15 Trucks of Trivia That Ran Us Over This Week
At the start of the 20th century, many men in British pubs played dominoes. Then came a new game — darts, which gave authorities lots to fear. These were sharp objects, flung by men who were often drunk. No law existed on the books to restrict darts, but they did have a law banning games of chance in pubs. So, the city of Leeds declared darts to be a game of chance, and they arrested one publican for hosting darts games.
That publican got through his ordeal, thanks to a friend named Bigfoot. And we think you’ll get through your ordeal too, thanks to the following facts…
1. Jumbo Unleashed
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Lady Bird Johnson caught LBJ having sex with a secretary on an Oval Office couch, said one Secret Service agent. Johnson later had staff install a buzzer to warn him when she was approaching.
2. The Piggyback Bandit
Sherwin Sheyagan, a former high school team manager, kept showing up at games and hopping on players’ backs. Five states banned him from sporting events, then Virginia finally put him in jail.
3. That’s Nuts
There are no Brazil nut plantations. The nut trees are all wild because we’ve been unable to copy their symbiotic relationships with other plants.
4. Nub City
For decades, one town in Florida represented two-thirds of American dismemberment claims. The people there kept chopping off their own arms for the insurance.
5. Anti-Aphrodisiacs
Butterflies rub each other with a repulsive stench. This way, a male discourages any competitor from mating with a female after he’s already done so.
6. The M247 Sergeant York
The first killer robot immediately targeted its generals. Luckily, this 1985 computer-controlled tank did not fire. Then, given the chance to fire, it shot up a toilet instead of the target drone.
7. What Was He On?
A colleague of Freud’s, Karl Koller, investigated the use of cocaine in the eye. First, he poured cocaine in his own eye (fun). Then, he stabbed his eye with a pin (excessive).
8. Just Call It 10
Students doing physics problems all know that gravity is 9.81 meters per second squared. But the value varies considerably from this depending on where you are on the planet and even what time of the month it is.
9. No Chance
In 1908, “Bigfoot” Anakin won a game of darts in court to beat a gambling charge. By showing he could target individual numbers, he man proved darts is a game of skill.
10. Cadaver Ecosystem
A mountain lion will take down an elk, which is much too big for it to eat, and then abandon the half-eaten corpse. Hundreds of species rely entirely on these abandoned mountain lion meals for sustenance.
11. Turn Left
MIT invented turn-by-turn in-car navigation in 1989. They never bothered pursuing the invention, though. They assumed insurance companies would never let drivers use it.
12. STG-44s
The Nazis left so many of their rifles around, people still used them in the Iraq War. Same deal in Syria’s civil war: People are using assault rifles the Soviets captured from Germany all those years ago.
13. Timmins’ Folly
A Canadian city built a misguided museum to Shania Twain. The city went on subsidizing the museum, so they actually lost $33 on every visitor, until they finally demolished it.
14. Leonid Rogozov
This Russian surgeon took out his own appendix in Antarctica. He had to do the operation on himself as there were no other doctors in Antarctica at the time.
15. Percontation
There’s a special punctuation mark called the percontation mark, which you can stick at the end of a sentence to show that a question is merely rhetorical. How crazy is that؟
