12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, May 14, 2024
You graduated school, you got a job, you dove headfirst into the real world. Well, guess what, bucko? That was all just the tutorial level. Next up is the biggest challenge of your life: learning these 12 trivia tidbits.
Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox.
Dr. Seuss’ ‘Pocket Book of Boners’
The Pocket Book of __ was a popular series of joke books in the mid-20th century, and the Boners edition was a series of hilarious blunders, illustrated by Dr. Seuss.
Forrest Gump’s Shoes Are for Sale Again
The Nike Cortez, launched in the 1970s, was arguably the shoe that turned Nike into the behemoth it is today. It enjoyed a big-time resurgence in the 1990s when Forrest Gump revealed that they were the key to his cross-country treks. Nike brought them back briefly in 2022 for their 50th anniversary, and have just announced another limited reissue.
Cops Know Dweebs Will Flock to a Fancy Car Like Moths to a Flame
Miami Beach police bought a Rolls-Royce and decked it out in cop shit, with the explicit aim of scraping the bottom of the barrel for fascists enforcer types: “Recruiting police officers in this country today is a difficult thing to do. Using this car to help us do recruitment is gonna be great.”
Two Huge Blobs in the Middle of the Earth May Be Responsible for All Earthquakes
As our solar system was still settling, proto-Earth had a collision with a Mars-sized object that left two huge chunks of planet matter rattling around deep inside the slowly-cooling orb. Each is about twice the size of the moon, and their constant jostling and settling appears to be what’s responsible for the Earth’s plate tectonics.
The Government of Indonesia Is Recruiting TikTokers
Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, is currently under construction, much to the chagrin of anyone who has to live there, and the flora and fauna who used to live there. The government is hiring social media influencers to move to the new city, and talk about how fun it is, and how many ecosystems they didn't kill to build it.
Venezuela Is the First Country to Lose All of Its Glaciers
The last glacier in Venezuela has been downgraded to an “ice field,” a milestone in the erosion of the global ecosystem as we know it.
There’s a Grammar War in North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire, England’s town council declared that they have to remove punctuation from all street names, because periods and apostrophes were making it harder to search their official databases. As new signs have begun rolling out, locals have graffiti’d their punctuation back in. One postal worker who’s particularly fond of St. Mary’s Place said it “riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.”
You’re Surrounded by Skeuomorphs
A skeuomorph is an obsolete feature of a physical item that’s left in for strictly aesthetic reasons. Spokes on car hubcaps? No reason for those, they just feel natural, because wagon wheels had spokes forever. The little handle on a jar of maple syrup? That was helpful when maple syrup bottles were much bigger and heavier, but now they just make your bottle look quaint and fancy.
Someone Won a Million-Dollar Jackpot Twice in One Fiscal Quarter
A Massachusetts woman won a million dollars off of a $10 lottery ticket, and used her windfall to buy a car she’d had her eye on. Ten weeks later, she won again. Since she’d already fulfilled her biggest lotto fantasy, she said this one is going entirely into her savings.
America’s Most Basic Baby Names
The Social Security Administration announced the most common baby names of 2023, and the winners remained unchanged in the last several years: Liam takes the crown for boys for the seventh year in a row, while Olivia topped the girls’ list for the fifth consecutive year.
There’s a New Submarine Bike for Your Daily Commute
French company Seabike has designed a unicycle-looking device that uses bike pedals to power a propeller. It’s one million times dorkier than the Onewheel.
Octogenarians Spend More Time Socializing Than Teens
A survey of how Americans spend their days found that teens spend less time socializing than 60-, 70- and 80-somethings. Our socializing precipitously decreases from our teens to our 30s, but then swings back to record highs every decade for the rest of our lives.
