Trivia Day

In an effort to keep myself from doomscrolling and becoming horrifically disheartened, I odd-fact scrolled yesterday. I didn’t have physical therapy AND I’m between books—what else was I supposed to do? Honestly!

∆  What was Spock’s full name?
S'Chn T'Gai Spock

Don’t ask me to pronounce it. Vulcan wasn’t offered in my high school or college language departments and Duolingo wasn't even a fever dream then.

Additionally, in case you missed it, Spock’s home world was found in 2018.

The newfound exoplanet is 16 light-years from Earth in the Constellation Eridanus. It orbits its host star — a sunlike star with the formal designation of HD 26965 — just inside the habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form and where life as we know it could be possible. (source)

Not a wombat. Still CUUUUUTE.

∆  Wombats poop cubes (how CUUUUUTE!), and thanks to bony plates in their bottoms, they can use their butts to crush predators who invade their burrow.

∆  Turtles can breathe out of their ass. It’s true.

…when turtles hibernate, their main source of oxygen is through their butt. (source)

∆  Every "c" in Pacific Ocean is pronounce differently.

∆  I read that Carrie Underwood shook everyone’s hand at the inauguration except Kamala Harris’s. GEE, I wonder why *cough, racist pick-me, cough*

∆  The “ea” in “tea” is silent. Similarly, all the letters after the "q" in "queue" are unnecessary.

∆  A cockroach can live over a week without its head. They can also hold their breath for 40 minutes.

We should see if Trump and Musk can do this too.

∆  Octopus hearts stop beating when they swim. 

∆  Bananas are slightly radioactive. Also Brazil nuts.

∆  There's a jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii to be precise, who can live forever.

∆  Sharks are older than trees. Earliest shark fossils date back 450 million years. The earliest tree fossil? It’s from about 350 million years ago. Sharks for the win! 

∆  Will Smith was offered the role of Neo in The Matrix (yes, before Keanu Reeves) but turned it down. He’d already been in Independence Day and Men in Black and felt that was enough sci-fi for the moment. Instead he starred in Wild Wild West. 

∆  A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. It takes Venus 243 earth days to spin on its axis but only 224 days to go around the sun. Weird huh?! Venus is also hotter than Mercury despite being 23,612,000 million miles farther away from the sun.

∆  A queen bee will fly into a cloud of drones and mate with one dude bee. His wee bee dick breaks off inside her and then he dies. The next drone removes it and the whole business repeats. She mates with several drones and then lays those eggs the rest of her life, no new mating needed. Terrifically efficient, no?

∆  The little piggy that went to market wasn't going there to pick up a quart of milk and some muffins.

∆  The world’s largest beaver dam is visible from space in satellite images. It’s about half a mile long and located in Wood Buffalo National Park of Canada.

∆  One day human women will be like this. Evolution is self care.

Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males.
     ~~~
“In species where forced copulation is common, males have evolved longer penises, but females have coevolved convoluted vaginas with dead-end cul-de-sacs and spirals in the opposite direction of the male penis…This coevolution results from conflict between the sexes over who is going to control fertilization.” (source)

∆  Snails have teeth. No… really.

∆  The Appalachian Mountains are older than bones. They formed before animals walked on land.

∆  Did you know....EVERY time you yawn, a ghost sticks its dick in your mouth? This is why we cover our mouths when we yawn.

∆  The tongues of woodpeckers are long enough to wrap around their skulls. One reason—to protect their brains while they’re doing all that high-impact pecking on trees.

∆  The swimming pool on the Titanic is still full of water. Think about it.