Category: Trivia

– The San Diego Wild Animal Park (part of the world-famous San Diego Zoo) has a monorail line. Its name is WGASA, and that moniker was chosen by a park employee. Management loved the name, since they were seeking something with an “African feel”. What they didn’t know until later was that WGASA was a crude acronym for “Who gives a shit anyhow?”. Even after finding out the awful truth, management decided to keep the name. Read more here.

– The TV show Benson was the first television show to mention the Internet by name. In an episode called “Scenario”, which aired on February 22, 1985, the characters discussed ARPANET, the forerunner of the modern Internet.

– Phyllis Smith, who plays the character of the same first name on the US version of The Office, was once a cheerleader for the St. Louis Rams and a burlesque dancer. A knee injury in the 1980s forced her to stop dancing, so she moved to Hollywood and worked as an actress and in casting.

– Have you ever seen a picture which contains a picture of itself? This called a recursive picture, and the specific effect is called the Droste effect, after a brand of Dutch cocoa which features a picture of the box on the packaging:

Other famous images featuring the Droste effect include the cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album, Land O’Lakes butter, The Laughing Cow cheese, and the movie poster for Memento. Read more about it here.

Here are a couple of items I meant to post on Monday, but forgot:

– Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 film Blackmail is generally considered the first British film with sound. However, Hitchcock had already started filming the movie when the decision was made to add sound to it. Hitchcock had chosen Polish\Czech actress Anny Ondra as the female lead because film was originally supposed to be silent. However, now that sound was added, Anny’s thick accent would make her unconvincing as an English woman. Since recasting the lead and starting over from scratch was too expensive, and since sound could not be edited later on at that time, Hitchcock had Ondra mouth the words while English actress Joan Berry spoke into a microphone off camera. Here’s a picture of the filming:

Hitchcock (with headphones on) listens to Berry read lines as Ondra mouths them and a cameraman records it.

– There’s an interesting story behind the creation of Curious George.

– Play-Doh was originally created as a wallpaper cleaner.

– There are no rats in Alberta, Canada. Well, I’m sure there are a few, but for fifty years the Alberta government has worked hard to keep rat populations at bay. Here’s a brief write-up about the province’s rat eradication program on the official Alberta government website, and here’s a Wiki map showing the lack of rats in Alberta.

– It’s tempting to think of some foods as always existing, but the truth is that many of our favorite foods are extremely recent. Granny Smith apples, for example, didn’t exist until 1868 and first went on sale in the United States in 1972. Hass avacados weren’t bred until 1926, when full-time mail man and part-time horticulturist Rudolph Hass grafted seedlings from random avocado seeds (even scraps from restaurants!) onto Fuerte trees, then the predominant avocado strain. Hass’ original avocado tree, located at 430 West Road, La Habra Heights, California, survived until September 11, 2002 when it was cut down due to root rot.

– Roger Ebert likes black women. Back in the 80s, friends set him up on a blind date with a local talk show host. The date was a “genteel bust”, but Ebert did convince the woman to syndicate her show. Thus, thanks to Roger Ebert, everyone in America knows the name Oprah Winfrey.

– Duran Duran’s song “Sound of Thunder” is based on a Ray Bradbury short story of (almost) the same name: “A Sound of Thunder”. The story, set in 2055, concerns a hunter named Eckles who contracts with a company called Time Safari to go back in time to shoot a Tyrannosaurus Rex. One condition of his time travel is that Eckles cannot step off a path that Time Safari has created, as any subtle changes caused by time travelers might impact the future. Although Eckles is initially excited about the safari, he loses his cool when he sees the dinosaur, and so he runs off the path, crushing a butterfly in the process. When he comes back to present time, he finds that the world has changed. The song’s lyrics “I’m the man who stepped off the path” show that LeBon is supposed to be Eckles in the song. Read more about it here.

As mentioned in this post, I have a ton of trivia items to share… so here’s today’s Amazing Trivia Bonanza:

– John Tyler (born March 29, 1790) was tenth president of the United States, holding the office from 1841–1845. Amazingly, Tyler has two living grandsons: Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., (born 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928).

– One of the very last “Confederate widows” died in 2008. This one’s a bit of a trick, though: a girl named Maudie White Hopkins did the laundry and housekeeping chores for Civil War veteran William M. Cantrell. She was 19 and he was 86. Cantrell told Maudie that he would give her his land and house if she would marry and take care of him. Being one of ten children from a dirt-poor Ozark family, Maudie agreed. Cantrell, who enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 16 and served with the Virginia infantry, died in 1937 after the couple had been married for three years. Maudie lived on until August 17, 2008. Read more here.

– If you took a piece of paper .1 millimeter thick and folded it in half 100 times, the resulting stack of paper would be 13.4 billion light-years tall – almost as large as the entire observable universe! It sounds incredible, but it’s really basic math: .1mm (the height of the paper) * 2¹⁰⁰ (the effect of doubling the height of the paper 100 times) / 1000 (to convert mm to m) / 9,460,536,000,000,000 (the number of meters in a light year) = 10²⁶ meters, or  13.4 billion light years.

– William Moulton Marston was not only a psychologist, feminist theorist and inventor, he also wrote comic books, too! He’s mostly remembered for creating the systolic blood-pressure test, which detects deception and is still an important component of the modern polygraph machine. Oh, and he also created a comic book character known as Wonder Woman. Read more about him here.

I have a giant “virtual stack” of trivia items I’ve been building up over the past few weeks. Here are three of them:

– The Old Man of the Lake is a 30 foot tall tree stump that has been floating in Oregon’s Crater Lake since at least 1896. The stump, which has been bleached white over the years and can support a man’s weight, was first noted in print by geologist Joseph S. Diller, who wrote in 1902 that he’d seen the stump six years earlier. In 1938, a study of the stump was undertaken to see if it moved; the results were pretty spectacular: it does indeed move, and can do so very quickly. Boaters frequently note the position of the stump and relay it to other boaters for safety reasons.

– Every session of the British parliament is opened by the monarch, who travels from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament in a fine carriage. The House of Lords is assembled, and the monarch takes a seat on the throne. The House of Commons in then called to the chamber, and the monarch reads a speech which outlines the policies and goals of the current government. But what you might not know is that after the speech, a piece of legislation called the Outlawries Bill is introduced to the House of Commons. No member of the House orders the bill to be read, nor it is never printed, nor is any action taken on it. First used in 1727, the act of reading the bill is purely symbolic, to show the monarch that her (or his) speech cannot influence the business of the House. In other words, instead of running back to the House and arguing over what the monarch said, this bill reminds her (or him) that the House of Commons is independent.

– Mention the name Dallas Texans and most folks think of the AFL team that started in Dallas but later became the Kansas City Chiefs. Did you know that there was actually an NFL team called the Dallas Texans? And that they only lasted one season? And that they went 1-11? 

Continue reading “Trivia Throwdown!”

I keep a text file on my desktop with random facts I pull from the Internet. I always figure I’ll use them later on this site. They’ve been building up for a while now, so let me go ahead and dump them here:

– The 2006 independent film Zyzzyx Road is the lowest grossing American film of all time. Starring Leo Grillo, Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore, it officially earned $30 at the box office. In reality it actually only earned $20, because Grillo refunded the $5 ticket price to makeup artist Sheila Moore and a friend.

– In the 1984 presidential election, Ronald Reagan won every state except Minnesota… and he only lost that state (Walter Mondale’s home) by 3,761 votes!

– The British band Madness’ first 20 singles all made the Top 20 in the UK charts. In fact, from 1980 to 1986, there was a Madness single in the British charts in 214 out of 312 possible weeks. That’s staggering.

– Songwriting credits for Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” were credited to “Vincent Ford”, a longtime friend of Marley’s and the owner of a soup kitchen. Marley’s act insured that his friend (and his soup kitchen) would be financially stable for life.

Continue reading “Random Facts Dump”