12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, July 30, 2024
We may have pinpointed the most expensive jar of salsa in history.
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The White House First Got Air Conditioning Because James Garfield Was Stinking Up the Joint
In his defense, he was dying a slow and gross death after being shot by an assassin. The room he was attempting to recover in would get up to 95 degrees, so Navy engineers devised a machine that would blow air through a box full of cotton screens and ice. They dropped it down to a chilly 75 degrees.
The Furthest Olympic Venue in History
The Paris Olympics’ surfing events are being held 10,000 miles away in Tahiti, but that’s only the second-furthest satellite competition campus. The 1956 Melbourne Olympics were forced to hold their equestrian events in Sweden, because Australia wouldn’t relax its six-month horse quarantine rules.
The Oldest Message in a Bottle
In 2018, an Australian woman found a bottle on a beach that nearly languished as a decorative tchotchke, but her son’s girlfriend got curious and dumped out the contents. The note was confirmed by experts to have come from a German ship, which dumped its current coordinates into the Indian Ocean in 1886, just for funsies.
The Defending Olympic Gold Medalists Got Caught Cheating
The Canadian women’s soccer team was caught spying on other teams using a drone. In response, they were given a six-point penalty, and their coach was booted.
People Keep Mistaking Perry Como for Jeffrey Epstein
New York City’s Gallagher’s steak house has been inundated with visitors complaining about a signed picture of the late actor and singer Perry Como, which they believe (strongly, for some reason) to be Jeffrey Epstein. The restaurant has refused to take the photo down, and has instead printed out a disclaimer: “THIS IS NOT JEFFREY EPSTEIN. THIS IS PERRY COMO.”
A Breakthrough in Alzheimer’s Detection
A new blood test can help diagnose Alzheimer’s with a record 90 percent success rate, which should lead to more (and more accurate) early detection and treatment.
“Shrapnel” Is a Guy’s Name
The catch-all term for “stuff that flies out from an explosion that you don’t want puncturing your torso” is “shrapnel.” That type of weaponry has been around for centuries, but Major General Henry Shrapnel had the dishonor of associating his name with it when he invented a cannonball that would pop open in midair, spraying the enemy with a bunch of tiny painful pellets.
The Best-Ever Opening for an R-Rated Movie
Deadpool & Wolverine brought in $205 million, possibly in part due to audiences flocking to see the movie before its many cameos, Easter eggs and twists are spoiled by friends and media who think their headlines are clever.
A Jar of Salsa Cost a Local Pool $20,000
Someone brought a jar of salsa to a Massachusetts pool deck, and when they accidentally dropped it, the shattered glass flew into the pool, necessitating extremely costly cleaning and repairs.
We Can Take Down the Insurance Industry by Moving to Disaster-Prone Areas
Home insurers have reported a $15 billion loss in 2023, due to rising populations in areas that often endure natural disasters.
Boneless Wings Legally Don’t Exist
Ohio’s Supreme Court has ruled that no customer would expect their boneless wings not to contain any bones, “just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers.”
Inane Olympic Apologies
The Paris Olympics have been underway for less than a week, but they’ve already had to make two pretty remarkable apologies. Christian conservatives got all upset about drag queens depicting what they thought (incorrectly) was The Last Supper, prompting a public “my bad” from the Olympic Committee. And an announcer accidentally called the South Korean team North Korea, which led to a private “oops, sorry about that” to the president of South Korea.
