12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Sunday, October 6, 2024
An eccentric video game developer made a real-life scavenger hunt with $25k on the line. Like a real-life Ready Player One.
Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox.
The Hot New Gemstone: Wood
“Jet,” a gem made of petrified wood that was popular among Victorian-era royals, is making a comeback among modern guillotine fodder.
WeightWatchers Is Shedding Market Value
WeightWatchers spent $106 million acquiring a telehealth company that could help it prescribe Americans with Ozempic and Wegovy. It sounds like the perfect way to profit off of American gluttony and vanity, but they somehow fumbled that, and the company’s share value has dropped 90 percent in one year.
The Most Expensive Things Travelers Lost in 2023
Unclaimed Baggage, a store that collects and sells items that have been left at airports, has announced its three most expensive items from 2023: a $23,000 Birkin bag, a $26,000 Cartier watch and a $37,000 diamond ring.
China’s Volcano of Vaporized Dookie
A burst pipe along a busy road in China caused a massive mushroom cloud of human excrement to erupt in Nanning, reaching up to 33 feet high.
The $700 Stand Mixer for Idiots
KitchenAid sold a stand mixer with an oiled walnut bowl that is “not recommended for whipped egg creations.”
The Brutal World of Vegetable Record Chasing
A British man won a Guinness World Record for his 13-pound celeriac, but came up just short of breaking the cucumber record: “I weighed it today, and it weighed at 29 pounds. The world record is 30 pounds. That’s just how cruel the business is at times.”
Boston’s Sand Tiger Sharks Are Returning After Decades on the Lam
Overfishing in the second half of the 20th century, coupled with pollution in the first part of the 21st, caused Boston Harbor’s sand tiger shark population to all but disappear. Decades of regulation are finally paying off, and about 30 percent of the previous population have returned to the cleaner, safer waters.
Brits Get All Excited to Herd Sheep Over London Bridge Every Year
There’s a yearly tradition where more than 1,000 Freemen of the City will herd sheep over the River Thames to celebrate a hard-won medieval law that allowed traders to bring their produce into the city without paying a toll. This year, actor Damian Lewis chased some sheep across the bridge.
New Zealand’s Native Language Is Returning From the Brink of Extinction
The native Maori language was spoken by 100 percent of inhabitants in the 1800s, but plummeted to 3 percent by 2013. It’s now back up to almost 8 percent, and linguists are aiming for 20 percent by 2040.
Drama in the Ultramarathon Community
Ultramarathoner Camille Herron has been accused of running a scheme, along with her husband-coach, to beef up her accolades on her Wikipedia page, while deleting accomplishments on the pages of her rivals.
A $25,000 Treasure Hunt
Video game developer Jason Rohrer created Project Skydrop, a real-life treasure hunt where he’s hidden a 24k gold trophy somewhere in the woods in the northeast United States. The only clues are a series of aerial photos that zoom out, extremely gradually and a map where a 500-mile radius circle slowly move toward the location.
One Good Use of A.I.: Glyph Hunting
Archaeologists in Peru have teamed up with IBM to launch a fleet of small drones to photograph and scan the legendary Nazca Lines, a series of ancient geoglyphs. In six months, they’ve discovered 303 new glyphs that human researchers had overlooked for almost 100 years.
