12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, February 11, 2025

The 836-pound Bahia emerald is worth around $1 billion, and is so legally contested that industry insiders refer to it as “cursed.” It was sitting around the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for 15 years before finally being legally cleared to return to Brazil.

A 1714 Stradivarius violin sold for $11.3 million, which was actually a disappointment, because Sotheby’s expected bids to hit around $18 million.

In 2011, the 1721 “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius sold for $15.9 million. It was named after one of its original owners, Lady Anne Blunt, cofounder of a horse farm called the Crabbet Arabian Stud.

Thieves broke into the estate of the Windsor Castle and pulled off a bafflingly low-scale heist, making off with only an Isuzu pickup and a quad.

Google had to walk back and re-edit a Super Bowl ad that (falsely) claimed that gouda accounts for up to 60 percent of global cheese consumption. Gemini, Google’s A.I. system, got the false stat from online propaganda, and neither the algorithm nor the producers of the ad had any fact-checking mechanism in place. Despite this obvious pitfall, Google is blaming the internet at large, rather than taking responsibility themselves.

CBS used to take halftime viewership for granted, phoning it in with acts like singing magician Elvis Presto, the Grambling State University marching band and a salute to Jazzercise. The final straw was 1992’s “Winter Magic” that had a couple professional figure skaters dancing around a 30-foot snowman.

That year, Fox had a live episode of In Living Color hit the airwaves at halftime, complete with a countdown clock so viewers would know when to pop back over to CBS for the second half. CBS lost 11 percent of their viewers for halftime (about 29 million people).

Halftime shows took a marked leap in star power, featuring Michael Jackson in 1993, followed shortly thereafter by acts like Diana Ross, the Blues Brothers and Indiana Jones.

Chef Raffaele Ronca made Guinness for his $5,000 cheesecake in 2017, and holds the record to this day. It’s no longer available, but the cake had to be ordered five days in advance to allow the chef to source the ingredients, which included $200 of Hennessy Paradis cognac and cheese made from Italian water buffalo milk.

Louis Vuitton teamed up with big-time weird accessory guy Pharrell Williams to drop a horrible little leather crustacean covered in the LV logo.

A study of hundreds of online reviews, focusing on factors like ingredient quality, price, value and consistency, found that Subway makes the worst BLT while Jersey Mike’s is the top of the line.

Two different groups of macaques in Japan have been observed “mounting” local deer and trying to mate with them. The two bone zones are about 370 miles apart, and scientists are looking into how this happened twice and why they’re doing it.