Humor

disastrous trivia roundup

Calamities, fiascoes, debacles: a roundup of things disastrous.

ignatius donnelly, king crank

Minnesota’s contributions to American culture include Zubaz, hotdish, and a cheeseburger where you put the cheese inside the burger. Equally deranged but less well-known is Ignatius Donnelly: crank, crackpot, charlatan, peripatetic land speculator turned politician turned PT…

a brief history of tire fires

I read once that shoulder-deep ruts were gouged into the ground at points along the Oregon trail. I doubt that’s true, but riding in a wood-wheeled wagon over bare rock was probably a good way to grind vertebrae into powder. Thank god for rubber…good old shock-absorbing…

a brief history of miniature golf

Did you know mini-golf was hugely, monstrously popular in 1930? Neither did I. A report from August 1930 listed 25,000 miniature golf courses in the US. By 2001, there were 7500. On a per capita basis, that’s eight times as many mini golf courses in 1930 as now. Mini…

corrupted trivia roundup

A roundup of frauds, flimflams, cheats, sandbags, dupes, bamboozles, deceptions, and corruption…

1. Gerrymandering is a portmanteau of Jerry Mathers, TV’s “Beaver.” After leaving acting in his teens, Mathers, a math prodigy, studied computer science at Cal…

a history of vending

“We started out some time ago with a machine for selling prophylactic goods. Maybe we ought to have been shot for that.” I. W. Schulman

Scoring a 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora in 1815 was a global disaster. On the plus…

lost trivia roundup

Pigeons of war, Ruth Buzzi, hat people, castaway depots, a gold-mining flim-flam man: a roundup of things obliquely lost…

1. The Lost Battalion was a group of 554 American soldiers who, through miscommunication, ended up entirely surrounded by German soldiers in the…

found trivia roundup

Heads, ancient cities, ideas, and ill-considered TV shows: a roundup of things found…

1. Here’s a thing that happened: after his death in 1809, composer Joseph Haydn’s head was stolen. CRANIOKLEPTY: a national scourge. Why steal his head? Well, it was 1809, and the…

timed trivia roundup

A roundup of calendars, clocks, dating conventions, missing time, and lesser-known batman villains.

1. The AD/BC convention (now BCE/CE) dates back to 525 AD. Dionysius Exiguus, a Christian monk, was responsible for the computus, or the calculation of the date of…

lepidoptera trivia roundup

A roundup of trivial things, obliquely, tangentially, and tenuously linked to butterflies…

1. Let’s talk about Maria Sibylla Merian, born in 1647 in Frankfurt. I’m wary of the biographer’s fallacy, tying someone’s adult interests to childhood events…