52 Things I Learned in 2022

Another New Year’s resolution this year was inspired by Jason Kottke and Tom Whitwell who keep a list of interesting things they learned throughout the year. Inspired by them, here is my list of 52 things I learned this past year. Here is Tom Whitwell’slist from this year, and Jason Kottke’s from last year.

(1) Clover is a legume.

(2) In 1938 New York had a ticker tape parade for Billy “Wrong Way” Corrigan who was trying to fly from New York to California and instead flew to Ireland. More people attended Corrigan’s parade than Lindberghs.

(3) The Strand Bookstore has an entire section devoted to Sinatra

(4) The most popular business jet is also the only single engine model on the market. If something does go wrong with the engine a parachute deploys through the nose and parachutes the entire plane down. The parachute has been used over 200 times resulting in the plane only having one fatality.

(5) The Savannah airport was built on the Dotson family farm and the runways were built on two graves that remain on the runway.

(6) Hans Christian Andersen went to stay with Charles Dickens while on a trip to London and overstayed his welcome to the point that he was asked (after five weeks) to leave.

(7) Wal-Mart owns the most private jets of any U.S. corporation

(8) Clark Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, was the first female casualty of war for WWII. She was killed on a TWA flight she took with several other people but whose main mission was transporting 15 pilots from Las Vegas to LA in 1942. Since the plane’s mission was officially bringing those pilots to combat, all the individuals on board the plane were listed as casualties of war, making her the first casualty of war.

(9) If you like playing crosswords with another person it’s tough to do online. The NYTimes does not have a collaborate feature. Fortunately, there’s a free awesome app called downforacross.com that does!

(10) Jousting is the official state sport of Maryland. Not only that, it was the first state with an official state sport. So all the sports were available. Yet it chose jousting. Since then, most states have chosen more traditional state sports. New York is baseball. Minnesota is Hockey. Massachusetts is basketball.

(11) You have higher odds of dying in a car ride on the way to buy a lotto ticket than buying the winning ticket

(12) It’s almost impossible to lose an item in Japan

(13) NABISCO is short for National Biscuit Company

(14) Most of the songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind were inspired by Cobain’s breakup with Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. Vail wore a perfume called teen spirit and Bikini Kill guitarist Kathleen Hanna wrote on Cobain’s bedroom wall in sharpie “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” It was meant as an inside reference that Hanna knew Cobain and Vail were a couple, but Cobain saw it and turned it into a song. — From Chuck Klosterman’s Book “the 90s”

(15) Pakistan is an acronym developed in 1933 by a student at Oxford. The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet Now or Never, using it as an acronym (“thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN”). The name refer to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan

(16) There are more planes in the ocean than submarines

(17) JFK didn’t get circumcised until he was an adult

(18) Iceland, whose hockey team plays the antagonist in the film Mighty Ducks 2 as the best in the world, has never actually produced an NHL player

(19) In English prisons if you had enough money, you were allowed to pay your servants to serve your sentence with you in jail

(20) Dogs prefer to be scratched on the chest

(21) While Vines are design to attach and climb to anything that points upward (twinning) they are somehow able to recognize their own stems to avoid twinning around them

(22) The Queen (RIP) hated garlic

(23) Roses don’t actually have thorns, they have prickles. A thorn is a sharp branch from the stem, whereas a prickle is a node on the stem.

(24) A Welsh man faked being in a coma for two years to avoid paying back a debt to his neighbor.

(25) Sea monkeys are neither monkeys nor come from the sea (but they’re brine shrimps who come from salt lakes) and the founder of sea monkeys was a Jewish man who later became a neo-nazi and also invented a stick for Neo Nazis to beat people

(26) The vending machine was invented by the Ancient Egyptians to dispense holy water

(27) during the Cold War one spy who was a musician hid messages in sheet music.

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28) Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate a right wing U.S. Army general before JFK

(29) Japanese flat earthers use a special map to explain how Pearl Harbor could have occurred.

(30) Mrs, Doubtfire is based on a book

(31) Hamsters can only wink one eye at a time

(32) Bruce Willis was 35 and passed over by ABC for the lead of Moonlighting until during a screening, the lone female in the room said she thought Willis was the only actor auditioning who would be “one dangerous fuck.”

(33) Mecca, Saudia Arabia has a subway system that is only used 7 days a year.

(34) Hard shell tacos are an American invention with no roots in Mexican or Latin cooking.

(35) Barry Manilow wrote “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There,” “I’m Stuck on Band-Aid Brand Because Band-Aid’s Stuck on Me,” and “You Deserve a Break Today at McDonald’s.”

(36) The school bus was invented in 1939 and the model and chassis has stayed the same since.

(37) In 1997, the Milwaukee police tried training its bomb sniffing dog by placing 5 pounds of explosive at the airport, only to forget where it placed the explosives. The dog was unable to locate the explosives either, and the explosives may still be in the airport.

(38) the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme.”

(39) Antelope in the Grand Canyon are born without any scent so that predators have a more difficult time finding them while the parents go off to find food. It’s not until the second or third day they began to have a smell.

(40) The pharmaceutical company Bristol Meyers Squib attempted a brief foray into the movie industry in the 1970s with Palomar Pictures. It was a huge business failure and they closed the department just two years later. Since then, instead of selling off any of the movies it owns, such as Sleuth and the Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 and the Heartbreak Kid, it just has hidden them and never released them.

(41) in 2014. Researchers left people alone for 15 minutes. They could sit there or shock themselves. They got nothing for shocking themselves. Still 68% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves. One guy shocked himself over 150 times.

(42) Silphion was an ancient plant that the Roman’s used for cooking and health so much it was thought to be extinct but may have been recently found in Turkey

(43) the USDA, which is responsible for live animal shows in the U.S. had just assumed for 30 years that Sigfried and Roy had some kind of protective barrier keeping the cats from the audience. After Roy’s attack and investigation it found they had performed for 30 years with tigers who could have “easily jumped off the stage and into the audience.”

(44) Venus has a day that’s longer than it’s year

(45) Super Bowl I had two second half kickoffs. the NFL made the teams redo the kickoff because the tv cameras had missed the first kickoff.

(46) plane crash investigations, while projected as unbiased and focused on safety, are actually hyper-politicized. Two egregious examples being Arrow Air flight 1285R where the Canadian Aviation Safety Board botched it so bad that the government disbanded the board and Air New Zealand 901 where the airline entered autopilot info that led to the pilots running right into a mountain, the airline within a day realized the error, but then withheld the info from the investigators and blamed the pilots

(47) the phrase “put up for” as in “put up for adoption” comes from orphanage trains where kids used to be “put up” at a church and locals would bid to adopt them, many ending up as indentured

(48) The Artic adventurer Peter Freuchen once used a dagger made of his own feces to escape from an avalanche. He also escaped from a concentration camp later in life even though he only had one leg, having lost the other leg from frost bite during a 1000 mile dog sleigh trip across Greenland

(49) there is a restaurant in New York devoted to Eminem named Mom’s Spaghetti

(50) MLK paid for Julia Robert’s birth.

(51) in the scene in 40 year old virgin where Steve Carrell gets his chest waxed, he based his reactions on how he’d seen kids shout getting their wounds cleaned out at Action Park (one of my favorite films from last year).

(52) Truffle oil and basically the entire truffle industry is one big scam.