12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, November 27, 2024
You know I got that thang* on me.
*hundreds of tarantulas and bullet ants
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Being Single Is Expensive
An MIT study of household expenses found that couples in South Carolina spent about $47,000 per year, split between two people, while single people had to shell out $30,000 just to live. Housing is the biggest expenditure, alongside things like medical care and transportation.
New York: The Jaywalking and Adultery Capital of the World
On the heels of an announcement that jaywalking will no longer be a crime in New York, the governor also signed a law saying it’s now legal to cheat on your spouse.
A Macy’s Accountant Hid Millions of Dollars in Shipping Expenses
Over the course of three years, an unnamed employee made a series of “intentional accounting accounting errors” to cover up $154 million in shipping expenses. No one really knows why yet.
Which Plant Can Shoot Its Seeds the Furthest?
The squirting cucumber fills itself up with liquid and eventually propels its seeds over 30 feet. But Chinese witch hazel nearly doubles that distance, launching its seeds at 27.5 miles per hour, landing as far as 59 feet away.
The Music Industry Is Now A Bigger Business Than the Movie Industry Was at Its Peak
Global box office revenue hit $41.9 billion in 2019, peaking just before the pandemic hit. The music industry is now raking in $45.4 billion per year, although the lion’s share is going to labels and streaming platforms, not artists.
Lighthouse Engineers Found a Message in a Bottle (From Their Long-Dead Colleagues)
While replacing panels on a cupboard in a 209-year-old Scottish lighthouse, engineers found a corked bottle with a paper inside, listing the names of the team who had made similar renovations 132 years earlier. The modern team has plans to add their own message to the bottle and seal it back up where they found it.
Drake’s Bizarre New Beef With Kendrick Lamar
Drake is suing Spotify and Universal Music Group, not to defend his honor after Kendrick called him a “certified pedophile,” but because he says the music industry has conspired to artificially inflate the numbers on Kendrick’s wildly popular song “Not Like Us.”
Funding Athletic Departments With Mausoleums
Someone floated the idea of storing cremated remains at, near or underneath the University of Nebraska’s football stadium to help mitigate budget cuts. They’re still working out the details, but they’ve had a coffin company offer to sponsor it, and several living people offer up their charred corpses if and when the time comes.
‘Wicked’ Is Not Karaoke
AMC theaters have officially banned moviegoers from singing during movies, kindly but explicitly calling out the theater kids who are seeing Wicked 10 times: “To our guests seeing Wicked, we ask that you allow everyone to enjoy the cinema experience.”
Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year
Cambridge says that “manifest” was one of its most-searched words of the year, and that “manifesting influencers” became popular enough to be added to the dictionary just last year. “Manifest” originally meant “to show something clearly,” but has come to mean “to use specific practices to focus your mind on something you want, to try to make it become a reality.”
The Oldest Firearm in the U.S.
Researchers have found a 16th-century cannon in modern-day Arizona that was used by the Spanish as they blasted their way through the flora, fauna and native peoples in the Southwestern part of the continent.
A Guy Was Caught Trying to Board an Airplane Strapped With 300 Live Tarantulas
A Korean man with an oddly distended stomach was stopped before boarding a plane home from Peru, and was found to have stuffed his shirt with a ton of tarantulas, centipedes and bullet ants.
