15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, May 3, 2025
“Everyone knows,” says Ishmael in Moby Dick, “that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.” That book was written in 1851, and that line served as a useful tip for everyone not yet familiar with that definition of “cool.”We’ve had the slang term “cool” for quite a while. Other stuff changes quickly, so you need to constantly update your reserves of knowledge. For your latest update, we have some facts about crime, music and why Kansas can drive you crazy.
15 Do They Look Like They Have a Plan
The Dark Knight wasn’t eligible to win an Oscar for Best Score because too many composers worked on it. Batman Begins was ineligible for the same reason, and then the sequel’s disqualification got so much attention that the Academy lifted the rule going forward.
14 Luck of the Irish
Phillip Spiwak ran for a judicial seat in Chicago in 2010 and lost. Undeterred, he changed his name to Shannon P. O’Malley, ran again in 2018 and won.
13 Friends Don’t Dance
“The Safety Dance” from 1982 offers lyrics so inane that some people assume it has to be a metaphor for something else. “We can dance if we want to,” it says. “We can leave your friends behind.” The song was a genuine protest against dance restrictions, after the singer was kicked out of club for pogo dancing.
12 Well That Escalated
In 1992, a group of British friends imprisoned Suzanne Capper for a week and then set her on fire. The full motive for the murder is too complicated to detail here, but it has been summarized as the avenging of “trivial grievances: a sexual insult, infection with pubic lice and the loss of a pink duffel coat.”
11 Trolls: Origins
The trollface is supposed to be a fun way of representing yourself if you’re succeeding at trolling everyone. But it originated with a 2008 comic showing “what trolls want you to believe,” where the troll is the idiot in the conversation and manages to defeat no one. via Wiki CommonsNow that we think about it, this fellow doesn’t look very intelligent at all.
10 Streaming Rights
Big Mouth Billy Bass, though nowhere as popular as it once was, has been enormously lucrative for some of the artists whose songs it sings. Al Green made more money off the fish singing “Take Me to the River” than from any other recording of the song.
9 Night Shift
If you’re considering killing your spouse for the life insurance money, note that there may be consequences. After a Colorado man murdered his wife, a judge sentenced him to spend nights in jail for two years but to remain free by day. Then the judge learned the woman left an $82,000 insurance policy behind, so he raised the sentence to four years in prison, reasoning that the man could now afford not to work.
8 Too Low to Get Under
Michael Jackson’s voice deepened a bit as he became an adult, as happens to most boys. That super-high voice you heard from him was something he put on as a persona, while other times, he spoke more naturally at a lower pitch.
7 Spoiler Alert
The trailer for Terminator 2 gives away that Arnold’s robot character is a good guy this time. Seemingly, this is an example of marketing spoiling the movie because this was a big twist that the movie doesn’t reveal for a while. But James Cameron actually approved that marketing and wanted people to know that character detail before watching the movie.
6 Double Fantasy
John Lennon signed an album for Mark David Chapman just hours before the man assassinated him. In 2020, this album went up for auction and sold for $922,500. Goldin Auctions If he just left a gracious message, he would have been spared.
5 Mark Loverboy
The Social Network ends in 2007 with Mark Zuckerberg single and pining for a girl he broke up with four years earlier. In reality, he started dating a fellow student in 2003 and was still with her 2007. They’ve now been together for over 20 years and are married with three children.
4 I Want to Dance
Six years before she was ever credited for a single, Whitney Houston sang background vocals on a song called “Life's a Party” by the Michael Zager Band. It’s a disco song that somehow stretches to eight minutes long.
3 Phones Cure Mental Illness
Technology has been blamed for creating strange modern maladies. It’s also credited with solving strange modern maladies. Settlers to the Great Plains were diagnosed with prairie madness, depression resulting from isolation. Once these settlers got telephones, the madness went away.
2 Le Gueule de Bois
In France, The Hangover is known as Very Bad Trip. It doesn’t have a French title that translates as “very bad trip” — it has the English title Very Bad Trip. Comedy titles often start with “very bad,” to let you know they’re comedies.
1 Blaming the Victim
Virginia man Jay Ghorbani was sentenced to prison in 2023 for soliciting a bribe from a defendant. The strange part is that the defendant was on trial for kidnapping Ghorbani and was indeed found guilty.
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