12 Family-Sized Bits of Premium Trivia We’re Leaving in a Bowl on Our Front Porch; Please Take Only One

As a child, Dean Karnazes would run home from kindergarten. In 2005, at the age of 43, he ran 350 miles in about 80 hours (a little under 14 minutes per mile). He’s done a ton of other ridiculous running-related stuff, like completing 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. 

Fuggerei is a public housing community in Germany that was built in 1516 by a rich dude called Jacob Fugger the Younger. Since the day it opened, rent has been one Rhenish gulden a year. Residents are also required to pray for their community three times a day, and work one part-time job.

Auto-brewery syndrome affects people with a gut biome made up of just the right (or wrong) types of bacterias and yeasts, causing carbohydrates to ferment and produce enough ethanol to get you messed up.

Belugas who spend time around humans can make a garbled string of nonsense “words” that sound enough like real speech that divers have reported being duped into believing there was someone else down there with them, trying to get their attention.

Instead of being thrown out, any broken wafers discovered during production are ground up and used in the filling between the wafers of future batches.

Researchers studied 70 dogs for two years — observing a total of 1,893 poops and 5,582 pees — and discovered that, “under calm magnetic field conditions,” dogs will make sure to align themselves with the north-south axis when they go.

Nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, used to be mainly recreational. In 1844, dentist Horace Wells witnessed someone huff a bunch of it, accidentally slash his leg open — and not feel a thing. He then started using the gas to conk out his dental patients. Wells started self-experimenting with other gasses and concoctions, got himself addicted to chloroform and died in a mental hospital at age 33. 

In 1996, they went hard in the paint trying to appeal to anybody but their core demo of manic children at the mall and their exhausted parents. They spent the modern equivalent of $560 million marketing the Arch Deluxe — a legitimately good sandwich (burger, cheese, peppered bacon, potato bun) that nevertheless didn’t strike adults as particularly sophisticated. It was the largest amount spent on a fast-food marketing campaign at the time, and it failed spectacularly. 

It’s estimated that it would take 1.2 million mosquitoes at maximum suckage to get every last drop of blood from your veins.

The roster of sports gets shuffled around at every Olympics, so some sports are temporarily retired, while new, popular sports can have their time in the spotlight. Breaking was a huge hit at the 2018 Youth Olympics, so the IOC added it to the 2024 Paris games. Similarly, squash and flag football are both slated to make their Olympic debuts in the 2028 Los Angeles games.

The Gates of the Arctic is a massive, 8-million-acre expanse right in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. It’s entirely above the Arctic Circle, and is completely devoid of roads or even trails. The park gets about 7,000 visitors per year (compare that to the Grand Canyon’s 4.5 million visitors).

While finishing up Toy Story, John Lasseter and three of his writers dedicated a lunch break to figuring out what their next project should be. Writer Andrew Stanton says, “We thought, well geez, if we're going to make another movie we have to get started now.” In a single lunch, they came up with A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and WALL-E.