Trivia Proofing

A meticulous researching of 2̶,̶2̶0̶1̶ 1,875 facts. Click for a random fact.

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the record is 31ft9.5 inches held by Jeff "The Faucet man" Barber set in Raleigh Mississippi

I’m sorry, I don’t know what record this is for.

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Not really planning on continuing this blog.

If someone sends in something, I might post it. But otherwise, this blog is only sticking around for posterity.

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Random facts about cities in Florida:

* The Wikipedia pages that list demographics for really TINY towns are hilarious because you can pretty much suss out who exactly lives there. For example, Marineland, FL? There were 6 people living there in 2000. 1 household had a couple plus their two kids. The other two households in the town were individuals, one of which was older than 65 and the other was aged between 45 and 65.

* Bell, FL, has a population of 456 yet its middle/high school has 750 students.

* Wewahitchka, FL, takes its name from a Native American word meaning “water eyes,” since two lakes on the edge of town look like eyes.

* Bristol, FL, is claimed to be the site of the Garden of Eden.

* Ocean Breeze, FL, and Briny Breezes are the only two towns in Florida where all residents live in a mobile home park with the same name as the town.

* Golf, FL, was founded by people from Golf, IL. It was originally a planned community on a golf course.

* Frostproof, FL, was so named as a marketing ploy to convince potential landowners. However, a few years after the town was established, a frost killed most of the citrus in the area.

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More facts about towns in Texas (plus one in Louisiana)

* Colonel William G. Butler blamed the city of Helena for his son’s death in 1884. He shouted, “All right! For that, I’ll kill the town that killed my son!” He arranged for a local railway to bypass Helena. The train would pass seven miles away from Helena. Later, the county seat moved to Karnes City and Helena became a ghost town.

* In the early 1900s, Kenedy, TX, had a reputation for gunfighting, to the extent it was nicknamed “Six Shooter Junction.”

* In the 1870s, there was a community called Baby Head in Llano County, TX. The local legend went that a small girl had been killed by Native Americans and her remains were left on a local mountain. The mountain was then called “Baby Head Mountain.” The community no longer exists today.

* In a small Texas town circa 1912, there was a huge dispute. What happened? Did people want a different design for the church’s new steeple? Did people want a different preacher? Were church members fighting over land? We’ll never know. No matter what happened, a little boy at the scene said, “I’m going to cut around the corner and shoot through the bushes in a minute!” The town became Cut and Shoot. 

* The “Cheeseburger Capital” of Texas has only three places in the town that sell cheeseburgers, other than its annual festival.

* In 1890, a man named George Nickel set up the first post office in the area in his dugout. The neighbors let George name the office, so he decided on Shamrock, since his Irish mother always said those brought luck. Then George’s dugout mysteriously burned down and he never got to open his post office. Guess he didn’t have that much luck after all!

* The singer Roy Orbison used to live in Wink, TX, as a child. Later, he described it as  "football, oil fields, oil, grease and sand." He said it was home at one point and also said he was happy to leave at another point.

* There’s a town in Louisiana called Slaughter.

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#1441: “In the nineteenth century, flypaper, hat linings, playing cards, paper collars, Christmas tree candles, wallpaper dyes, and wreaths of artificial flowers all contained lethal amounts of arsenic and all caused countless cases of accidental poisoning.”

True.

Flypaper was well-known for its arsenic, to the point where a nineteenth-century British woman used it to attempt to kill her husband.

Men had an eczema-like rash show up on their foreheads because their hat bands had arsenic in them. For paper collars, attached to shirts, arsenic made them look shiny.

Arsenic was used to color things green. A woman’s fingertips were painfully sore after playing so often with green-backed playing cards. A set of green candles, intended for Christmas trees, had arsenic in them. After a servant burned some wallpaper (presumably with some green tint) that had arsenic in it, she fell ill from arsenic poisoning due to her breathing in the fumes. Artificial flowers also had arsenic in them to dye them green.

Source:

Wood, E. S. (1885). Arsenic as a Domestic Poison. Boston: Wright & Potter Publishing Company. (accessed via Google Books)

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#1427: “In late-nineteenth-century France there was an individual known as "l'homme prote," or the "protean man." He had exceptional control over all his muscles and could protrude or distort any part of himself at will. He could harden the muscles of his stomach so that if hit with a hammer they would not recoil. He could distend his abdomen to create the appearance of enormous obesity or draw it in until he looked like a living skeleton. According to Quatrefages, a celebrated French physician of the time, l'homme prote could shut off all the blood from the right side of his body and control the beating of his heart, feats he credited to his great muscular control.”

Some inaccurate. True.

Quatrefages, described as a scientist in the original text, was actually a physician.

I did some digging and discovered that this protean man’s name was Simeon Aiguier. He was from Provençal and indeed had great muscle control. At one point he had a stage show where he would hang himself and appear to be dead, before coming alive for the audience. He died for real in 1907.

Here’s a trading card picture of him:

Source:

Gould, G. M., & Pyle, W. L. (1896). Anomalies and curiosities of medicine. New York City: The Julian Press.

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#1430: “In the late nineteenth century doctors discovered a Mexican porter named Paul Rodrigues who had a horn more than 4 inches long protruding from the upper part of his forehead. The horn was divided into three principal shafts and had a circumference of about 14 inches. Rodrigues wore a special pointed cap to hide it. This case was by no means unique. Sir W. J. Erasmus Wilson, a nineteenth-century English dermatologist, recorded ninety cases of human horns: forty-four females and forty-six males. Of these ninety cases, the majority of the horns were situated on the head. A few, however, grew from the face (several on the nose), some from the thighs, back, and foot, and one from the penis.”

True. Some inaccurate.

Apparently poor Rodrigues’ horn wasn’t discovered until the day a sugar barrel hit his head, knocking him unconscious. When his co-workers took off the bandana or hat he wore, they saw three horny growths coming from his head, the back shaft having been knocked off by the fall to the ground.

Most of Wilson’s cases were indeed on the head, but there were actually five cases of horns growing from the penis. Nine cases of horns were also recorded growing from the torso. He also only recorded thirty-nine males, sex not recorded for the rest.

Source:

Gould, G. M., & Pyle, W. L. (1896). Anomalies and curiosities of medicine. New York City: The Julian Press.

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#1344: “It was the style among eighteenth-century Englishmen to wear pantaloons so tight they had to be hung on special pegs that held them open, allowing the wearer to jump down into them. This was the only way fashionable gentlemen could get their trousers to fit properly.”

False.

Two different sources both say that pantaloons were looser at the top and tight from the knee down. The latter source explains that it was looser in the seat to allow for men to sit down easily, but even then, pantaloons were made of a semi-elastic material.

Perhaps this is exaggeration from that time? I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case- here’s a caricature of the day showing a fat man in tight pantaloons:

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#1307: “A condition known as hypertrophy (enlargement) of the tongue can sometimes reach such extremes that the tongue becomes too large for the mouth and protrudes over the chin, reaching down as far as the chest. This extraordinary enlargement may cause deformity of the teeth and jaw, and may even cause the sufferer to choke on his or her own tongue.”

Inaccurate.

Hypertrophy of the tongue is better known as macroglossia. In Curiosities and Anomalies of Medicine, one case of macroglossia resulted in death. One doctor treated macroglossia by tying off two crucial blood vessels, and the tongue was reduced to almost normal size. That was a very risky operation. Today, most doctors use the wedge-shaped excision, meaning they cut out a chunk of your too-large tongue and then sew it up.

People with macroglossia have trouble speaking, eating and sleeping. Here’s an illustration of a girl with an extreme (and very rare) case of macroglossia (said to reach to her sternum):

Source:

Gould, G. M., & Pyle, W. L. (1896). Anomalies and curiosities of medicine. New York City: The Julian Press.

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#686: “During the American revolution, inflation was so great that the price of corn rose 10,000 percent, the price of wheat 14,000 percent, the price of flour 15,000 percent, and the price of beef 33,000 percent.”

Plausible.

I found this article that talks about inflation during the Revolution. At the worst, the paper-to-specie (paper currency to hard currency) ratio was 146:1. At best, the ratio was 1 to 1. So at the best, a dollar in paper was worth a dollar in silver or gold, and at the worst, it took $146 in paper currency to equal a dollar in silver or gold.

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#1395: “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams were all avid collectors and players of marbles. In their day, marbles were called "small bowls" and were as popular with adults as with children.”

False.

People played various games and sports during the American Revolution, including soccer, cricket and baseball, but they never played “small bowls” or marbles. The game of small bowls doesn’t seem to exist either. I found references to the game of bowls, but none about small bowls.

Furthermore, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, released an article saying there is no evidence Jefferson played marbles. So it’s safe to assume the other two didn’t as well.

And that’s it for the category Games & Hobbies!

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#307: “Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew Canabis sativa (marijuana) on their plantations.”

Technically true.

Yes, two of our first presidents did grow pot. But to them, it wasn’t pot. It was hemp.

The Straight Dope discusses this factoid. In eighteenth-century Virginia, since tobacco could be a difficult cash crop to work with, hemp was an alternative. Hemp had many uses back then: it could be used for clothes, rope and paper. Washington and Jefferson were both farmers so they tried growing hemp to make a profit, but they didn’t really succeed. It’s also doubtful that they smoked pot.

In 1937, Congress had some hearings on the nationwide prohibition of marijuana. Some people from a few different industries (birdseed, rope and paint) showed up to defend why hemp or marijuana shouldn’t be prohibited. The representative for the rope industry said that up until 1820 or so, America produced hemp to make its own rope. Then after that, it got cheaper to import it from Asia, so we stopped making it here. This led to our having to make hemp again in World War II when we couldn’t get our rope from Asia anymore.

And that’s it for the Drugs category! I hope you enjoyed it since it’s the last time it’ll show up.

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Random facts about cities in Texas:

* Gail, TX, is named for the inventor of condensed milk.

* Ding Dong, TX, was named after two brothers (named Bell) hired an artist to paint a mural for their store. Under a picture of two bells, the artist painted the brothers’ initials, then “Ding” and “Dong” under each of the bells.

* Groom, TX, inexplicably has a huge cross.

* There’s an unincorporated community in Texas called Tubbs Corner.

* Pecan Gap, TX, was named for the gap between two pecan trees. But the second tree was destroyed by a tornado in 1963.

* It’s a modern Truth or Consequences, NM, only in Texas! In exchange for renaming their town DISH, the residents got free cable for ten years plus a free DVR. 

* Ponder, TX, according to local legend, had a bank that was the target of an attempted robbing by Bonnie and Clyde. However, the bank had gone broke the week before.

* Before being renamed, Alanreed, TX, was once named Gouge Eye in honor of a memorable saloon brawl.

* Emily Rose Morgan, the Yellow Rose of Texas, was so called because she was mixed race and “high yellow.” A few cities in Texas are named in her honor.

* There’s a city named Uncertain in Texas.

* Carl’s Corner, TX, was founded for the sole purpose of providing alcohol in an otherwise dry county.

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Interested in a challenge?

I know this blog is now over, but along the way, I ran into some factoids that my research turned up absolutely nothing on. I marked those “difficult to determine” because I couldn’t find enough information to determine whether or not those factoids were true or false. I suspect the vast majority of them are false.

But if you’d like to exercise your research muscle, you can check those particular facts out and try to dig up more information than I did! If you find anything, you can submit your research to this blog and I’ll edit the factoid with your update if everything checks out.

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marry me!

Aww, thank you for the offer! But how can I marry you if I don’t know who you are?

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The end. Thank you all for reading.

Well. This is it. The end.

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I decided I wanted something that would improve my research skills and prove to people that I could carry out and complete a long-term project. And this has been very long-term- starting in June of 2011 (technically- the blog really took off that September) and completing five years later. So I’ve spent quite a while working on this thing. At first, it was hard to keep up. I often got behind on entries because I was also keeping up with upperclassman and honors classes.

Eventually, I built up enough of a buffer that I could relax. I remember sitting on the couch with my laptop, patiently uploading two hundred entries at a time. I got far enough into entries that I wrote some up to a year before they were published. I’m currently writing this entry on December 3, 2015, but it will be the summer of 2016 before it’s published. I worked in libraries for over two years, and I now have a job working with research. This blog legitimately helped me get at least two of the jobs on my current resume. I started this blog in a college in Washington, DC, and now I’m completing it in a library in the greater Denver area, Colorado. I’ve come a long, long way.

I’ve definitely learned a lot from this project. I’ve learned to communicate with people in various methods and be patient when someone doesn’t quite get my question. Yeah, this project has baffled a few people. I had this asshole in New York refuse to help me on one factoid but I managed to find other sources, thankfully. When I asked one lady about a statistic involving suicide, she was horrified and said that they didn’t cover that kind of thing anymore! I’ve also learned that a lot of research is about knowing exactly where to look and what keywords will help you get there.

It’s also exhausting, finding factoids that date back as recently as forty years ago. This book has a ton of really, really old factoids that the original author must’ve dug out of some library’s moldering century-old book elsewhere. (At one point, I envisioned the author with a scrapbook full of old ads, newspaper articles and trivia.) I’ve had to be flexible with researching, learning a lot and teaching myself as I went. Not all colleges will hold old research, for example- you have to look for a more up-to-date study.

What’s next for this blog? I think the trivia debunking part is pretty much over, but you’re welcome to send in any trivia you want me to check out! Other than that, I might post trivia I happen to come across, but that will be very intermittent.

Overall, it’s been a good journey and I thank you all for following this blog, hopefully learning a little more. If you’re interested in more typical Tumblr blogging from me, message me. 

Once again, thank you for reading along with me on this journey. I wish you all well in your personal journey for knowledge.

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#293: “Roughly 40 percent of the population of the underdeveloped world is under fifteen years old.”

True, approximately.

In third world countries, the percentage of people ages 0-14 tends to be over 40 percent.