12 Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, May 1, 2024

A patient who had been prescribed a “Medical Aid in Dying” drug remarked, “Man that burns!” after drinking it, to which a 35-year-old man attending the end-of-life celebration responded, “Let me see,” and took a swig. Paramedics were able to save the friend, but required documentation of the prescription before they’d agree not to resuscitate the patient.

Extreme heat and drought in the Philippines has gotten so severe, a reservoir built on top of an old town has resurfaced. In fact, it’s currently possible to walk among the ruins of the three-century-old town of Pantabangan that’s been submerged since the 1970s.

Antarctica’s Mount Erebus is currently erupting, and there’s gold in them thar hills. Scientists estimate that about $6,000 worth of gold crystals are being spewed out every day. 

Dwayne Johnson is currently on blast for regularly showing up to set up to eight hours late, and not using the on-set lavatories: “He pees in a Voss water bottle, and his team or a PA has to dispose of it.” This is a pattern for The Rock; in 2021 he spoke about his bottle habit in an interview, and all the way back in 2017, he accidentally posted bottle on main on his Instagram account.

Conventional wisdom says you should try to capture the snake that bit you, so the hospital knows which antivenom to administer, but they have blood tests and venom-detection kits that can do that now. And so, one Australian hospital administrator is begging patients to knock if off, after a deadly snake nearly escaped, and everyone freaked out: “The staff got a fright, and the serious consequence of that is it delays people’s time to treatment.”

A survey of 2,000 people resulted in a cool map that illustrates each state’s deepest, darkest collective desires. Foot fetish appears a lot, as you might imagine, but there are a few we hadn’t considered, like Wisconsin’s technology fetish and Delaware’s balloon fetish. Is it possible the sample size wasn’t large enough, and they accidentally talked to only the horniest clown in Delaware? Yes it is.

In an effort to get into the sports betting game — as well as bring back old-fashioned saloon brawls — Dave & Busters is working on a functionality within their app to let anyone 18 and up bet on the outcome of all their games.

As nuclear power is coming back in vogue, it’s important to remember just what a low impact it has on the environment, when everything goes right. The same amount of energy can be produced with 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, one ton of coal or a single half-inch pellet of uranium.

A picture of 97-year-old veteran Seymour Weiner being honored at a Mets game recently went viral. Later, when it was time to advertise for dollar hot dog night, the team’s CMO said, “We were like, well, what would be better than Seymour Weiner?” Weiner loves the attention, saying, “It’s probably one of the highlights of my life.” Which makes sense, the man bore witness to the horrors of war.

Scientists just found a mechanism in mouse fetuses that heals damaged cartilage cells, somethings that’s hard to do in fully developed mice (or humans, for that matter). This appears to be an important step toward figuring out how to reverse age- or injury-related bone and cartilage damage.

Thirty-one percent of workers live in a different city than their boss, which is up from the pretty steady 23 percent it had been prior to the remote work boom of the pandemic. Bosses are congregating in “managerial hubs” where property values are super high, like San Francisco, while workers are congealing in America’s many flyover dirt farms and hovels.

New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz in large part because the Confederate Army left piles of brass instruments lying around after their defeat. This made them extremely cheap and accessible, and a generation of musicians started goofing around with them, creating the perfect conditions for a freewheeling, energetic genre to be born.