12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, July 19, 2024

A CIA analyst was accused of spying for South Korea in exchange for $37,000 worth of designer handbags and other luxury items.

The family that runs Disney just purchased Angel City FC for a record $250 million.

Danish artist Thomas Dambo has created 139 giant troll sculptures made entirely out of trash, and hidden them randomly in wooded areas across the world, with the express purpose of scaring the crap out of hikers. He’s aiming to get to all 50 U.S. states (he’s currently at 19).

...if you don’t count all that medical testing. One new drug study was able to boost insulin-making cells by 700 percent, completely reversing diabetes in mice. Another found that blocking a specific protein basically granted them eternal youth by decreasing cancer rates and giving them healthier muscles and fur.

Certain mushrooms are able to ingest and filter heavy metals and other toxins, and researchers have deployed them to clean up former industrial sites that have been unable to produce a single blade of grass.

Marty Reisman and Douglas Cartland were world champion ping-pong players who created a “comedy table tennis routine” that would perform as the opening act for the Globetrotters. Timothée Chalamet is set to star in an A24 movie about Reisman.

Color perception changes as divers get deeper underwater, and similarly, taste perception works differently in space. Astronauts often report just straight-up not enjoying eating while they’re up there, and a new study has found that while some flavors become repressed, others, like almond and vanilla, become more intense.

A free expansion pack for The Sims 4 will introduce Romantic Boundaries sliders, which allow users to adjust characters’ boundary and jealousy values to allow for polyamorous relationships for the first time.

The Professional Pickleball Association is releasing PPA Pickleball Tour 2025, hoping to add to its collection of 48 million weirdos who are newly obsessed with the sport.

HeHealth was a dating app that required users to submit dick pics, which would be scanned by an A.I. they claimed could detect 10 common STIs with 94 percent accuracy. The FTC decided that since most STIs are asymptomatic, and the studies the company cited in their research only account for four STIs, the whole thing was likely bullshit.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo “crawled through a river of shit,” as they say in Shawshank Redemption. She had long promised to swim in the Seine to prove it’s safe for the upcoming Olympics, despite dangerously high levels of sewage being detected.

Wealthy losers in Indonesia are paying athletes to bulk up their street cred on Strava, a popular run-tracking app, to make them appear more rugged and active. One “Strava Jockey” said he charges about 31 cents per kilometer at an easy pace, and 62 cents for a faster pace.