funny facts

WTF Fun Fact 12779 – Goat Yoga

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Goat yoga began in Oregon when a local yoga instructor, Heather Davis, asked Lainey Morse if she could hold a class on her animal therapy farm in August of 2016. Of course, the answer was yes and everyone – goats included – seemed to have a great time.

From yoga with goats to Goat Yoga(TM)

When Morse sent photos from that event to Modern Farmer magazine, everyone was obsessed. The practice took off and is now performed all over the world.

According to CNBC (cited below), Morse said of the fateful moment she sent in the photos: “Within a few minutes, they contacted me and said, ‘We have got to do a story on this.’” The story came out and changed her life. “You never know what it means when something goes viral, but it feels like a roller coaster going 100 miles an hour, and you can’t get off.”

“By the time Morse had the business fully up and running, “I had over 2,300 people on the wait list.” She started listing classes on Facebook, and “realized I can’t have 400 people on my farm showing up for goat yoga.” She soon came up with a registration platform to bring order to the process.”

As for Goat Yoga(TM), it’s not really a thing. Trademarks have long been denied and copycats exist everywhere. It did, however, become a 6-figure business. But it’s expensive to run.

“There were other big expenses along the way, like spending thousands of dollars on tents to protect outdoor sessions during inclement weather, only to see the tents destroyed in wind storms. She also had to buy special mats for customers because the goats would eat (or poop on) yoga mats people brought themselves.”

How do the goats feel?

Goats are pretty friendly and show happiness when they’re in good situations. In most cases, they probably don’t mind Goat Yoga too much.

Of course, not all goat yoga teachers are good to the goats, and animal rights activists have taken up the issue. That said, not all goats are the same, so there are probably some goats that would rather be anywhere else. – WTF fun facts

Source: “This woman’s goat yoga business is bringing in 6 figures” — CNBC

WTF Fun Fact 12778 – Krokettenmotie

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The Krokettenmotie is an obscure motion passed by a council in northern Holland, the Netherlands that entitles council members to a bit of a snack if their meetings run late.

Frankly, it sounds pretty civilized.

How did the Krokettenmotie come to be?

When the future Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, served on the municipal council of Amstelveen in 1993, he proposed the motion. And he fully admits to having had a juvenile sense of humor back in his younger days.

While the “croquettes motion” was meant as a joke, the other council members apparently agreed that any meeting that ran past 11 pm made them deserving of a little snack. The motion passed. Even better, it’s still in force (because why repeal a law that says you get a free deep-fried snack?!).

Updates to the Krokettenmotie

While it has never been repealed, the Krokettenmotie has been modified over the years, specifically to accommodate vegans and vegetarians.

In 2019, a vegetarian option was added. But that was likely a page taken out of a copycat motion passed in 2002 in Zwolle, which set the time limit to 10 pm and mentioned the option of a vegetarian snack as well.

Croquette controversy

As the Netherlands has focused more on healthy lifestyles and eating, all of the Krokettenmoties have come into question. After all, it’s not exactly the healthiest snack option. So many municipalities that have debated the croquette controversy have had members demands snacks such as fruit, nuts, and even hummus wraps as alternatives.

It may all sound ridiculous, but the justification behind the genuine debates is that the council is bound to do better work in the late evenings if they’re not hungry. Council members have pointed out that a bit of a nosh will help them make better decisions with clear minds.

Frankly, we’re just glad someone takes their snacks as seriously as we do.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Krokettenmotie” — Wikipedia

WTF Fun Fact 12777 – Busta Rhymes Island

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Have you ever wanted to take a trip to Busta Rhymes Island? Frankly, we had never considered it – until now.

Unfortunately, that’s not the official name of the tiny piece of land in Shrewsbury, MA (well, Wrentham, to be exact) but that is how it’s known and even how it appears on Google Maps.

What and where is Busta Rhymes Island?

According to Zillow (which does not refer to it as Busta Rhymes Island, sadly), that land is “A once in a lifetime opportunity to buy your own ISLAND!” Sadly, it’s not currently for sale.

“The island is one acre and the seller has gotten an elevation certificate so no flood insurance is required. 823 Eastside Rd is a parcel of land on the shore with a big 2 story storage building and dock. Super convenient to be able to leave your boat on the dock to be able to get back and forth from the island.”

How the island got its name

Ok, we know what you’re really wondering.

(And in case you didn’t already know, Busta Rhymes is a 12-time Grammy-nominated rapper.)

The island got its name when a then-27-year-old Shrewsbury resident named Kevin O’Brien started maintaining the tiny island (that’s basically in the middle of a pond). He had been a fan of the rapper since he was a teen and decided to plant some blueberry bushes, set up a rope swing, etc.

“It’s a very small little island [with] rope-swinging, blueberries, and . . . stuff Busta would enjoy,” he told a newspaper in 2009.

O’Brien “named” the island semi-officially by simply applying a geotag on Google Maps, where it still appears as “Busta Rhymes Island.”

He also applied to have it named officially, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names requires a celebrity to be dead for at least 5 years before a landmark can be named after them. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Busta Rhymes Island, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12776 – Swedish Banana Pizza

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The rumor about Swedes liking bananas on their pizza started in 2017. In fact, Snopes (cited below) traced it back to a Tweet on August 11 of that year from Curators of Sweden. In it, “a social media campaign initiated by the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden, the pineapple-banana-curry topping trifecta made up the ‘most Swedish pizza there is.'”

We know what you’re thinking.

Eww, why?

Well, to each their own. Maybe you’d like if it you tried it. As pizza purists, we’re just planning to let them be about the whole thing without venturing into dough-destroying territory.

Is Swedish banana pizza real?

As with all internet rumors that sound too weird to be true, the folks at Snopes did the research for the rest of us. And we give them props for being really good at it. Who even knows what’s we’d believe at this point if not for them.

In this case, the Snopes folks did us a public service by reviewing a bunch of Sewdish menus from pizzerias in Stockholm only to find that many really did offer some sort of banana pizza monstrosity…we mean, combination.

Banana pizza with…curry? And tomato?

Ok, so for the American palate (which is eclectic at best, we’re not claiming to be conniseurs of anything other than pizza here, trust us!), it sounds a little gross. But believe us when we say it actually gets worse.

According to Scopes: “Two such pizzerias were Corella Kungsholmen and Stockholm Pizza, both of which offered the ‘Tropicana’ pizza, described as topped with tomato sauce, cheese, ham, pineapple, curry, and — you guessed it — bananas. In the U.S., the Swedish-style food joint Viking Pizza, which is located in Glendale, California, included its version of ‘Tropicana’ pizza, complete with all of the above toppings and finished off with the addition of shrimp and peanuts.”

Ok, so leave it to the U.S. to take an already sketchy-sounding pizza and somehow make it worse. You took an already questionable Hawaiian pizza and added pizza AND curry? Astounding.

We kid though – it’s never nice to “yuck someone’s yum,” as they say.

How Swedish banana pizza came to be

Snopes did some more research and if it didn’t seem rude, we’d just copy and paste it all because they really went out of their way to add some context. In fact, Sweden really likes their bananas, and “this love affair dates back to the early 20th century when Caribbean-grown bananas were first introduced to the Scandinavian nation, according to historical records.”

Picture it. Sweden, the earth 20th century. Boats comes into the harbor weighed down with tons of bananas. The descendants of apes (aka humans) no longer even know how to enjoy a banana. In fact, they asked the age-old question about every new fruit humans encounter: which parts are edible.

If you think about it this way, maybe it’s no surprise that some confused Swedes eventually put it on a pizza. Sadly, there are no extant written accounts of early attempts to try to figure out what to do with bananas, but we hope there’s a history grad student out there combing Swedish archives to find them. It should add some levity to all the reading about colonial oppression that it probably took to get those bananas out of the Caribbean in the first place.

Of course, there’s a lot to unpack here, historically, about how foods travel around the world, but we’re left with knowing that the banana trade has obvious interruptions during war time. What’s interesting is that as far as Snopes can tell, the banana pizza (with curry) thing started in the 21st century.

We’re going to need a food anthropologist to unpack the rest. The best we can do is tell you it’s not a rumor.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Do Swedes Really Put Bananas on Pizza?” — Snopes

WTF Fun Fact 12766 – Hashtag Octothorpe

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Hashtag, pound sign, number sign – call it what you will. This -> # <- is an octothorpe (or octothorp).

It’s not a word we had ever heard before, but it’s no surprise that signs we use quite frequently for many different purposes actually have proper original names.

The 14th-century octothorpe

According to Mental Floss, the sign originates in 14th-century Latin manuscripts when monks used it to abbreviate libra pondo (or the Latin term for weight in pounds). That would have been lb (like we use today), however “At the time, it was common to add a horizontal bar to abbreviations, known as a tittle, to show that the two letters were connected, and that the letter “l” was not the numeral 1.”

But as scribes began to write faster, the lb with a dash through the l began to look more like a # (in other words, a pound sign).

The octothorpe goes mainstream

No doubt a lot happened in between those Latin manuscripts and the # appearing on typewriter keyboards, but we haven’t found any proper explanation of how that happened.

However, when AT&T made its first phone keypads, it wanted them to be a perfect square. That would mean adding two more buttons. They chose * and # because they were already common on typewriters.

But why an octotherp, octothorpe/octothorp?

But when did the pound sign turn into an octothorpe? When an employee at Bell Labs decided to make up a name for the sign.

The thought process went like this, according to Google engineer Chris Messina’s history of the word:

  • There are eight points on the symbol so “OCTO” should be part of the name.
  • We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun, so what should that be? (Don MacPherson at this point in his life was active in a group that was trying to get JIM THORPE’s (ibid) Olympic medals returned from Sweden) The phrase THORPE would be unique, and people would not suspect he was making the word up if he called it an “OCTOTHORPE”.

The birth of the hashtag

Ok, so why and when did we start calling # a hashtag?

According to CBS News, it started with a Tweet.

“It all started back on Aug. 23, 2007 with a tweet by San Francisco techie and former Google developer Chris Messina. He wrote on Twitter, “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

People didn’t like the idea, but that clearly didn’t stop it from catching on.

Then, a few days later, another user named Stowe Boyd suggested the # symbol be called a hashtag.

And the rest, as they say, is #history.

–WTF fun facts

Source: “Where Does the Hashtag (a.k.a. Octothorpe) Come From?” — Mental Floss
“The Real Source of The Word “Octothorpe” — Chris Messina, Medium

WTF Fun Fact 12763 – The Harvard – Yale Prank

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Every year, Ivy League universities Harvard University and Yale University meet up in a college football matchup that only alumni could possibly care about. (Yale has been bad for over a century, while Harvard has had a few eye-raising moments in the last few decades, but not enough to be a contender in the wider world of college football.)

The game is all about the rivalry, so pranks are fairly common. But a November 20, 2004 prank was at least good enough to make the evening sports news and go down as an embarrassment for Harvard.

Who carried out the Harvard – Yale prank?

Two Yale students from the class of ’05 named Michael Kai and David Aulicino gathered about 20 classmates to carry out the prank. The students dressed as members of the Harvard pep squad and handed out placards to the middle sideline section of Harvard fans. The idea was that when everyone held up the placards at the same time, it would spell out “Go Harvard.” At least that’s what the fans were told.

Impressively, they managed to hand out 1800 squares of paper, so it would have been hard for anyone to know what it was about to say (people only had small parts of letters).

Trolling their own team

Of course, now we know those placards didn’t spell out “Go Harvard.”

Instead, they spelled out “We Suck.”

The section was mostly full of alumni (which somehow makes it even funnier). The student section was off to the side, so the Harvard students couldn’t quite see it – and they later denied it even happened (despite the photo).

But Yale fans and players could see it, and so could that Harvard football team.

Prankster Dylan Davey didn’t feel bad about hoodwinking the alumni. According to the Yale Daily News (cited below):

“It was almost sad,” said Davey. “There were all these grandfather and grandmother types — and they all had big smiles, saying, ‘Oh you’re so cute, I’m so glad you’re doing this.’ I felt bad for about two minutes. Then I got over it.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Elis outsmart Harvard with prank at Game” — Yale Daily News

WTF Fun Fact 12762 – The Signing of the Declaration of Independence

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When was the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Well, it’s far more likely that the document was signed on August 2, 1776, and not on July 4th as most of us are taught.

At the very least, August 2nd is when the signatures were done being added (though we’re also pretty sure the last one was added in 1777).

So, when was the Declaration of Independence’s signed?

The delegates to the Second Continental Congress voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Out of the 13 colonies, 12 voted to approve, with only New York abstaining since its delegates had not yet received official permission from Albany yet. That’s because like much legislation, compromises were still being made until the last minute (around 86 changes to Thomas Jefferson’s original draft).

The document stated that the signatories would no longer be colonies of the Kingdom of Great Britain and would not be “free and independent States.” It’s likely that at this point, the secretary of the Continental Congress had his assistant create a copy to be printed, and then had it delivered to the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia (now known as Independence Hall) on August 2, 1776, where it was then signed (or the signatures were completed) by members of all the colonies.

(However, there is evidence that Thomas McKean didn’t have a chance to sign the document until after January 1777.)

Are you sure?

No one is exactly sure when the first signatures were added. But while Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams have all implied or stated that it was signed by Congress on July 4, 1776, the same day it was adopted, it appears that not even all the signatories were on site that day. That’s stated clearly by one of the signatories themselves. And to top it off, some of the signers hadn’t even been elected to the Congress by July 4th.

So, when was the Declaration of Independence signed? Maybe some people signed it on the 4th. But it’s far more likely that the final document was signed on August 2nd (and possibly done collecting signatures the following year).

Of course, this makes no real difference in the grand scheme of things. Independence Day celebrated the spirit of the document, which was largely in order and agreed to on July 4th.

But we do know one thing for certain about the Declaration of Independence – there is no treasure map on the back. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Unsullied by Falsehood: The Signing” — Declaration Resources Project, Harvard University

WTF Fun Fact 12761 – The 50-Star American Flag

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Our current American flag was designed by teenager Robert Heft in 1958. This fact may give you a bit of pause for two reasons.

Who designed the American flag?

First, when we think of the designer of the U.S. flag, many of us think of Betsy Ross. And she is, indeed, the designer of the original. Of course, her design has endured as more states have been added to the Union.

But if you want to get technical, then The designer of the 50-star U.S. flag was a 17-year-old history student from Lancaster, Ohio named Robert Heft. He made it for a high school history project, and his teacher gave him a B- for lack of originality.

How did a teenager design the current American flag?

The second thing that might give you pause is that when Heft made his design, Hawaii and Alaska were not yet part of the United States. They didn’t even become part of the country at the same time.

Heft sewed on two more stars with the assumption that two more states would join. He used his parents then-current 48-star flag and his mother’s sewing machine.

According to the Ohio History Central (cited below), Heft’s history teacher “Stanley Pratt gave Heft a B- as the grade for the flag. Pratt supposedly stated that Heft’s design lacked originality, but the teacher did offer to raise the grade if Heft could get the flag accepted as the United States’ national flag. Heft sent his flag to Walter Moeller, his Ohio Congressman. Moeller succeeded in having Heft’s design adopted as the new United States flag on July 4, 1960.

Heft’s original flag has flown over the White House, every state capital building, and eighty-eight United States embassies. It remains in Heft’s possession, although numerous people and museums have offered to purchase the flag, including one offer of $350,000. Heft’s design was the twenty-seventh official flag of the United States.”

Heft died on December 12, 2009, in Saginaw, Michigan, of a heart attack. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Robert G. Heft” — Ohio History Central

WTF Fun Fact 12754 – Sudan Pyramids Outnumber Egypt’s

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Interested in ancient civilizations? Want to see pyramids without all the tourists? Then you may want to consider visiting the Meroe region in Sudan. In Sudan, pyramids outnumber the Egyptian kind by nearly 2:1.

Nubian pyramids in Sudan

The pyramids belong to the ancient Nubian kings, who lived in the northern part of present-day Sudan. Meroe was the capital city of the Kingdom of Kush. The structures themselves are nearly 5000 years old and are largely untouched these days.

The main source of destruction to the pyramids was an Italian “explorer” named Giuseppe Ferlini. He blew up quite a few and destroyed the tops of many structures in his hunt for the kings’ treasures in the 1880s.

What’s inside Sudan’s pyramids

These little-known Nubian tombs have paintings on the inside celebrating the kings buried inside. And since the Nubians did business with other ancient civilizations, you can see Greek and Roman, influences in the artwork.

Since the Kushite kingdom is part of the Nile River Valley, the most prominent influence is that of the Egyptians. (Of course, Egypt’s pyramids are much older, dating back to the era of the New Kingdom from the 16th century BC to the 11th century BC).

Of course, many of the tombs were raided by Ferlini during his destructive episode, and the “loot” now resides in many European museums. But they had been plundered in ancient times as well.

Preserving the past

Luckily, the Nubian pyramids are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and are generally protected from more harm. Until 2019, National Geographic funded further excavations of the site to learn more about the ancient kings and their civilization.

Much of the excavations require researchers to dive underwater to enter the structures.

According to NatGeo, “The largest and oldest pyramid at Nuri belongs to its most famous resident: the pharaoh Taharqa, a Kushite king who in the seventh century B.C. rallied his troops to the northern edges of his empire to defend Jerusalem from the Assyrians, earning him a mention in the Old Testament.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Dive beneath the pyramids of Sudan’s black pharaohs” — National Geographic