12 Bits of Trivia We Found in an Abandoned Storage Unit and Would Like to Have Appraised, Please

In 2008, a man was taken into custody, accused of drunk driving. They wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom, so after a while, he ripped a huge fart, saying, “I couldn’t hold it no more.” He says the cops all laughed about it at the time, but they later filed a complaint: “The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature with Patrolman Parsons.” The charge was eventually dropped.

An Oregon man ordered from his local Domino’s every night for over a decade, so when he suddenly stopped in 2016, the establishment got worried. After 11 days without an order, they sent a driver to his house to check on him. He was unresponsive, so they contacted police, who broke in and found him on death’s door. It’s unclear what he was suffering from, but it sounds like a pretty harrowing week and a half.

In 2013, Clooney devised a Jigsaw-esque plan to force his friends to take his money. He stuffed 14 suitcases full of $1 million each, and invited over his 14 best buddies for “dinner.” In reality, when they got there, he offered them each a suitcase — with the stipulation that if anyone refused their suitcase, none of them got the money. In his telling, he even opened with an evil villain monologue: “I just held up a map, and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them. And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’”

In 2011, a British man bought his own premium phone number, which he gave out to businesses that like to cold-call potential customers. Each incoming call cost those companies money, and he got to hang on to about 70 percent of it. Phone Pay Plus, which regulates these premium numbers, had to make a statement when his story went viral: “Premium rate numbers are not designed to be used in this way, and we would strongly discourage any listeners from adopting this idea.”

It’s cute that an organization with a lengthy “Human Rights Concerns” section on Wikipedia can still have a little bit of fun on the job.

Jeremy is a rare snail whose shell curls to the left — meaning its genitals are on the left as well. That makes it impossible to mate with other standard snails. University of Nottingham researchers wanted to do genetic research on lefty snails, so they’ve been trying extremely hard to get Jeremy laid. They put out a call for other backward snails, and were able to acquire snails Lefty (U.K.) and Tomeu (Spain). They were placed together in a habitat, at long last giving Jeremy companionship, and a chance at love. Instead, Lefty and Tomeu mated with each other.

Rolling up to the 1936 Olympics, Liechtenstein was stunned to see that their flag was identical to Haiti’s. Even though it had been in use since 1764, the Liechtenstein government swiftly added the crown to the top left corner to differentiate it within a year.

Nagoro is a Japanese village that became a tourist destination for the many lifelike dolls scattered around the community. Residents made likenesses of themselves, and set their dolls up in schools, in fields and working various construction jobs around town. But the population has dwindled in recent years, to just 27 people in 2019, ratcheting the cursed vibes up to 100.

In 2000, the insurance company that was on the hook to pay out winners of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire sued the show for making the questions too easy — but only in America. At the time, the British version had paid out about $800,000 in prizes, compared to $3.5 million paid out to American winners. Brits responded in dignified fashion: complaining that they were given harder questions. The country rallied around headlines like The Guardian’s “You Don’t Have to Be a Rocket Scientist to Become a Millionaire — You Just Have to Be an American.”

Mary Anning was a merchant who sold fossils at a beachside stand on England’s Dorset Beach in the 1800s. She was a bona-fide pioneer in fossil location and classification, starting with the first known complete ichthyosaurus skeleton, which she dredged up at the age of 12.

Íslendinga-App is kind of like a yearbook for Icelandic residents. It’s primarily a genealogy database, but since Iceland is so remote, and about two-thirds of the population are registered there, young people figured out it’s pretty handy to cross-check before a date to make sure you’re not about to hook up with a relative.

People who travel for cosmetic surgery, particularly on their faces, sometimes have trouble proving their identity. Three women were stuck in South Korea in 2017 because their surgeries hadn’t yet healed, and therefore didn’t match their passport photos.