barcelona residents were so sick of tourists crowding their public transportation, the city council successfully lobbied Google and Apple to hide one of their main bus routes from public digital maps.

A company called Reworld was started in 2017 in an effort to retrieve all that free money. They’ve gotten their mitts on about $10 million, but only $6 million of that was in good enough shape to cash in.

Grant just wrapped up a lawsuit against a British tabloid he’d accused of spying on his phone calls by accepting a sizable settlement. He had wanted to hold them accountable, but a weird rule might have put him on the hook for their legal fees, even if he won the case. He said he ultimately decided to meet them halfway: “As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court.”

A scammer claiming to be a psychic, a witch and a wealthy foreign heiress is facing charges in Maine for scamming $170,000 out of several victims while in Northern Ireland. She apparently didn’t predict her own arrest earlier this year, after years on the run, and she likely hasn’t predicted how the judge in the case will rule on her potential extradition to the U.K.

Producers of What Jennifer Did apparently wanted pictures of the subject, Jennifer Pan, looking happy before being convicted of murder. The images they used have the telltale signs of A.I. visual mangling: missing fingers and all-around uncanny valley shittiness. Pan chucking up the peace sign in a photo serves no real purpose to the narrative, so it’s unclear why they decided to wade into obvious A.I. fakery.

According to pollen.com, Greenville, South Carolina, Virginia Beach, Virginia and Wichita, Kansas are the worst cities for pollen allergies. Meanwhile, lots of cities’ allergy seasons are getting longer. At the top of that list are Medford, Oregon (61 more days), Las Cruces, New Mexico (65 more days) and Reno, Nevada (95 more days).

A separate study that took a look at data on things like health-care cost, vegetable consumption and active adults per capita found that Seattle, Honolulu and San Francisco are the healthiest cities in America in 2024, while Laredo, Texas, Gulfport, Mississippi and Brownsville, Texas are the least healthy.

A British law firm has confirmed that it hit the wrong button on an online portal, terminating the marriage of a couple who had never filed for a divorce. Bizarrely, a judge has ruled that the accidental divorce is legally binding.

Some users of Ozempic have reported that addictions to nicotine, alcohol and other substances practically vanished. Now, users of the drug Zepbound have reported their sleep apnea clearing up.

British shepherds have noticed that Axe body spray (or technically Lynx, as its called in the U.K.), is really good at calming down ornery rams. As one shepherd put it, “There’s no argy-bargy, no rowing.”