12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, held an event to make fun of the fact that Jason keeps losing his ring. They hid the ring in an inflatable pool full of chili, along with some decoys, and had people root around in there to find it. No one located the real one, even when they brought out a metal detector, and Jason concluded, “I think we can safely assume that my Super Bowl ring is now in a landfill someplace in the Cincinnati tri-state area.”

Ecuadorian hunters have long fed their hunting dogs potentially psychedelic plants that appear to improve various hunting skills. Scientists are studying those plant compounds, and also straight up feeding dogs substances like psilocybin, to see if it’s safe to trip with your dog.

Smuckers bought a product called “Incredible Uncrustables” from two dudes in North Dakota in 1998, for $1 million. They’ve made about $700 million so far, and expect to break the billion barrier in the next two years.

Earth is located close enough to the sun to keep us from freezing, but far enough away that all the water on the planet doesn’t sizzle into the atmosphere. Zooming out, we also live in a relatively quiet neighborhood within the Milky Way Galaxy. More densely packed areas leave planets susceptible to asteroids, the possibility of being swallowed by a nearby star, and of course, contact from alien exterminators, 3 Body Problem-style.

Over the last few years, coffee has become an easy commodity for entrepreneurs to whip up some branding around, and bait specific types of idiots into brand loyalty. Conservative coffee. Gun coffee. Podcast coffee. And now there’s A.I. coffee. A Finnish coffee company decided to see if they could take the artistry out of coffee making, just for fun, so they fed their beans into a computer and asked it to create an exciting new blend. They praised the computer for daring to suggest a blend of four beans, instead of the two beans that meat-brained coffee experts usually stick to.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that two endangered black-footed ferrets were just cloned from embryos frozen in 1988. 

A new study shows that, despite a sizable setback by COVID, global life expectancy has increased by 6.2 years on average, with some even greater leaps in specific parts of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa life expectancy is up 10.7 years.

A Nova Scotia funeral embalmer named John Snow Jr. was contracted to help recover bodies from the wreckage, and snapped a picture of the iceberg that caused the fatal damage. He passed it down through his family until a collector got ahold of it in the 1990s, and it’s now being put it up for auction for the first time.

Bavaria, Germany has passed legislation to ban smoking weed in public places, including Oktoberfest. A health official from one of the drunkest states on the planet said, “Our aim is to limit cannabis consumption in public spaces. ... That is important for health protection and especially for protecting children.”

Chinese company NetDragon acquired Neopets in 2017, just three years before the phase out of Adobe Flash made the game largely inaccessible. But one NetDragon employee was determined to recode it and bring it back to life, and thanks to his efforts, users have tripled to 300,000 in just six months. They expect to be profitable again before the end of the year.

A Cybertruck owner reported that after taking his $100,000 computer on wheels to a car wash, it completely shut down for several hours. Consulting the owner’s manual, he realized it does indicate that you have to put it in “Car Wash Mode” if you’re going to get your car wet. 

Ryan Smith, owner of the NHL team that will be based in Salt Lake City next year, says he still doesn’t have a name picked out. The closest he’d get to the big reveal was telling reporters, “It will be called Utah Something.”