99 Facts I Learned in 2024
Fact dump from yet another year gone by.
Last year, I did a year-end 'Wrapped' of some trivia I came across while researching for my quizzes. It was quite well-received, prompting me to do another for this year. These are not necessarily happenings from this year alone. Just like last year, I have also linked the sources for most of them for further exploring.
Happy reading!
In January 2024, a blue penguin at Wellington Airport disrupted flights for a while. In fact is the newest member of a menagerie that has infiltrated airports, including musk ox, caribou, seals and moose on Alaska airfields, alligators at Orlando’s airport, diamondback terrapins at JFK in New York, wild hares at Milan’s Linate Airport and foxes at England’s Manchester Airport. In Australia, airport employees have to shoo away perky kangaroos. In February 2023, an Air New Zealand pilot screeched to a halt after landing at Dunedin Airport to make way for a hedgehog.
Murray Sayle was a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During his long career he covered wars in Vietnam, Pakistan and the Middle East, accompanied an expedition on its climb of Mount Everest, sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean, was the first reporter to interview double agent Kim Philby after his defection to Russia, and trekked through the Bolivian jungle in search for Che Guevara. He resigned from The Sunday Times in 1972 after the newspaper refused to publish an investigative piece he wrote about the Bloody Sunday shootings of 26 unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland.
His wiki page, here.Sabiha Gökçen was a Turkish aviator. During her flight career, she flew around 8,000 hours and participated in 32 different military operations. She was the world's first female fighter pilot, aged 23. As an orphan, she was one of the nine children adopted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. After the introduction of the Surname Law, Atatürk gave her the family name Gökçen on 19 December 1934. 'Gök' means sky in Turkish and Gökçen means 'belonging or relating to the sky'. However, she was not an aviator at that time, and it was only six months later that Sabiha developed a passion for flying. The Istanbul airport is named after her.
Her wiki page, here.Terry Pratchett was once asked why he worked across six monitors; ‘Because I don’t have room for eight’ was his cheeky response.
The Monarch butterflies’ migration from Canada and the United States to Mexico and back again is considered a marvel of nature. No single butterfly lives to complete the entire journey. This means that the animals that arrive back are completely different than those that left.
In her book, "Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea," Michelle Francl argues that adding a pinch of salt to tea — not enough to taste — can make it seem less bitter, as the sodium helps "block the bitter receptors in our mouths.” Adding salt to tea is seemingly so scandalous that even the American embassy got involved. The U.S. Embassy in London issued a statement, saying that Francl's "'perfect' cup" recipe landed the embassy's relationship with the U.K. "in hot water.”
In February 2024, the ride-sharing company Lyft reported that it would improve adjusted earnings margins by 500 basis points, or 5 percentage points, compared with the previous year. Lyft stock surged in the minutes after the announcement. The shares then retreated to a gain of about 15 per cent after chief financial officer Erin Brewer said on a call with investors and analysts that the increase would in fact be 50bp, or 0.5 percentage points. The CFO said it was a typo that caused all the rally.
Tivoli Gardens in the heart of Copenhagen is one of the world’s oldest amusement parks. It was founded 180 years ago, and its creator George Carstensen secured the land by petitioning King Christian VIII, arguing, “When the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics.”
When Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish essayist, published a book analysing the French revolution, a reviewer tutted that it was too soon. (It was half a century after it.) The old saw is that the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, replied, “It’s too early to tell.”
Southern blot is a method used for detection and quantification of a specific DNA sequence in DNA samples. The method is named after the British biologist Edwin Southern, who first published it in 1975. Other blotting methods (i.e., western blot, northern blot, eastern blot, southwestern blot) that employ similar principles, but using RNA or protein, have later been named for compass directions as a sort of pun from Southern's name. As the label is eponymous, Southern is capitalized, as is conventional of proper nouns.
Wiki link, here.St. Anthony's, a primary school in the Irish city of Cork counts Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy as a past pupil. After Murphy’s Academy Award win, the school declared a no-homework day for its students.
Across all the Apollo missions, astronauts left 96 bags of human waste on the moon.
The government of Sri Lanka backs a group of 42 astrologers through their cultural affairs ministry. Astrologers possess legit political power in the country; a former president once called a snap election based on the advice of an astrologer (he lost), and over a decade ago an astrologer was arrested after forecasting that the president would be ousted by his prime minister. Whether this arrangement continues under its new leftist president remains to be seen.
Heirs to Barnum in 1970s Britain distributed a catalogue that purported to offer a range of pornographic films and sex toys. At no point did the firm stock any of the products it advertised. Instead, anyone sending an order would receive a letter of apology stating that their requested smut was out of stock, accompanied by a perfectly valid cheque for a full refund. Unfortunately, the refund cheque was to be drawn on the account of, say, ‘XXX Adult Films and Services Ltd’. Since most recipients were too embarrassed to pay this cheque into their bank, the firm legally made a fortune selling nothing.
Frans de Waal passed away in March 2024. Among his smaller accomplishments was winning an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012, with colleague Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
On March 26, 2024, the main spans of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed after the Singapore-registered container ship MV Dali lost power and collided with it. On 5 January 2015, Dali and her sister ship Cezanne were named for painters Salvador Dalí and Paul Cézanne.
Lebanon has not conducted a census since 1932. I had shared a corollary fact on Lebanon’s administrative arrangement last year. (Check #5).
Pollo Campero is privately held Guatemalan chicken chain. They mapped how workers were moving around stores and revamped its restaurant design to allow people to work more efficiently. It slashed the number of steps taken by the staff member who ensures orders are delivered promptly and accurately from about 18,000 per shift – or about 3.4 miles – to about 9,500.
Are you a morning person? Chances are you are a neanderthal descendant.
A new poll from YouGov found that 70 percent of adults who made a New Year’s resolution said they have mostly or entirely stuck to them, with just 20 percent conceding that they have mostly or entirely given up on them. This stands against the perception that most people have, with 54 percent of respondents saying they assume that people have mostly or entirely given up on their resolution.
A sperm whale that washed up on the Spanish coast had an entire green- house in its belly: the flattened structure, together with the tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and spray cannister it had contained. The greenhouse was from an Andalusian hydroponics business, used to grow tomatoes for export to colder climes.
Carrying cell phones is strictly banned in Augusta Masters. It applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament in 2019, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.
On the heels of the Maldivian presidential election in the Maldives in September 2013, police investigated an entity accused of rigging the entire thing. They didn’t question a disgruntled campaign manager, though, or place a mole in a hacker collective. Instead, authorities took a coconut into custody. Its crime? Possible involvement in a black magic ritual with electoral consequences.
The dictator-controlled autonomous region of Chechnya has banned any music that is slower than 80 beats per minute or more than 116 beats per minute, as well as music that does not “conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm.”
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority runs on 5.25-inch floppy disks, which a few decades ago was deeply impressive and made it the bleeding edge of transportation software management in the world. Now it just makes it a bit of a dinosaur, as floppies remain essential for the Automatic Train Control System and despite efforts to move beyond them, completion of the ATCS overhaul isn’t expected until 2029 to 2030.
The Lucy Stone League is a women's rights organization founded in 1921. Its motto is "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.” It was the first group to fight for women to be allowed to keep their maiden name after marriage—and to use it legally. The group took its name from Lucy Stone (1818–1893), the first married woman in the United States to carry her birth name through life (she married in 1855). Ruth Hale, the president of the Lucy Stone League, also founded the Cross Word Puzzle League of America in 1924 and established bylaws that still characterize the game: interlocking, symmetry, and accessible words.
Talking of crosswords, the crossword puzzle became an object of cultural hysteria. Newspapers and magazines from the nineteen-twenties and thirties warned of a “crossword craze” gripping the country’s minds. Hotels considered placing a dictionary next to the Bible in every room; telephone companies tracked increased usage, as solvers phoned friends when stuck on a particularly inscrutable clue; baseball teams feared that America’s pastime would be usurped, the grid to replace the diamond. The passion for crosswords was described as an “epidemic,” a “virulent plague,” and a “national menace.”
Effective May 7, 2024 onwards, Milan had banned the sale of takeaway drinks and food, including pizza and ice cream, after midnight in ongoing efforts to clamp down on nighttime revellers sowing havoc on the streets of Italy’s financial capital. However, facing backlash from residents, the authorities have put this plan on hold.
The Aichi prefectural government has issued an official apology for improper handling of the personal data of 121 resident households. The data was neither leaked by an unscrupulous worker nor stolen by hackers. Instead it was taken by the wind. The Aichi government’s blunder was even more old-school, however, as it was carrying out its data transfer by physically transporting 1,696 pieces of paper, placed inside a cardboard box. What’s more, they upped the degree of difficulty by opting to transport the box in a handcart and having someone walk it over, out on the streets, to its destination, instead of driving it over. Oh, and they decided to do this on a day with strong winds.
There was the time, for example, when the Tokyo police department lost citizens’ data that they’d stored on floppy discs, or that other time when a city employee in Hyogo Prefecture got drunk, passed out, and lost a USB memory stick with residents’ personal information on it.Talking of Japan, a new trend about Onigiri rice balls grabbed headlines. Girls exercise to produce sweat, and use their armpits instead of their palms to knead and shape the rice balls.
The German cockroach, the most prevalent indoor pest in the world, evolved from the Asian cockroach, somewhere in India or Myanmar around 2,100 years ago. Some Asian cockroaches lived near human settlements or plantations, and they probably switched to eating crops planted by humans. Then, because human dwellings had similar food sources, they moved indoors and eventually became household pests. The insects moved westward in two waves. They first hitched rides in soldiers’ bread baskets to the Middle East 1,200 years ago — much earlier than previously thought. They reached Europe, where they would get their name, only 270 years ago, probably aboard European colonial ships.
Cold beet soup is a culinary staple in Latvia and Lithuania and across Eastern Europe. In 2024, Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, hosted its “Pink Soup Festival” celebrating the dish. But the city’s tourism agency also started a public beef with Latvia, claiming that the Lithuanian version of the soup is better.
chess.com bans about 90,000 players a month for cheating.
In May 2024, on the 50th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube, Mitsubishi Electric’s TOKUFASTbot set a new Guinness World Record by solving a 3x3 puzzle in just 0.305 seconds — the time it takes a human eye to blink.
In August 2024, French actor Alain Delon passed away at the age of 88. In a very weird request, he had asked for his pet dog Loubo, a 10-year-old Belgian malinois, to be humanely killed and laid in his grave. However, following protests from animal rights activists, Delon’s daughter Anouchka confirmed the dog would not be killed and would stay within the family. Delon has been a famous dog person, owning over 50 dogs. At least 35 of Delon's dogs have been buried in a chapel in a cemetery that the actor created in the grounds of his home, La Brûlerie.
People have used breast milk for reasons other than feeding babies for a very long time. In the first century, Pliny the Elder recommended it for fever, gout and healing from poisonous beetles. In 17th- and 18th-century England and America, breast milk was prescribed for ailments ranging from consumption to blindness. Here’s looking at you, Homelander.
The Catholic Church canonized its first-ever gamer saint. Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager, the first millennial saint of the Catholic Church, died from leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15. Alongside other hobbies and interests, Acutis apparently enjoyed video games and was known to play Halo, Mario, and Pokemon. Acutis was adept with technology, and has been referred to as "God's influencer" due to his work documenting various Catholic miracles on a website he designed.
Since its launch in 1990, there have been 46,000 scientific papers written with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, papers cited over 900,000 times, and it’s still kicking, as in 2023 alone its data fuelled 1,435 scientific papers.
In Danish, the term for Danish pastry is wienerbrød (or wienerbröd), meaning "Viennese bread”. In Vienna, the Danish pastry is called Kopenhagener Plunder, referring to Copenhagen, or Dänischer Plunder.
The National Dog Show airs directly after Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade — for the 22nd year in a row in 2024. At the time, NBC had been filling that slot with reruns of It's a Wonderful Life, but the network noticed it wasn't holding viewers' attention. Executives let Miller try it out for a single year in 2002 — and the ratings were so high that it's aired every year since, even keeping the same co-hosts: Seinfeld actor John O'Hurley and presenter David Frei.
Russia has fined Google for not reinstating Russian TV channels that were blocked on YouTube, an absurd amount of money. We’re talking about $20 decillion US dollars. That’s a two followed by 34 zeros, or $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of money. In fact, it’s more than the GDP of the entire planet for a millennium.
A new viral trend called “splitting the G” has prompted a surge in interest in drinking Guinness among younger drinkers, with the objective of quaffing the exact amount of beer so as to reduce the level of beer in a cup down to the level where the meniscus aligns with the horizontal line in the letter “G” on a branded pint glass.
The oldest known wild bird in the world is Wisdom, a 74-year-old Laysan albatross who was first banded in 1956 and was spotted in December 2024 at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. She laid what was probably her 60th egg. This large seabird is named for Laysan, one of its breeding colonies in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
Considered to be the founder of the feminist movement in Spain, Concepción Arenal was the first woman to attend university in her country. She took courses at the law school disguised as a man, her chest flattened by a double corset.
In 1950, the U.S. State Department fired 91 employees because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual. In the next two years, nearly 200 more state employees were dismissed for the same reason. The man who oversaw the purge was Undersecretary of State James E. Webb. Later, as administrator of NASA, Webb enlisted the assistance of Wernher von Braun (who, because of his services to Nazi Germany, could be termed a war criminal) to help put Americans on the moon.
Research shows parts of the brain from those that deal with regular words are different in case of swearing. People who suffer from Tourette’s syndrome, in which some have swearing tics, suggest that swearing is associated with the basal ganglia, a deeper lying brain structure.
2024 has seen South Korea operate on a different plane. On one hand, the President announced martial law for barely six hours. On the other hand, the Seoul Metropolitan Government hosted a mass blind date event, resulting in 27 new couples.
Le Figaro was founded as a satirical weekly in 1826, taking its name and motto from Le Mariage de Figaro, the 1778 play by Pierre Beaumarchais that poked fun at privilege. Its motto, from Figaro's monologue in the play's final act, is "Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est point d'éloge flatteur" ("Without the freedom to criticise, there is no true praise”).
Halfway is a city in Baker County, Oregon. The city took its name from the location of its post office, on the Alexander Stalker ranch, halfway between Pine and Jim Town. The population was 288 at the 2010 census. During the dot-com boom, Halfway agreed to rename itself Half.com for a year as a publicity stunt for the e-commerce company of the same name.
When a young, ambitious critic named John Leonard was appointed editor of the NYT Book Review, he sought to inject the supplement with new energy, bringing in the upstart generation of intellectuals, novelists, historians, journalists, and poets who wrote for the Book Review’s competitors. Leonard published Neil Sheehan’s nearly 8,000-word essay on the Vietnam War, a landmark piece that helped persuade Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers. He also pushed for gender parity at the Book Review and commissioned articles from Black luminaries like June Jordan and Alice Walker.
According to historians, the Olmecs initially noticed that the cocoa fruit was edible after witnessing rats consuming it. Undoubtedly, the Olmecs (1500–400 BC) were the first humans to eat chocolate, at first as a beverage.
In the game of Darts, Bed and Breakfast or just Breakfast means a score of 26 points by hitting a single 20, a single 5, and a single 1 in a single round. It is believed 26 is called breakfast because breakfast used to cost 26 pence.
The American Institute of Wine Economics has found that the safest way to guarantee enjoyment of wine is simply to tell the drinker that it cost a lot of money.
Benjamin Netanyahu might be among the most notorious war criminals alive but his reputation in international tours precedes himself. According to some White House staff, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu take their dirty laundry on state visits, to be laundered at another country’s expense.
A young police officer in charge of his mental and psychological well-being handed Adolf Eichmann a copy of Lolita for relaxation. After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant. “Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch”, he told his guard, “Quite an unwholesome book”.
The colourful detail that Nero played the lyre—or “fiddled”—while Rome burned is a piece of nonsense propagated by, among others, a writer called Cassius Dio, who died in 235 AD; it has never been given much weight by modern historians.
Wildfires in Italy are directly proportional to Mafia presence. Sicily has more than 8,000 wildfires every year. These wildfires have burned more than 120,000 acres of vegetation and forced thousands of people to evacuate from their homes.
Happywhale is a citizen science platform that uses a photo identification program to identify whale flukes that was modified from a software designed for facial recognition in human beings. Through the Happywhale fluke identification program, a team of researchers identified a single humpback whale who made the impressive journey from Colombia to breeding grounds near Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, a minimum 13,000-kilometer journey that smashed the previous known record for a humpback of 10,000 kilometers.
My favourite animal story from this year, however, is about Boris and Svetlaya, two orphaned Amur tiger cubs released into the wild in 2014 in a remote corner of Russia’s far-east. More than a year later, Boris walked over 180 kms, almost in a straight line, to where Svetlaya had made a home. Six months later, Svetlaya gave birth to a litter of cubs.
Just as Smith is the most common surname in the English-speaking world, Persaud (an altered form of the Indian surname Prasad) comes out on top in Guyana, where 40% of the population has Indian heritage.
Researchers at Harvard University have developed a small device that will also allow blind or visually impaired people to experience solar eclipse by listening. The device, called Lightsound, receives light from the sun as an input and converts its intensity into musical tones.
In 2021, the BBC's coverage of the death of Prince Philip drew almost 110,000 complaints from the public, making it the most complained-about piece of television programming ever in the U.K
Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels liked flowers and landscaping and in high school was president of the Botanical Garden Club. Yet this ‘gardener’ changed aviation and in extension, our world. In the 1950s, he showed that cockpits had been designed for a mythical “average” pilot. Not a single pilot in a group of 4063 met the criteria of this supposed average.
The famous American journalist H.L. Mencken once referred to the Martini as “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”
In 2015, Nigel Richards won the francophone world championships in Scrabble without being able to speak or understand French. He reportedly memorised the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks. In 2024, he won the Spanish World Scrabble Championships, without speaking Spanish.
Toni George owns The Scratcher Girls spa in Miami. She tours the country a couple of times a year, making stops in Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. She’s planning a European tour in 2025 and might even take her nails further. The service she provides is usually done by kitchen utensils or one’s partner: scratching the back (quite literally). She charges north of $100 per hour from clients. 8500 Indian rupees to get your back scratched!
95% of Londoners live within 400 meters of a bus stop.
Molly House was the name given to the underground salons and pubs where queer men could meet in relative privacy in London’s 18th-century nightlife. This setting inspired Cole Wehrle to design a tabletop game. To win, players will need to accumulate as much “joy” as possible, which is counterbalanced by the ever-present threat of “guilt,” two vectors that defined queer identity through much of antiquity.
Just 300 travellers were admitted into Bhutan in 1974, the year in which the country opened up to the world for tourism.
The oldest bond in the world turned 400 in December 2024. A flood in the Netherlands in 1624 necessitated raising 23,000 Carolus guilders in order to finance repairs to the local dike system, and one of the bonds sold to raise that money was a 1,200-guilder bond sold on December 10, 1624, to a wealthy woman in Amsterdam, a bond that promised the water board would pay out 2.5 percent interest in perpetuity to the bondholder. The current owner collected £299.42 of owed interest.
There are at least two Palestines in the US. It is said that French explorer Jean Lamotte first gazed upon a region in Illinois in 1678 and gave it the name Palestine, as it reminded him of Palestine (Really? How?). Palestine, Texas was named after Palestine, Illinois, as suggested by Micham Main and or Daniel Parker, a minister of Pilgrim Church who had migrated with the Main family and numerous other settlers from that town.
Sony’s first product was an electric rice cooker. The rice needed for the development of the electric rice cooker was procured by Shozaburo Tachikawa on the black market. Tachikawa was a distant relative of Masaru Ibuka's, and as a child, Ibuka used to visit the Tachikawa family, who operated a marine products wholesaler in Hakodate, Hokkaido. Whenever Ibuka visited Tachikawa, the whole family would make such a big fuss, saying,"Masaru is here,"and they would hide their clocks and other such items so as to prevent Ibuka from tinkering with them.
Operation Acoustic Kitty was a $20 million project by the CIA where they were rigging up a cat with cameras and microphones to spy on the Soviet Union during the 1960s. The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.
Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus (ca. 450 BCE) received a prophecy that he would die by something falling on his head. He spent the rest of his life outside in open fields. According to Valerius Maximus, he was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle which had mistaken his head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell.
In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979, George Harrison described himself as “just a gardener.” His strong association with gardening was further illustrated in his 1980 autobiography, I Me Mine (also the title of a Beatles' song he wrote), dedicated “to gardeners everywhere.”
Alan Blinder's 1974 paper, "The Economics of Brushing Teeth," was a satirical piece published in the Journal of Political Economy. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it returned, “Blinder's goal was to critique simplistic econometric analyses, suggesting that observed correlations can often be misleading or spurious without proper theoretical grounding.” Among the author’s observations was people who earned less, brushed more. The paper is full of tooth-related puns. The acknowledgment section reads: “I wish to thank my dentist for filling in some important gaps in the analysis.”
Artists apply dry pigments to wet plaster to create a fresco, and a good fresco can last for centuries. Over time, though, the decorative plaster layers can separate from the underlying masonry, introducing air gaps. Traditionally, gently knocking on the plaster with knuckles or small mallets and listening to the resulting sounds were used to determine where delamination has occurred. A new research is using laser Doppler vibrometry to pinpoint delaminated areas. It's a non-invasive method that zaps the frescoes with sound waves and measures the vibrational signatures that reflect back to learn about the structural conditions.
A full-colour version of Citizen Kane was nearly a reality in 1989. In late 1988, a team at Color Systems Technology Inc. in Marina del Rey, California, secretly colorised a portion of Orson Welles' landmark black and white film. CST was formed in 1983 to convert black-and-white films and television shows into colour to attract a wider, younger audience. Among its clients was cable TV mogul Ted Turner. The furore was short-lived, as Turner backed down on February 14, 1989 after a review of Welles' 50-year-old contract with RKO Pictures revealed he had been given absolute artistic control over his first Hollywood film, which it specified would be a black-and-white picture.
Ittoqqortoormiit (pronounced: it-ockor-tormit) is a 370-person village of colourfully painted homes sandwiched between the world's largest national park to the north and the largest fjord system in the world to the south. There are no roads to Ittoqqortoormiit; the only way to get there is by helicopter, boat (in the summer), snowmobile or one of two weekly flights to Nerlerit Inaat airport, roughly 40km away: one from Iceland, and the other from West Greenland.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a prominent eugenicist, as was Marie Stopes, her British counterpart, who gave her name to Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the world’s foremost providers of abortion services to this day. So great was Stopes’s eugenics fervour that in 1947 she forbade her son from marrying a beautiful heiress because the woman was short-sighted. After he went ahead anyway, Stopes cut him out of her will.
Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to travel 80 kilometers every week from the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago, where he taught a course attended by only two students. When asked why he spent his time this way, the professor replied that they were very good students. In 1957, Lee Tsung-Dao and Yang Chen-Ning were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The course taught by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar became the only course in history where all its attendees received a Nobel Prize.
In Korean cuisine, Army Stew is a hodgepodge stew of sausages, Spam, American cheese, instant noodles, tteok, and assorted vegetables dating back to the aftermath of the Korean War. Because meat was scarce, cooks found creative replacements in the surplus foods from the American army base stationed in Seoul, hence the stew’s name.
“Seinfeld” ran for nine seasons. The finale was so highly anticipated and conceived with such secrecy that, on the night of the taping, Seinfeld came out to greet the studio audience and said, “Well, aren’t you all hot shit? And don’t tell me you haven’t been working it. You’re at the Kennedy assassination, and you’ve got your seats on the grassy knoll.” More than seventy-six million people watched. On the night of the “Seinfeld” finale, Frank Sinatra, who was eighty-two, had a heart attack. It took only four minutes for the ambulance to get to his house in L.A.
Trains crossing between Mongolia and China need to have their wheels changed at the town of Erlian. That's because railway tracks in China are narrower than in Mongolia. It takes several hours to perform this monumental operation and passengers must remain on board throughout.
The myth that cigars are rolled on the thighs of virgins stems from the fact that once the tobacco arrives at the factories, i.e., before it is processed, a group of women sorts the tobacco leaves by size, color, and texture. It got its start in the 1940’s when a reporter visiting Cuba noticed some beautiful women sorting and grading the tobacco leaves while the piles were on their laps. That reporter ‘spun’ the idea that the cigars were rolled on their thighs.
An example of alternative ivories is Digory, a resin made of calcium phosphate particles. Another one that’s promising is tagua, or vegetable ivory, derived from the Phytelephas tree, which is literally Greek for “plant elephant.” After 15 years of growth, it produces 16 to 18 seed pods per year, each containing 120 nuts, which can then be used to create more vegetable ivory annually than an elephant can in a lifetime.
King Charles III’s former butler stirred up a storm in a teacup by saying that the most elegant way to drink tea would be with one’s pinky finger tucked in. There are many theories about how sticking out one’s little finger while sipping tea originated. Some claim that those with venereal diseases used the gesture to find mates with similar infections at public gatherings; others say that it is a legacy of the original Chinese teacups, which came without handles and were thus held between the first three fingers only to avoid burning all of one’s digits. Indians, however, have solved this dilemma by pouring out the piping hot tea on a dish and slurping from it.
In the 1960s, Peru was responsible for 80 percent of the fish meal fed to farm animals in the Netherlands, a testament to the country’s global export market for cheap fish. The Peruvian anchoveta catch would rise to 12 million tonnes by 1971, but then following a 1972 El Niño, the overfished population crashed, and prices shot up 250 percent, sparking an economic crisis that rippled across the country.
In 1892, while the art community of Chicago was preparing for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, chief architect Daniel Burnham expressed concern to Lorado Taft (distant relative of POTUS William Howard Taft) that the sculptural adornments to the buildings might not be finished on time. Taft asked if he could employ some of his female students as assistants (it was not socially accepted for women to work as sculptors at that time) for the Horticultural Building. Burnham responded, "Hire anyone, even white rabbits, if they'll do the work." From that arose a group of talented women sculptors known as "the White Rabbits", which included Enid Yandell, Carol Brooks MacNeil, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Janet Scudder, Julia Bracken, and Ellen Rankin Copp.
When P. S. Gerbrandy, Prime Minister of the Dutch government-in-exile, whose English upon his arrival in London left a little to be desired, first met Churchill, he extended his hand and engaged with the greeting “Goodbye.” Churchill’s reply was all we could expect: “Sir, I would wish that all political meetings were so short and sweet.”
Every year, Disney selects just one of its songs from its animated musicals to be eligible for consideration for Best Original Song at the Oscars. The fear is that multiple songs from a single film might compete against one another and split the vote.
The Vishnu Basement Rocks is the name recommended for all Early Proterozoic crystalline rocks (metamorphic and igneous) exposed in the Grand Canyon region. It was named after a natural rock structure in the Colorado River valley which was named "Temple of Vishnu" from its appearance. The Granite Gorge Metamorphic Suite consists of lithologic units, the Brahma, Rama, and Vishnu schists, that have been mapped within the Upper, Middle, and Lower Granite Gorges of the Grand Canyon.
Charles W. Howard first played Santa Claus in a school play when he was in fourth grade. It was a role he never shook: He would go on to appear as Saint Nicholas at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade for nearly two decades, between 1948 and 1965, and worked as a “Santa consultant” for the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street. Today, the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School is the longest continuously-operating Santa school in the world.
Pavel Durov, the entrepreneur behind Telegram, claims he has fathered over 100 children in 12 countries. Relax. This is through sperm donations he had made over the past 15 years.
W.H. Auden “was lazy, brilliant, gluttonous, disdainful of hygiene, contemptuous of authority, always delighting in rudeness and dirty jokes. He refused to wear underpants.” The last bit makes him the Cosmo Kramer of the era.
St. Lucia, the country named after a woman, got her first ever Olympic medal in 2024, aptly, a woman, that too the fastest on Earth. The government subsequently declared 27 September 2024 as "Julien Alfred Day”
John Keats once light-heartedly accused Isaac Newton about how he diminished the beauty of a rainbow by breaking down to its constituent colours and thus reduced its wonder. This is the origin of the title of the 1998 book “Unweaving the Rainbow” by Richard Dawkins.
Manal al-Sharif is a women’s rights activist from Saudi Arabia, where she challenges the social and legal rules that suppress women. In 2011, she posted a video where she was driving a car, which was illegal in her country. She was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of “driving while female”. In 2017, she published a memoir – Daring to Drive – about her experiences standing up for her rights. Even though Saudi Arabia has now allowed women to drive, al-Sharif is still in a self-imposed exile in Australia.
Bhagat Singh was one of the longest-running mayors of Manila. Well, not quite! Ramon D Bagatsing – Philippines national hero of World War II who also held several portfolios as cabinet minister. He was the son of Mataram Singh Banga, who, influenced by Bhagat Singh, had established the Manila chapter of the Ghadar Party. Ramon Bagatsing, the Philippines ambassador to New Delhi, is the grandson of Mataram Singh Banga from Punjab. Ramon D Bagatsing’s son, Ramon Bagatsing Jr. was the Ambassador of the Philippines to India and Nepal from 2019 to 2022.
Happy New Year to you all! Here’s to more trivia hunting and discovering new stuff.
P.S.- Last year, when this reached your mailboxes, a couple of readers replied thinking this is a paid substack. This is not. I want it to be free for all. They asked me to make it optional, which somehow felt very complex to me. However, in case you still want to buy me a coffee, this is my QR.