99 facts I learned in 2023
Trivia dump from a year gone by.
At the outset, let me confess this is a misleading title. Some of them were already known to me, some of them were stored as bookmarks which I had long forgotten about. Quite a few of them featured in numerous quizzes (and workshops for students) I hosted round the year. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy these nuggets.
Happy reading!
Painkillers are more effective when the pills are red. But soothing blue pills make more effective tranquilizers than red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the colour blue is associated with their national soccer team.
Further reading, here and here.Since it was often held that husbands voted in their wives’ interests, 19th-century American suffragist Susan B. Anthony suggested that if a woman commits murder her husband should be hanged in her stead.
ChatGPT gulps up almost 500 ml of water every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research.
In August 2023, a 74-year-old Italian man was crushed to death under thousands of large wheels of a Parmesan-style cheese each weighing around 40 kg. Giacomo Chiapparini was checking on the ripening wheels of cheese and a metal shelf collapsed in his warehouse, setting off a domino effect. Reportedly, it took 12 hours to find his body.
A confessional system is where political power is allocated based on religious affiliation. Lebanon follows this form of governance, outlined in the National Pact, an informal agreement reached in 1943. According to this agreement, the President of Lebanon is traditionally a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister is traditionally a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament is traditionally a Shia Muslim.
People in Spain consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight as a New Year ritual, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. The tradition is popular since 1909 when some Alicantese vine growers spread this custom to better sell huge numbers of grapes from an excellent harvest. Doctors have previously warned against involving children in the practice because of the risk of choking. In 2019, the practice took the life of a three-year old boy.
In 1962, the King of Greece came to India on a state visit. Dr S Radhakrishnan, welcoming the distinguished guest, said, “Your Majesty, you are the first King to come as our guest. Alexander (the great) came uninvited.”
The physicist Andre Geim features in many quizzes as the only person to win both the IgNobel as well as the Nobel Prize. His Nobel Prize winning discovery was Graphene. He (along with Konstantin Novoselov) created the substance by simply messing around with pencils and Sellotape.
Numbers are of great significance in China. The number 8, in particular, is considered to be a shorthand for prosperity. In 2020, a phone number, which ended with five 8s, was so coveted that it attracted 5,000 bids and ultimately sold for $325,000. A phone number that ended in five 5s (the digit is thought to be associated with emperors) was sold for $52,000 in an online auction in 2019, and a number with eight 7s was auctioned for $560,000 in 2017. Seven is a homonym for “life’s spirit,” or “qi” in Mandarin, China’s official language. The Beijing Olympics was held on Aug. 8, 2008, and some couples try to get married on the eighth day of the eighth month. Talking of marriages, in 2009, thousands of couples decided that 9/9/09 would be an auspicious date to marry. The number nine in Mandarin, pronounced “jiu,” has the same pronunciation as the word for “perpetual” or “forever.” 18,979 couples got married or received marriage licenses on that day in Beijing alone.
Further reading, here and here.A California theatre reportedly only screened the first half of SS Rajamouli’s RRR – that has a runtime of more than three hours, because the manager had not received instructions “that there was more”. In 2023, London’s Vue Theatre offered a bewildering screening of Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan where they played the second half of the movie before showing the first half.
In 1915, Agatha Christie joined Torquay's Red Cross Hospital pharmacy, where she trained as an apothecary's assistant, which involved learning both theoretical and practical aspects of chemistry. For someone who was not much a fan of murder with firearms involved, no wonder where she got her knowledge of poisons from.
Katalin Karikó, who along with her colleague Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, received Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for work on mRNA that fast-tracked the development of COVID-19 vaccines, had a life full of rejections. She, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter snuck out of communist Hungary in 1985, smuggling 900 pounds sewn into their daughter’s teddy bear.
Great read here.Mark David Chapman, the guy who fatally shot John Lennon, exchanged a few letters with Stephen Spiro, the police officer who arrested him. In the first letter, from 15 January 1983, Chapman says his reason for writing, besides wanting to be Spiro’s friend, is to ask for help in locating his copy of the book which he was reading at the time of his arrest. The book was of course, The Catcher in The Rye.
By the 18th century, London had more coffee shops than anywhere else in Europe apart from Constantinople. In Oxford they were seen as places to sit and think and talk and write; as “penny universities”.
Further reading here.When Grimes shared a thoughtful 274-character explanation of the name of their first child, “X Æ A-12”—a translation which includes references to “elven spelling,” the “unknown variable” of the letter x, emojis of swords, a “metal rat,” and the “SR-17” aircraft— Elon Musk publicly responded that she had made a mistake and the plane was actually an “SR-71.”
Here’s a Vanity Fair profile on Musk.In post-pandemic Japan, people are signing up for 'smiling lessons' to relearn the art without looking awkward, according to reports. Many people admitted to struggling to adjust to life without face coverings after Japan lifted the official advice to wear masks in public places.
Talking of Japan, Sumo might be the country’s national sport, but for most of the last two decades it has been dominated by Mongolians. Between 2007 and 2017, the three active yokozuna (the sport’s highest rank, who are even revered above film stars) were all Mongolians, including Hakuho, the GOAT in the world of Sumo Wrestling.
If you think “unpaid intern” is a trope invented only in the modern world, meet Thomas de Quincey, best known for his 1821 work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He was extraordinarily shy. It took him four years to find the courage to meet his childhood hero William Wordsworth. He ended up enduring a nightmarish time as Wordsworth’s unpaid assistant.
Will Shortz is easily one of the world’s most famous crossword editors, employed in this capacity with the New York Times for almost three decades. The creators of the 1995 film Batman Forever asked him to write riddles for the Riddler. He has also appeared on The Simpsons and sold over 1m copies of a sudoku book.
The Scottish village of Dull has been twinned with Boring in America and Bland Shire in Australia. If twinning was done on the basis of homophones, Bland Shire could have well twinned with Bulandshahr in India.
Pandit Ravi Shankar was born in British India, toured Weimar Germany as a child star just as Hitler was rising to power, danced at Carnegie Hall and partied at the Cotton Club, met Clark Gable and Joan Crawford in Hollywood, sang for Gandhi and was blessed by Rabindranath Tagore—all this before he was eighteen.
This is a great book on him.In 1905, printers in Moscow demanded to be paid for setting punctuation marks as well, which required the same action and the same amount of time as the letters. The ‘Comma Strike’ led to widespread protests, eventually forcing Czar Nicholas II grant Russia its 1st constitution.
The French host an annual competition outside the Notre-Dame in Paris to judge the best baguette creator in France. The winner, announced with flourish, wins not just prestige, but also a yearlong contract to serve the Élysée Palace, where the president resides. In 2022, the artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread was included in the list of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
King Charles III had been delivered by Sir William Gilliatt. By some coincidence, he handled Camilla Shand’s delivery, too, at a time when nobody could guess that Charles and Camilla would marry one day.
A study in 2013 led by researchers from the University of Hyderabad and the University of Edinburgh centred on Alzheimer’s sufferers in the multilingual city of Hyderabad. The research team assessed 648 people, of whom 391 were bilingual. Their results seemed to suggest that those who spoke two languages developed dementia an average of four and a half years later than the monolinguals. Cognitive multitasking arising from speaking more than one language was deemed to act as protection.
Elizabeth Taylor’s 2011 funeral started 15 minutes behind schedule, on her own instructions. Her publicist Sally Morrison confirmed that she ‘even wanted to be late for her own funeral’.
In 2010, Finland became the first country to incorporate a 1Mbps broadband connection as a ‘legal right’ for every person living in the country.
Talking of Finland, Finnish is not considered a Scandinavian language. While Finland is geographically close to the Scandinavian countries and has historical connections with them, Finnish is linguistically similar to languages like Estonian and Hungarian, which belongs to a different language family called Uralic. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese are the Scandinavian languages, typically associated with the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language family.
Analysis of 700-year-old coroner reports by experts at Cambridge University has discovered that around the end of the 13th century, and into the 14th, Oxford was the murder capital of England. 75% of the killers are noted as ‘clericus’, a term covering both staff and students at the university. Back then, the young, all-male student body were often carrying swords and prone to beer-induced violence. They were mostly aged between 14-21, the peak for taking risks.
The superstar of European printer-intellectuals, the Venetian Aldus Manutius, invented the semicolon for the Italian poet Pietro Bembo’s dialogue De Aetna (1494), allowing new ways of sophisticated pausing. The 20th-century writer Kurt Vonnegut called them ‘transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing’. However, when readers were asked about their favourite punctuation mark in a 2012 survey in the Swedish journal Språktidningen, the semicolon won with a 10 per cent lead on all other signs.
The Bombay Famine Code in the 19th century said troops must march at right angles to the wind like crabs walking sideways, the reason behind this being an erroneous belief that cholera spread through air. One fine day in 1856, the prisoners of Agra jail were asked to march sideways and they soon found themselves camping in the gardens of the Taj Mahal.
Early in 2017, YouGov conducted a poll in the UK in which they asked: “Of the following, whose opinions do you trust the most when they talk about their field of expertise?” Nurses came first. Eighty-four percent of people polled trusted them. Politicians came last, at 5 percent (though local members of Parliament were a bit more trusted, at 20 percent). Economists were just above politicians at 25 percent. Trust in weather forecasters was twice as high.
In 2009, Mohammad Sarwar, then Labour MP for Glasgow Central, called for the city to be officially recognised as the home of the chicken tikka masala. He campaigned for Glasgow to be given EU Protected Designation of Origin status for the curry and tabled an early day motion in the House of Commons.
Pavlo Blavatskyy of Montpellier Business School in France, used an algorithm to analyse photographs of almost 300 cabinet ministers and estimate their body-mass index (BMI), a measure of obesity. He found that the median BMI of a country’s cabinet is highly correlated with its level of corruption.
In 2016, Pierce Brosnan did an advertising campaign for Pan Bahar. The Delhi government issued a show-cause notice to Brosnan, asking for an explanation as to why he appeared in an advertisement that seemed to glorify tobacco consumption. In response, Brosnan stated that he was misled by the company and that the ad campaign had not made him aware of the harmful effects of the product. He clarified that his contract with Pan Bahar was for a "breath freshener/tooth whitener," and he did not endorse the product for its tobacco content.
The concept for the show Jeopardy! is credited to Julann Griffin, Merv Griffin’s wife. She is supposed to have argued that, if it was a crime to give quiz-show contestants the answers in advance, then giving them the answers up front and having them come up with the questions would get the show around the Communications Act.
In 1626, the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was one of the first westerners to discover a new use for ice, after packing a dead chicken in snow in the hope of preserving its flesh. He succeeded (in his own words, “excellently well”), but in so doing unfortunately caught a chill that would, several days later, be the death of him.
Jack Kirby was unbelievably prolific, producing almost twelve hundred pages of illustration in one year. As his biographer put it, Kirby was “very, very good at creating comic book art and very, very bad at getting paid for it.”
In Japan, some students started to give each other KitKats as good-luck tokens before important tests, because the brand name reminded them of the phrase ‘kitto katsu’ (meaning ‘you will overcome’). Nestlé encouraged the students’ behaviour and, eventually, KitKat became an accepted 'omamori' (good-luck token) that people exchanged on all kinds of occasions, showing how new contexts create new meanings for brands.
The World Cube Association allows players to lubricate and sand their cubes’ mechanisms to improve their times. But too much fiddling can be risky: damage or markings can result in disqualification. The arrival of magnetised cubes in 2016 has enabled more accurate twisting, helping to shave off valuable milliseconds. In 2023, Max Park solved a cube in 3.13 seconds and beat the previous record, set in 2018, by 0.34 of a second.
The Mercedes Benz Club of India is a group formed by Merc enthusiasts of western India. Started as The Three Pointers in 1997, it got its present name four years later. Owners met at Shivaji Park every Sunday. Kiran Shantaram (son of the legendary V Shantaram) was once President.
When Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” appeared in Paris bookshops in the summer of 1943, its publisher, Gallimard, knew its commercial prospects were slim. How many readers, living under Nazi occupation, would want to devour a 700 page philosophical essay? To their amazement, it flew off the shelves – and seemed especially popular with women. Then the truth dawned. The book weighed exactly 1 KG, and people were using it as a kitchen weight, because the standard copper ones were being melted down to make ammunitions.
In the spring of 1954, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings in New York City on the menace of comics, largely prompted by the notoriety of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s best-selling book “Seduction of the Innocent,” which contended that “chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books . . . are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment.”
According to the Nobel Foundation’s online archive, all 11 of Einstein’s nominees won a prize. Some were already famous, like Max Planck; others, like Walther Bothe, were lesser-known. In two cases, his support seems to have been decisive. In 1940, Einstein supported Otto Stern, a physicist who had already had 60 nominations. Stern won the next time the prize was given. Similarly, Wolfgang Pauli, whose “exclusion principle” is central to quantum mechanics, had received 20 nominations before Einstein backed him in 1945. He got his prize that same year.
In 1920, President Paul Deschanel of France fell through the window of the train while travelling on the Orient Express. He stumbled up to the nearest signal box in his pyjamas and told the signalman that he needed help and that he was the President of France. The signalman reportedly replied 'And I'm Napoleon Bonaparte.’ A similar event happened with Pope Francis in 2013. Phoning the switchboard of a Jesuit residence in Rome, Pope Francis identified himself – only to be told: ‘Oh yes? And I’m Napoleon.’
In 1961, the United Nations declared coca leaves an illegal narcotic, and, outside of countries like Peru and Bolivia, it’s illegal to use the plant. But one US company was given a pass. The Stepan Company’s laboratory based out of Maywood, New Jersey, processes coca leaves to yield two ingredients: cocaine for approved medicinal use, and a cocaine-free extract that Coca-Cola uses for flavouring.
When tea was introduced in Britain, it was in green tea, which the Chinese consumed themselves. However, black tea started replacing green tea due to a few reasons. One, there was a high risk of original tea getting adulterated, as it was mostly a smuggled form to avoid heavy taxation. Thus black tea which tasted better with milk was becoming increasingly popular. Two, by the eighteenth century, the price of sugar had dropped in Britain due to supply from its Caribbean colonies. Most of it initially went into tea.
The ancient Greeks commemorated disgraced athletes, people accused of cheating at the Olympic Games, by setting up statues (of Zeus rather than the offending athletes, except they called these “Zanes’) at the entrance to the stadium at Olympia. The bases can still be seen. They carried the name of the athlete and details of his offence. They were a warning to other athletes, and they shamed the city from which the disgraced athletes came.
Golf has been known as a boys’ club for good reason. Augusta National, host of the annual Masters tournament, began accepting female members only in 2012. In 2014, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews voted to allow women as members for the first time in its 260-year history. Pine Valley, the No. 1-ranked golf course in the U.S., according to Golf Digest, agreed to begin allowing women members for the first time in May 2021.
Forensic science is a relatively young discipline. Its origins can be traced back to two attic rooms in Lyon, where a Frenchman named Edmond Locard, inspired by the still-fictional techniques he read about in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, opened the world’s first crime investigation laboratory in 1910. One of Locard’s core beliefs was that every contact made between two objects leaves a trace. This idea, known as Locard’s principle, is still central to forensics.
While giving a speech in Miami in February of 1933, as a president-elect, FDR was sitting on the back of the Buick in his three-car motorcade, and a man named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots in 15 seconds at him. A 100-pound woman named Lillian Cross saw him pull out the gun and smacked him with her purse. It thwarted his aim. He missed FDR by about 3 inches. He ended up killing the mayor of Chicago who’s in town. But this extraordinary woman and her purse saved the New Deal.
One of the best April fool was played by The Guardian in 1977. They published a 7 page supplement commemorating the anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe, a completely imaginary small island nation in the Indian ocean. The nation consisted of 2 main islands which together form the shape of a semicolon. The larger island was called Upper Case and the southern island called Lower Case. The day it was published The Guardian was flooded with calls for more information, including calls from travel agents and airline companies.
Gilbert Baker, the creator of the Pride flag, worked at the Paramount Flag Company in San Francisco. In the 1970s, he created two monumental flags with the help of volunteers including fellow artists Lynn Segerblom, James McNamara, Glenne McElhinney, Joe Duran and Paul Langlotz. By 1979, the Pride flag was restricted to six colours for practical reasons. When Baker had approached the manufacturers to mass produce the flag, he found that the ‘hot pink’ (fuchsia) dye was prohibitively expensive. Indigo was removed, and turquoise and violet were merged to form blue. Philadelphia added black and brown stripes in the flag for racial inclusivity. Another variation of the rainbow flag had added a black stripe for AIDS awareness.
The word “astirbroad” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1885, but when an editor came to revise it in 2019, they discovered that it was an early-modern typo: the typesetter for the 17th-century book in which the word was originally found had dropped the word “stir” into “abroad”. Still, astirbroad remains.
The ancient roots of interest payments far predate coined money. The Mesopotamians were apparently charging interest on loans before they put wheels on carts. Even the dangerous miracle of compound interest was known from the earliest of times. Around 2400 BCE, a compounding debt that became unpayable caused a war between the city-states of Lagash and Umma.
We take subtitles for granted but it was the Public Law 85-905 which created the Captioned Films for the Deaf program, signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on September 2, 1958. As a result, deaf Americans once again had access to the motion picture, which became inaccessible with the introduction of sound in 1927.
The first cellphones in the 1980s “were the size of a shoebox and consisted of 25 to 30 elements,” Larry Meinert, U.S. Geological Survey deputy associate director for energy and minerals, said in 2017. “Today, they fit in your pocket or on your wrist and are made from about 75 different elements, almost three-quarters of the periodic table.” That may include tantalum from Rwanda, potassium from Belarus, silver from Mexico, tin from Myanmar, carbon from India, and germanium from China.
Lotteries are an ancient pastime. They were common in the Roman Empire—Nero was a fan of them; make of that what you will—and are attested to throughout the Bible, where the casting of lots is used for everything from selecting the next king of Israel to choosing who will get to keep Jesus’ garments after the Crucifixion. In many of these early instances, they were deployed either as a kind of party game—during Roman Saturnalias, tickets were distributed free to guests, some of whom won extravagant prizes—or as a means of divining God’s will. Often, though, lotteries were organized to raise money for public works. The earliest known version of keno dates to the Han dynasty and is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall of China. Two centuries later, Caesar Augustus started a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome.
Elizabeth Magie was a woman of many talents and trades. She worked as a stenographer, a typist, and a news reporter; she wrote poems and short stories; she was a comedian, an actress, and a feminist (she once published an ad to auction herself off as a “young woman American slave,” to make the point that only white men were truly free); and she patented an invention that made typewriting easier. Despite that impressive resume, she is now remembered mainly—and barely so—as the inventor of Monopoly. Except that the board game she developed was called The Landlord’s Game.
James Cameron has done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from his movie Titanic. They took two stunt people who were the same body mass as Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio to help with the study put sensors all over them and inside them. The team put them in ice water and tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. “Only one could survive,” concluded Cameron.
Stan Lee had teenage jobs delivering sandwiches, as a theatre usher and an office boy, before his first writing jobs. These included advance obituaries for a news service and publicity material for the National Tuberculosis Centre. In 1939, he found work at Timely – later renamed Atlas Comics, and eventually Marvel – as an editorial assistant, with his first writing credit on an early issue of Captain America in 1941.
Probability theory only really got going in the 17th century, after the gambler Chevalier de Méré posed a problem concerning a dice game to Blaise Pascal (he of the triangle and the wager). Pascal duly consulted with Pierre de Fermat (he of the last theorem), and together they developed the classical theory of probability.
Vishnu Temple is a 7,533-foot-elevation (2,296 meter) summit located in the Grand Canyon. According to explorer Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh, Vishnu Temple is "without doubt the most stupendous mass of nature's carving in the known world."Vishnu Temple is named for Vishnu, the Hindu deity, redeemer of the universe. This toponym was applied in 1880 by Clarence Dutton who thought this mountain resembled an oriental pagoda, when he began the tradition of naming geographical features in the Grand Canyon after mythological deities.
The first dining forks were used by the ruling class in the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire. In 1004, Maria Argyropoulina, niece of the Byzantine emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, was married to the son of the Doge of Venice. She brought with her a little case of two-pronged golden forks, which she used at her wedding feast. The Venetians were shocked, and when Maria died three years later of the plague, Saint Peter Damian proclaimed it was God’s punishment. And with that, Saint Peter Damian closed the book on the fork in Europe for the next four hundred years.
Benjamin Franklin wrote under a variety of pseudonyms and, as "Richard Saunders," published Poor Richard's Almanack every year from 1732 to 1758. It contained weather predictions, household hints, poetry, essays, and adages such as "Marry'd in haste, we oft repent at Leisure"; and "Where there's Marriage without Love, there will be Love without Marriage.”
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand married Sophie Chotek, it was agreed that she would not become a royal and that their children would have no claim to the throne. He became next in line after the suicide of his cousin and the death of his father Karl Ludwig. He never got to rule Austria-Hungary, however, because of that fateful to Sarajevo.
Mount Everest is melting, and Nepal is considering moving the base camp to a place that would make it more dangerous to climb, as the mountain is pretty much the foundation of a $2.4 billion tourism industry that constitutes literally 6.1 percent of the country's GDP. The Everest Base Camp is located on top of the Khumbu Glacier. Campers tend to urinate outside, dumping around 4,000 litres of warm liquid on the glacier each day.
The Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence has published a paper on the effect the name of a dish has on diners. ‘Give it an ethnic label such as an Italian name,’ he says, ‘and people will rate the food as more authentic. There are other intriguing research finds as well. For example, classical music increases sales of expensive wines and overall spending in posh eateries.
The publishing figures for 2022 were rather depressing. In a country of 332 million people, only 28 books out of ~300,000 titles sold more than 500,000 copies. Eight were by one author, Colleen Hoover, and no book of history or politics sold more than 295,000 copies. Past the top 100 books, the numbers are dire. The average book sells 200 copies. An average "bestseller" sells about 2,000 copies. Almost all significant book sales are to "communities," typically book clubs, authors' social media followers, or interest groups (like true crime).
Sending a thumbs-up emoji may now be considered the agreement of a legally binding contract, a Canadian judge has ruled. The thumbs-up emoji proved pivotal in a case involving farmer Chris Achter of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and a 2021 deal to sell 87 metric tons of flax to grain buyer Kent Mickleborough. Mickleborough signed the contract for the deal and texted a picture of it to Achter and wrote "Please confirm flax contract," according to court documents. Achter responded to with a thumbs-up emoji. When Achter did not send the flax to Mickleborough, the grain buyer filed a lawsuit stating he thought Achter's thumbs-up emoji was an agreement to the contract.
Multi-millionaire Rumi Verjee was made a lord in 2013. A fourth generation Indian born in Uganda, much of his family assets were seized by the Idi Amin regime. After the expulsion of the Asian population from Uganda, he made the United Kingdom his home and brought the Domino's Pizza chain to Britain.
In the 6th century BCE, Pisistratus, the then ruler of Athens, established a series of public festivals, one of which was held in honour of the god Dionysus. The first recorded 'City Dionysia' prize for tragedy was won by a wandering bard called Thespis. Around 534 or 535 BCE, Thespis astounded audiences by leaping on to the back of a wooden cart and reciting poetry as if he was the characters whose lines he was reading and became the world's first recorded actor. We still use the word ‘thespian’, derived from his name, to denote actors, particularly with a stage background.
The German-made Hindenburg – a point of pride and propaganda for the Nazi regime — came with its own all-electric kitchen (run by a head chef, with several assistants), grand dining room and printed menus. At the bar, guests were treated to cocktails like Sloe Gin Fizzes, Manhattans, martinis and sidecars, but also crafted signature drinks, such as the LZ-129 Frosted Cocktail, a combination of orange juice and gin, named after the airship's official moniker, the LZ-129 Hindenburg. Also available was a vast selection of more than 250 bottles of the finest German wines.
The Maldives is 99% water and more than 80% of its 1,190 islands are just one metre above sea level. Yet many young Maldivians, particularly girls, do not know how to swim. The implications of this go far beyond basic life skills; it stops local people connecting with their local habitat, which needs their protection, and blocks women from accessing work in the two main industries: fishing and tourism.
Frito-Lay, which supplies Taco Bell with taco shells, runs a research complex outside of Dallas that’s staffed by hundreds of chemists, psychologists, and technicians, who perform millions of dollars’ worth of research a year examining the crunch, mouthfeel, and aroma of each of its snack products. A forty-thousand-dollar steel device that mimics a chewing mouth tests such factors as the perfect breaking point of a chip. (People apparently like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.)
On April 16, 2023, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s biggest hit The Phantom of the Opera hung up its mask on Broadway, having played to over 145 million people worldwide in 41 countries, 183 cities, and in 17 languages, receiving scores of awards and honours. The show also lays claim to the title of the biggest job producer in U.S. theatrical history. During its run, it created an estimated 6,500 jobs, including those of 400 actors, in New York City, while grossing $1.3 billion in ticket sales.
In Australia, every year on 26 May, National Sorry Day remembers and acknowledges the mistreatment of 'The Stolen Generations’ – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families and communities.
El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018.
On 27th September 1825, Locomotion No. 1 became the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It was the first locomotive to run on a public railway. A man on horseback went before the train carrying a banner that read Periculum privatum utilitas publica ("The private danger is the public good”).
Lead poisoning contributes to as many as 5.5 million premature deaths a year — more than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined. Bangladesh phased out leaded gasoline in the 1990s. But high blood lead levels have remained. Why? When researchers Stephen Luby and Jenny Forsyth, doing work in rural Bangladesh, tried to isolate the source, it turned out to be a surprising one: lead-adulterated turmeric. A recent paper however found that researchers and the government appear to have driven lead out of the turmeric business in Bangladesh.
Donald Trump and Anil Ambani are both alumni of the University of Pennsylvania, whose motto "Leges sine moribus vanae" translates to English as "Laws without morals are useless". Nirav Modi is a dropout of the same Ivy League college.
While living in an internment camp in Vichy France, Alexander Grothendieck was tutored in mathematics by another prisoner, a girl named Maria. Maria taught Grothendieck, who was twelve, the definition of a circle: all the points that are equidistant from a given point. The definition impressed him with “its simplicity and clarity,” he wrote years later. When Grothendieck was forty-two years old, he abruptly left the field of mathematics. By the time he was sixty-three, his whereabouts were known by almost no one.
In November 2023, when the Houthi rebels of Yemen launched a ballistic missile flew almost 1,000 miles over the Arabian peninsula on the way to its target, the Israeli port city of Eilat, Israel used its Arrow missile-defence system to shoot it down. But this happened outside the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere, making it the first instance of ‘space warfare’.
The previous Afghan government signed a contract with a Lithuanian company called Garsu Pasaulis to produce passports. Given that the government that hired them technically no longer exists, there are now 3 million blank Afghan passports languishing in some Lithuanian warehouse, with the embassies and the Taliban arguing about to whom they belong. As a result, in Iran, Pakistan and Central Asian countries, black market Afghan passports go for up to $1,500.
A recent ‘health check’ of the river Thames as conducted by the Zoological Society of London has shown that the river is now home to three kinds of sharks: the tope, starry smooth-hound and spurdog. Apart from sharks, seahorses, eels and seals have also been found. This is great news as parts of the river was declared 'biologically dead' in 1957.
The lift produced by a Frisbee as it flies through the air is similar to the lift generated by an airplane’s wings. The perfect throw helps the disc push air downward without generating too much drag. In return, air pushes the Frisbee back up, generating additional lift. In 2005, researchers at MIT calculated the ideal throw angle for a Frisbee—12 degrees—to achieve maximum distance. (While the disc may travel greater heights with a larger angle, drag will shorten the distance traveled.)
Wagatha Christie is the popular name for a dispute between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney, the wives of two English footballers. The dispute began in 2019, when Rooney accused Vardy of leaking posts from her private Instagram account to The Sun newspaper. In 2022, the dispute escalated to the High Court of Justice in the case Vardy v Rooney, in which Vardy sued Rooney for libel. The judge ruled in favour of Rooney.
Majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century.
In 1999, when Time Magazine asked Steve Jobs his choice for the person of the century, he chose Mahatma Gandhi. The same year, Gandhi was declared the runner-up for Time magazine's 'Person of the Century' title (which eventually went to Albert Einstein.) Jobs also wore his iconic round rimmed glasses inspired by Gandhi.
It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favour: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance? The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’s death at age 56, even after doctors performed a gruesome craniotomy, looking at the folds in Beethoven’s brain and removing his ear bones in a vain attempt to understand why the revered composer lost his hearing. Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head.
2024 is the third time Paris will be hosting the Olympics. 100 years back, in 1924, Paris was the first venue to have an athletes’ village in the Olympics. Then competitors were given half a bottle of wine with both lunch and dinner every day. Eight years later, when the Games went to prohibition-era Los Angeles, the French team petitioned the authorities to turn a blind eye to their daily quart of claret.
South Korea has a unique arrangement known as ‘jeonse’ where tenants don't pay rent. Instead of paying monthly rent, a renter will make a lump-sum deposit on a rental space, at anywhere from 50% to 80% of the market value, which is then returned at the end of the lease term. The owners make profit from reinvesting the jeonse deposit, instead of receiving the monthly rent.
Climate crisis is causing more home runs in baseball, study suggests. “When you have warmer temperatures you have lower air density, and when you have lower air density you have less drag on a flying object, whether that’s a baseball or an aeroplane,” said Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth and senior author of the study published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. “On a warm day as opposed to a cool day you should expect more home runs.”
Among all Indian states or union territories, Puducherry is the only one where women voters have outnumbered men voters in all the 9 assembly elections held in the state since 1980.
Till 2021, Christchurch, New Zealand, had an official city wizard. His offensive remarks about women and the local government's new tourism strategy reportedly spelled his doom as the city parted with him after more than two decades. Ian Brackenbury Channell has been paid a total of $368,000 in this role.
In 1899, a promising young poet and would-be revolutionary dropped out of the theological seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia. He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. That was Joseph Stalin, who reportedly read 500 pages a day.
In the 1980s, Wayne Allwine was one of the actors to voice Mickey Mouse. He began a relationship with Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse. They eventually married and Disney were reluctant to publicise the union, as they have always stated that Mickey and Minnie are just good friends.
According to writer Nayantara Sahgal, Robert Oppenheimer attempted to communicate with Jawaharlal Nehru about the US government’s efforts to build a weapon ‘far more deadly than the atomic bomb’, and begged Nehru to not trade all-important thorium with the Americans in exchange for the wheat that India needed at the time. In her book Nehru: Civilizing A Savage World, Sahgal, who is Nehru’s niece, reproduced a letter that received in 1951 from her mother and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was serving at the time as India’s envoy in Moscow, Washington and London. The theoretical physicist was offered Indian citizenship by Nehru in 1954, but likely didn’t take it seriously because he was a staunch patriot.
Edison famously thought his phonograph, which he sometimes called “the talking machine,” would primarily be used to take dictation, allowing the masses to send albums of recorded letters through the postal system; that is, he thought he was disrupting mail, not music. But then later innovators, like the Pathé brothers in France and Emile Berliner in the United States, discovered a much larger audience willing to pay for musical recordings made on descendants of Edison’s original invention.
Happy New Year to you all! Here’s to more trivia hunting and discovering new stuff.
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