12 Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Utah’s Powder Mountain is building an outdoor sculpture park, which sounds like a cool Tony Hawk-esque triumph of radicality, until you find out the resort is owned by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Nashville’s yearly CrimeCon costs over $200 to get in, but instead of listening to Kevin Feige announce a new Armless Tiger Man trilogy or whatever, they have people like BTK’s daughter and Gabby Petito’s parents make unpaid appearances.

Too much hair would compromise the seal on an oxygen mask, so most airlines are very strict about the type and amount of facial hair a pilot can have.

Joseph “Bum” Farto was a Florida fire chief who was convicted of drug trafficking in 1976, but rented a car and disappeared before he could be sentenced. His saga became a popular couples costume that I don’t really understand: One person’s shirt would say “Where Is Bum Farto?” and the other’s would say “The Answer Is Bum’s Away.”

The Washington Post looked at 200,000 chatbot conversations and found that 20 percent were focused on creative writing like poetry and fan fiction, 18 percent were apparently for homework help and 7 percent were specifically dedicated to dirty talk.

An MIT study found that lawyers and laypeople alike hate the unnatural, convoluted way laws are written. But lawmakers adopt uncomfortable linguistic patterns of legalese because, essentially, “if you want to write something that’s a magic spell, people know that the way to do that is you put a lot of old-fashioned rhymes in there.”

A recent study found that 60 percent of men believe that blue balls is a serious medical condition. Additionally, men are twice as likely as women to believe that if there are no obvious physical signs of an STI, then no STI exists.

Doritos “Zero Gravity” chips are, they claim, designed to be eaten in space, and will be sent up on an upcoming SpaceX launch. So far, though, it looks like all they did was chuck some Doritos in a Pringles can.

A designer and coder put together TrafficCamPhotoBooth.com, which helps users locate the nearest traffic monitoring camera and take a selfie with it. The idea is to draw attention to “sprawling surveillance apparatus through fun self-portraits designed to be shareable online.”

Syracuse, New York held the nation’s first state fair in September 1841, featuring a plowing contest and the classic animal exhibits. With at least 15 percent of the country’s GDP coming from farming, it quickly caught on with other agricultural hubs across the country. Today, farming makes up less than 1 percent of our GDP, but it seems like butter sculptures and puke inducers have kept these parties popular enough to stick around.

German airline Lufthansa has invented the equivalent of those crazy sleek swimsuits that debuted at the Olympics a few years ago. The super-thin airplane pajamas should reduce drag by 10 percent, thereby burning less fuel.

San Diego snorkelers recently found a 12-foot oarfish, a reclusive creature whose rare sightings tend to coincide with disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.