funny facts

WTF Fun Fact 13132 – The Super Bowl Shuffle

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In 1985, the Chicago Bears recorded a hit rap song called “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” The song was even nominated for a Grammy award for Best Rhythm and Blues Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal. However, they lost to the late singer Prince’s song “Kiss.”

The Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle

We never expected to see the Chicago Bears nominated for a Grammy. But that’s precisely what happened after the team members known as the “Chicago Bears Shufflin’ Crew” released The Supe rBowl Shuffle in 1985.

The song was distributed through Capitol Records – and notable, it was released two months BEFORE their win in Super Bowl XX. How embarrassing would it have been if they lost?!

The song was popular, but it peaked at number 41 on the charts (hey, not everyone is a Bears fan).

The son’s Grammy nomination came in 1987. And that’s where the Bears lost.

The song’s legacy

The Super Bowl Shuffle made about $300,000, which went to the Chicago Community Trust to help struggling city families with housing (hence Walter Payton’s line “Now we’re not doing this because we’re greedy / The Bears are doing it to feed the needy.”)

Singers included Walter Payton, Willie Gault, Mike Singletary, Jim McMahon, Otis Wilson, Steve Fuller, Mike Richardson, Richard Dent, Gary Fencik, and William Perry. Meanwhile, the “Shufflin’ Crew” was on instrumentals and included some less well-known players like punter Maury Buford on cowbell and defensive back Ken Taylor on the tambourine. A “Shufflin’ Crew” chorus included players like Leslie Frazier. Few players declined to be involved.

The Bears weren’t the first or last team to try and make music history. The 1984 San Francisco 49ers recorded “We Are the 49ers” before winning the Super Bowl champs, but the disco-pop hit wasn’t all that successful (neither was their do-over “49ers Rap”). They were no “Super Bowl Shuffle,” cringey as it may have been.

And who could forget (except everyone) the Green Bay Packers’ attempt to spoof the “Macarena”, by recording “Packarena” in 1996? — WTF fun facts

Source: “Throwback Thursday: When the Chicago Bears Sang ‘The Super Bowl Shuffle” — Hollywood Reporter

WTF Fun Fact 13131 – Queensland’s Rabbit Laws

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We’ve heard of rabbit control, but Queensland’s Rabbit Laws are a bit on the strange side. For example, you cannot own a rabbit in Queensland unless you can prove you are going to display it for an acceptable purpose.

Queensland, Australia’s unique outlook on rabbits

It’s illegal to keep a rabbit as a pet in the state of Queensland. But according to the state’s business website: “…you can obtain a European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) for the purposes of exhibiting to the public. Under the Exhibited Animals Act 2015 (EAA) rabbits are category B species and may be exhibited for purposes such as educational exhibits or for entertainment.”

Those who work with rabbits much apply for a license and the premise at which the exhibition takes place needs to be licensed as well. “An example may include an invasive pest educational centre, or a zoo where the public enter the regular enclosure site to view the rabbit.”

The rules continue: “Rabbits may also be obtained solely for the purposes of exhibition outside of the premise where the licence is issued to (off the regular enclosure site). An example of activities permitted solely off the regular enclosure site include persons in the business of conducting magic performances at children’s parties.”

Queensland’s rabbit laws, continued

You must apply to exhibit a rabbit using an authorized form as well as submit a management plan detailing the way you are going to exhibit the rabbit and deal with it on a daily basis.

The management plan must address “animal welfare, human health, safety and wellbeing, social amenity, the economy and the environment…” People need to be aware of their obligations.

Why is this all such a big deal? Well, rabbits are an invasive species that Queensland has been trying to get rid of since the 1880s! — WTF fun facts

Source: “Exhibiting a rabbit” — Business Queensland

WTF Fun Fact 13130 – William Shatner’s Kidney Stone

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In 2006, actor William Shatner – aka the original Star Trek series’ Captain Kirk – had a kidney stone. That wouldn’t be a very interesting fun fact except that he decided to sell it. William Shatner’s kidney stone was sold to a casino for a whopping $25,000. The money went towards building homes for the homeless.

Selling William Shatner’s kidney stone

Shatner himself set up the auction, and an online casino known for collecting kooky memorabilia won the bid. Of course, they were in it for publicity. The company is called GoldenPalace.com, and in 2006, they reported:

“The former Captain of the Enterprise passed a kidney stone at warp speed and beamed it into the waiting hands of GoldenPalace.com. The casino paid $25,000 for Shatner’s specimen, the entirety of which will go to Habitat For Humanity to help provide housing for those in need.

Although the kidney stone that broke down Shatner’s shields caused him more discomfort than a Klingon pain stick, the sci-fi/pop-culture icon is more than happy that his calcium offspring fetched such a price.”

A kidney stone for a cause

While this all seems silly, something good came out of it. GoldenPalace.com reports that Shatner held out for a higher price for the sake of charity.

“When I was contacted about selling my kidney stone to GoldenPalace.com for an original price of $15,000 I turned it down knowing that my tunics from Star Trek have commanded more than $100,000. I offered the stone, stint, and string for $25,000 and informed them that 100% of the proceeds would go to benefit Habitat for Humanity and I retain visitation rights?”

At the time, that was enough to build about half a house.

The stone itself? Shatner said it was so big, “you’d want to wear it on your finger.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Shatner Sells Kidney Stone For $25,000” — CBS News

WTF Fun Fact 13125 – NFL Referees Get Superbowl Rings

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NFL referees don’t get a lot of love, But the refs chosen to work the Superbowl do get their own Superbowl rings.

Receiving a Superbowl ring

A Superbowl ring is obviously a valuable object. Only the winning team gets them, but so do all the referees. The tradition goes all the way back to the first NFL-AFL Championship Game in 1967, which is retroactively called Superbowl I.

Only referees with the best reputations and records are chosen to officiate the Superbowl. They do receive compensation above and beyond their salaries for the work. But the ring serves as an extra reward and moment.

In fact, the refs are the only people guaranteed to get Superbowl rings regardless of the outcome of the game.

But rest assured, they’re nowhere near as large or as valuable as the massive diamond-encrusted rings the players get.

Who else gets a ring?

According to NBC 6 News (cited below):

“While there isn’t a hard-and-fast number to how much a Super Bowl ring is worth, depending on the circumstances and details of the ring, experts generally appraise them between$30,000 and $50,000based on the jewels and features alone.”

As of 2020, all 53 players on a winning NFL team, as well as coaches, team executives, and the practice squad get Superbowl rings. But they’re not all worth the same amount of money. The bling that goes to non-players is up to the discretion of team owners. And they have so much discretion that they can even choose to bestow some type of ring on cheerleaders and trainers.

While the losing team members do not get Superbowl rings, they do get conference championship rings. But it’s a lot rarer for someone to show one of those off, so we don’t hear much about them.

Who makes and pays for Superbowl rings?

Ever wonder who makes Superbowl rings? It’s typically Jostens – the same company that makes most yearbooks and class rings! However, they have to bid on the job each year. In the past, they’ve been outbid a few times by Balfour and even Tiffany’s & Co.

Wondering who pays for all this bling?

The cost of team rings is split between the NFL (which contributes roughly $5k to $7k per ring for up to 150 rings per team) and team owners. —WTF fun facts

Source: “Here’s How Much a Super Bowl Ring Costs and How It’s Made” — NBC 6

WTF Fun Fact 13124 – Signalman Jack

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Signalmen play integral roles in the rail industry, installing, repairing, and maintaining the signal systems used to direct trains. It’s a hard job, but in the 1880s, a signalman named James Edwin Wide taught a chacma baboon from South Africa to assist him. The baboon became known as Signalman Jack.

Training Signalman Jack

Wide had lost both legs in a work accident and needed an assistant to help him get to his job at the railroad. And apparently, he saw a baboon driving an oxcart one day on a trip to South Africa and decided he’d made a fine sidekick.

Wide named the baboon Jack and first taught him to push a small trolly to get him to his job each day a half-mile from his home. The baboon even helped with chores around the house, including sweeping and taking out the trash.

But it was when Jack followed Wide to work that he seemed to find his calling. The baboon learned to recognize the train whistles used to indicate the vehicle was about to change tracks. After watching Wide operate the signals to indicate which tracks they should take, Signalman Jack was eager to start pulling the levers himself.

Wide had no qualms about letting a baboon do his job.

Kicking back

Wide was eventually able to train Signalman Jack so well that he could sit back and pursue some hobbies while at work.

According to Mental Floss, “As the story goes, one day a posh train passenger staring out the window saw that a baboon, and not a human, was manning the gears and complained to railway authorities. Rather than fire Wide, the railway managers decided to resolve the complaint by testing the baboon’s abilities. They came away astounded.”

Eventually, the railway superintendent decided to formally hire the talented baboon. Signalman Jack was given his own employment number. He even got a salary of 20 cents a day (plus half a bottle of beer per week).

Signalman Jack worked in his job for 9 years without ever making a single error. Sadly, he died of tuberculosis in 1890. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Signalman Jack: The Baboon Who Worked for the Railroad—and Never Made a Mistake” — Mental Floss

WTF Fun Fact 13122 – The Benefits of Recreational Fear

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It turns out fear isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, recreational fear – the kind of fear you experience on purpose by going to haunted houses or watching horror flicks – can be good for your brain.

Seeking out recreational fear

We know some fear can create a stress response in the body that can be harmful. But our body’s ability to feel fear is, overall, a good thing. It tells us to get away from danger and keeps us alive.

But what about the people who seek out fear?

Even a game of peek-a-boo as a baby starts to prime our bodies for being caught off guard. And it can be exhilarating. When we get a little older, we may tell ghost stories around the campfire. In many ways, we seek out fear. As adults, we may go on roller coasters, see slasher or suspense films, or participate in risky activities like mountain biking or skydiving.

But why do we go after this feeling?

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below), “One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival.”

The benefits of fear

By seeking out recreational fear, we put ourselves in a situation that has little risk. And perhaps scaring ourselves in a controlled situation can help us cope with real fear later on.

You can learn a lot about yourself by the way you react to fear. It’s just that not many of us like to acknowledge that feeling or explore it.

Researchers at the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark are looking into the science of fear and trying to learn more about our responses to stress. One thing they’re looking at is the relationship between fear and enjoyment. After all, some people really seem to go after scary experiences in order to hit a “sweet spot” between boring and terrifying.

The question of what makes recreational fear appealing to some is still up for debate. But researchers suspect that “even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us.”

One suggestion is to not be so afraid of fear, especially when you can control the parameters.

“With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Can Experiencing Horror Help Your Brain?” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 13119 – Greenland’s Ecosystem Surprise

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Evidence from the oldest DNA ever analyzed indicates that northern Greenland used to be a lush wonderland where mastodons, reindeer, geese, and hares once lived among a wide array of trees and other greenery. Greenland’s ecosystem surprise was reported in the journal Science in December 2022.

Why is ancient Greenland’s ecosystem such a surprise?

Today, Greenland’s ecosystem is far less varied thanks to its extreme Arctic climate. While you will find moss, lichen, small trees, and bushes in the tundra, it’s still largely considered an Arctic desert.

According to Eske Willerslev, a paleogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the study,

“No one would have predicted an ecosystem like this. Some species you find further south in Greenland, but a number you don’t find in the Arctic at all. It’s an ecosystem with no analog in the present day.”

Ancient DNA

According to Science (cited below), the insights into Greenland’s ancient past “come from the oldest DNA ever recovered: 2-million-year-old snippets of genetic material from more than 100 kinds of animals and plants, extracted from buried sediments.”

So not only is the information about Greenland’s ecosystem special, but the ability to use short and partially decayed DNA from millions of years ago is an exciting development.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, “Beyond evidence of reindeer, geese and one mastodon, [the researchers] also found signs of marine species, including horseshoe crabs and green algae. In this era of the island’s geologic history, temperatures were around 18 to 31 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are in Greenland today.”

Needless to say, scientists are excited about the finds.

“I wouldn’t have, in a million years, expected to find mastodons in northern Greenland,” said Love Dalen, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University in Sweden.

“It feels almost magical to be able to infer such a complete picture of an ancient ecosystem from tiny fragments of preserved DNA,” said Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Lost world in northern Greenland conjured from DNA in ancient soil” — Science

WTF Fun Fact 13118 – Oldest Known Pet Cat

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We know cats date back millennia and they even domesticated themselves. But we’re willing to be that most people assume the oldest known pet cat comes from Egypt. However, archaeological evidence suggests that the oldest known pet cats may come from the island of Cyprus.

Cyprus’ cats

In Egypt, cats were worshipped as idols as well as cherished as pets and pest control specialists. For centuries, we’ve assumed that Egyptians were the first to keep cats as pets. But a team of French archaeologists working in the island country of Cyprus has turned the feline companion timeline on its head.

What’s the evidence? Well, the best proof we have that cats were kept as pets rather than simply furry, mouse-hunting neighbors are cat burial sites. People bury their pets – they don’t bury wildlife.

The oldest pet grave we now have is a 9,500-year-old site on Cyprus in the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos. The presumably beloved kitty was buried with seashells, polished stones, and other decorative items.

According to National Geographic (cited below), this “predates early Egyptian art depicting cats by 4,000 years or more.”

The oldest known pet cat

The details of the grave suggest that the feline resting inside is the world’s oldest known pet cat. Of course, there could be gravesites elsewhere in the world that will rewrite the timeline again.

According to Melinder Zeder, a curator of Old World archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and president of the International Council for Archaeozoology, “The process and timing of cat domestication has been terrifically difficult to document.”

“In the absence of a collar around its neck, the deliberate interment of this animal with a human makes a strong case that cats had a special place in the daily lives, and in the afterlives, of residents of Shillourokambos,” Zeder told NatGeo.

The rest of our earliest evidence for cat domestication comes from ancient Egypt, but the oldest cat mummies date back a “mere” 4000 years.

Researchers have long been confident that felines domesticated themselves much earlier, but the Cyprus site is the first solid proof. We already knew cats were present on the island (and therefore valued in some way since someone had to bring them there) because archaeologists found bones. But a grave site suggests something quite different and more significant in terms of what cats meant to people.

“The first discovery of cat bones on Cyprus showed that human beings brought cats from the mainland to the islands. But we couldn’t decide if these cats were wild or tame,” said a study author. “With this discovery, we can now decide that cats were linked with humans.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Oldest Known Pet Cat? 9,500-Year-Old Burial Found on Cyprus” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 13116 – Pigeons Can Tell the Difference Between Monet and Picasso

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If you try hard enough, anything is possible. But it turns out training pigeons to discriminate between a Picasso and a Monet isn’t actually all that hard. Pigeons can tell the difference between the two artists with relatively little effort (at least relative to what we would have imagined).

Pigeons and Picasso and Monet

In 1995, researchers Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita published a paper called “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso” in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. In it, they showed:

“Pigeons successfully learned to discriminate color slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. Following this training, they discriminated novel paintings by Monet and Picasso that had never been presented during the discrimination training. Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet’s to Cezanne’s and Renoir’s paintings or from Picasso’s to Braque’s and Matisse’s paintings. These results suggest that pigeons’ behavior can be controlled by complex visual stimuli in ways that suggest categorization. Upside-down images of Monet’s paintings disrupted the discrimination, whereas inverted images of Picasso’s did not. This result may indicate that the pigeons’ behavior was controlled by objects depicted in impressionists’ paintings but was not controlled by objects in cubists’ paintings.”

Birds and bees

Later on, in 2013, behavioral scientists showed that honeybees could also discriminate between paintings by the two artists.

Perhaps more hilariously, a 2010 article in the journal Animal Cognition showed that “Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children.” Imagine a pigeon letting your child know their art is “bad.”

Wonder how it was done? In the words of the researcher:

“In this study, I investigated whether pigeons could be trained to discriminate between paintings that had been judged by humans as either ‘bad’ or ‘good’. To do this, adult human observers first classified several children’s paintings as either ‘good’ (beautiful) or ‘bad’ (ugly). Using operant conditioning procedures, pigeons were then reinforced for pecking at ‘good’ paintings. After the pigeons learned the discrimination task, they were presented with novel pictures of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ children’s paintings to test whether they had successfully learned to discriminate between these two stimulus categories. The results showed that pigeons could discriminate novel ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paintings.”

Who knew nature had such art critics?! — WTF fun facts

Source: “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso” — Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior