funny facts

WTF Fun Fact 12603 – The Rigors of Sumo Wrestling

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Sumo is an ancient Japanese sport born out of centuries-old temple rituals in the Shinto religion. It is also Japan’s national sport (although many successful wrestlers have come from Mongolia more recently).

Sumo training takes place in Japan only, and those accepted into training are assigned to one house, or “stables,” where they spend their entire careers (you cannot transfer to another). The “stable masters” are former wrestlers who oversee their training – and just about every other aspect of their lives. For example, no women are allowed in the stables, so marriage is atypical, and those who have not reached level 2 in the skill rankings are barred from having girlfriends. Sumo wrestlers are also not allowed to drive a car – although many people point out that their weight often makes it physically impossible for them to reach the wheel anyway because of the size of their stomachs.

But life as a sumo wrestler is not all eating and pushing each other around. Sadly, it’s a scandal-ridden sport where beatings are common to toughen up young men so that they feel less and less pain over time.

Life is incredibly strict, and many rules are dictated by tradition, such as how to dress, wear their hair, and address people in public. Because of their polite and soft-spoken nature, many citizens often bow to sumo wrestlers on the street as a sign of respect for their discipline.

Some have called sumo wrestling a dying art in Japan, and many of us know that when this kind of thing happens, the organizations overseeing a tradition try to hold on tighter to their old ways rather than adapt. More recent stories on the sumo world point out its secretive nature, part of which seems designed to cover up the violence that goes on inside.

Mark Buckton, a sumo expert and former commentator and columnist for Japan Times, told the BBC about a typical day:

“They do eat a lot. But what they do, which is crucial to them is, as soon as they’ve eaten, they go to sleep. They don’t eat anything for breakfast – they do all the training in the morning. They eat their lunch – they would have what you would have, maybe a bit more. But they would just eat it with large volumes of rice. Crucially they will then go to bed. They won’t wake up till mid-afternoon. Then they’ll eat again in the evening – they’ll eat a lot. And then they’ll go to bed quite early, because they’ll be up at 5, 6 o’clock in the morning training.”

While there are roughly 650 fighters, only about 60 are in the tier that gets paid. Everyone else trains and fights without financial compensation.

Things are more lucrative and lenient for the top-level wrestlers – they can marry and live outside the stable. But if they are injured and begin to lose and drop down to a lower tier, they must leave their wives and children and return to the stable!

Buckton also described the brutal conditions for fighters who do not meet the stable master’s standards:

“Oh, they are horrible. Before the boy was killed in 2007, there were regular beatings. You’d see guys with welts on their backs and on the backs of their legs, for not trying hard enough.”

Even champions recall the “kawaigari” or “doting” they experienced – violent beatings that can last as long as 45 minutes. According to Buckton:

“There is remarkable consistency in how the training, and the punishments, have been applied across the different stables and over the decades. This also means that when Harumafuji-style incidents happen, you don’t talk about them for the sake of preserving the group.”

It’s worth remembering when Westerners laugh off sumo wrestling. And it sounds like it’s time for things to change. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Inside the scandal-hit world of Japan’s sumo wrestlers” — BBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12602 – Lopburi’s Monkey Buffet

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Lopburi, Thailand, is the kind of place that no one needs to be convinced to visit. It’s one of the country’s oldest cities, holds the oldest ruins, and is just generally stunning to look at overall. The only issue for most people is that it’s a little hard to get there. And what usually seals the deal is the fact that long-tailed macaque monkeys roam the streets and serve as entertainment.

In order to thank the monkeys, the residents of Lopburi hold an annual banquet for them at the site of a 13th-century temple known to house many macaques.

The macaques probably don’t care much about the dancers and other forms of entertainment on offer. Like most of us primates, they’re there for the food. And residents deliver in the form of piles of delicious fruits, vegetables, and sticky rice.

The locals believe that celebrating the monkeys brings them good luck and more tourists. But we imagine it’s also pretty fun to watch since monkeys go a little wild around piles of food. We’ve always wanted to see a monkey food fight, and the festival reportedly has plenty.

The festival itself draws tourists, but it may not be the best time to go since the macaques are pretty riled up. If you’ve ever been in a place where monkeys roam the streets you know they can be mischievous little thieves. They like to snatch phones, sunglasses, and purses, and there’s not much you can do once a monkey has your stuff.

If you’re willing to risk it anyway, the festival typically occurs at the end of November, and Lopburi is about a 3-hour drive from Bangkok. And there are food stands for the human attendees because you do NOT want to try and take a monkey’s feast. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Everything You Need To Know About The Lopburi Monkey Festival” — Culture Trip

WTF Fun Fact 12601 – The Origin of Gingerbread Men

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People ate well in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Ok, it was British food, but the desserts were good.

Decadent royal banquets were stocked with sweets like marzipan and shaped into elaborate designs of castles, animals, and even other foods. The queen also had a personal gingerbread maker.

At one of these events, she had this gingerbread maker bake cookies to resemble the foreign dignitaries she had invited. Prof. Carole Levin, an expert on Queen Elizabeth I’s court surmised that in a time of political turmoil, the amusing gesture may have even been a part of diplomacy. (We just hope the cookies were flattering and the people they resembled had a sense of humor because it’s easy for those sorts of things to backfire.)

While we don’t know which came first, around the same time, there was another, very different use of gingerbread “men.” Folk doctors (which were more along the lines of what we might think of as witches) would “prescribe” them to women looking for love. According to Levin, the woman would buy the cookie and attempt to get the man she had her eye on to eat it. They were believed to be imbued with magic that would make the man fall in love with the cookie-giver.

We’re not sure how often it worked, but it’s not NOT true that the way to some men’s hearts is through their stomachs.

The delicious-smelling cake had been around for centuries before all of this, but baking them into the shape of little people is a culinary curiosity that traces back to a specific time and place. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Surprising Reasons Why Gingerbread Men Became a Holiday Classic” — TIME Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12600 – Potty-Trained Cattle

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Did you know that cattle can be potty trained with less instruction than toddlers? Some say it’s “easier” or “faster,” but that’s really going to depend on your access to and familiarity with each. Still, we didn’t realize cows would have the inclination to do it at all!

Researchers and cattle ranchers have worked together in Germany to train cattle not to pee out in the open. And it’s not a matter of cleanliness; it’s a matter of survival. OUR survival.

There are around 1 billion cattle in the world. Each pees about 10 liters (or 5 gallons) a day. It’s a lot. But we all pee, so what’s the problem?

Well, there are a couple of issues here:
1. When cows release all that urine in barns, it mixes with poop on the floor and creates ammonia, leading to air pollution for nearby people.
2. When they pee in pastures, it leeches into local waterways. And while most places are equipped with treatment facilities, not all of that infrastructure is in great shape and can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of potential pollutants in the water.
3. Cow urine also contains nitrous oxide. This substance gets trapped in the earth’s atmosphere and can prevent heat from escaping into space, increasing our planet’s average temperature.

So, if we can prevent all this, why wouldn’t we? And we can’t stop cows from peeing, so scientists want to see if they can capture the urine in a way that allows them to control it so that it causes less harm.

Potty training cows sounds ridiculous, but so does letting them pollute our atmosphere while we do nothing. (And let’s face it, we’re not getting rid of cows any time soon.)

Of course, they had to call it “MooLoo training,” so some of this remains pretty silly. The experiment also involved a “cow psychologist,” which is not something we ever heard about at career day.

Ok, so what does cow potty training actually look like? It’s not quite as bizarre as it sounds. It’s just a special pen with astroturf that cows can be trained to pee in. The floor is created in a way that allows the urine to be captured underneath. And some of it can even be used to make fertilizer.

Cows are pretty smart, but they’re also encouraged by food – so it didn’t take them long to realize they got a snack after using the “restroom,” making it much easier to train them.

The first experiment involved 16 cattle and the researchers had 11 of them trained after about 10 days.

Now that we know “MooLoo training” works, the goal will be to automate it so it can be adopted by farmers with much larger herds.

If you’re really eager to see a cow use the bathroom, there’s a video below!

–WTF fun facts

Source: “Potty-trained cattle could help reduce pollution” — Science News

WTF Fun Fact 12599 – Philadelphia’s “Eagles Jail”

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Philadelphia fans have a reputation for being…well, let’s say rowdy. For example, they’re the fans who booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs. In fact, in 1986, the Eagles stadium stopped selling beer at halftime in the hopes of improving fan behavior. But it clearly didn’t do the job because, in 1997, the Eagles installed a courtroom and jail at Veterans Stadium.

During a Monday Night Football game that year, the Eagles played the 49ers in a matchup that somehow sparked around 60 fistfights in the stands, along with some yahoo setting off a flare gun. Enough was enough. Families claimed to be afraid to take their children to games. So, the next time fans returned to the stadium, Eagles Court was in order.

On opening day, 20 fans were brought in front of Justice Seamus P. McCaffery.

But here’s another fun fact: It turns out Philly fans weren’t really the problem.

McCaffery said :

“Eagles Court was a lot of fun and it served a purpose. One of the interesting facts that came out of Eagles Court was that 95 percent of the people arrested were not from Philadelphia. But Philadelphia was getting broad-brushed as the city with horrible, horrible fans.”

So, apparently, Philly isn’t necessarily home to rowdy fans, but it encouraged rowdiness in people somehow.

For the most part, the court existed to bounce and/or fine people who got out of hand. Anyone who had committed a legit crime was handed over to the local police.

Eagles security and Philadelphia police had cited or arrested fans in the past, but most of them never showed up to their court dates weeks or months later, and their crimes weren’t serious enough for the police to track them down again. Eagles court made sure they were fined on the spot (or assigned community service).

But one of the problems with Eagles court is that it virtually forced people to plead guilty on the spot to avoid being arrested for real. It’s unlikely that everyone was sober enough to understand what was happening.

Some media outlets report that the court was only housed in the stadium in 1997 and was transferred out and into an actual court by 1998, while others say it was in the stadium for its whole (short) life, from 1997 to 2003. When the Vet was replaced by Lincoln Financial Field, there was also a 4-cell jail inside, but that only lasted two years. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Eagles’ history features a stadium jail, bounties and vomit, but lacks titles” — CBS Sports

WTF Fun Fact 12598 – Volunteering for Prison

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Zurich West Prison is designed to house no more than 241 people awaiting trial in Switzerland. Prison isn’t a fun place in any country, but that didn’t stop people from lining up to give the place a test run earlier this year. The prison is accepting volunteers over the age of 18 who live or work in Zurich.

As of February, over 832 people had applied to spend a couple of nights testing the facility in April 2022. What can we say, people are willing to try just about anything!

But they won’t be Instagramming the experience – there are no phones allowed. So, you won’t be able to see their prison meals, while they’ll be able to choose from a list of vegetarian, halal, or meat-based options.

Oh, and get this – they’ll also be able to opt-in to a strip search! (We’d pass, but that’s just us.) Of course, as volunteers, they’ll have the option of leaving at any time.

Switzerland’s prisons had come under scrutiny for their poor conditions, so Zurich West Prison wants to iron out any kinks beforehand. They aren’t prepping it to be a luxury stay, but they want to get a sense of how the prison operates with people in it before those people are those who have been charged with a crime.

According to an article in Bloomberg:

“What else do we know about the experience volunteers should expect? For starters, they won’t pay anything, and they also shouldn’t expect to get paid for their time in jail. Daily life will include going through intake procedures, testing food, walking the yard, and sleeping in a cell. Cellphones and other electronic devices must be left at the door when checking in, and every volunteer will need a security clearance. To obtain this clearance, participants must go through a security checkpoint similar to airport TSA. And as for strip searches? According to officials, those are voluntary. (Whew!)

During the authentic incarceration experience, volunteers will receive safe words. That way, if things spiral out of control, they can let authorities know ASAP. The same goes for those who get cold feet at any point during the test run. In return, the experience will let officials of the prison system test the new facility’s capacity, operations, and services. It will also give correctional officers a chance to communicate and cooperate with authorities like prosecutors and law enforcement.”

The prison hopes the safe words won’t be necessary.  – WTF fun facts

Source: “Swiss Prison Flooded With Volunteers for Three Nights in Jail” — Bloomberg

WTF Fun Fact 12597 – The Man Who Married A Pillow

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In 2010, a 28-year-old Korean man named Lee Jin-Gyu fell in love with his body pillow. The Japanese dakimakura is a cushy life-sized that also just so happens to have an anime character printed on it.

According to a widely-cited story in Metro UK:

“In Lee’s case, his beloved pillow has an image of Fate Testarossa, from the ‘magical girl’ anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. Now the 28-year-old otaku (a Japanese term that roughly translates to somewhere between ‘obsessive’ and ‘nerd’) has wed the pillow in a special ceremony, after fitting it out with a wedding dress for the service in front of a local priest. Their nuptials were eagerly chronicled by the local media.‘He is completely obsessed with this pillow and takes it everywhere,’ said one friend.‘They go out to the park or the funfair where it will go on all the rides with him. Then when he goes out to eat he takes it with him and it gets its own seat and its own meal,’ they added.”

A priest presided over the special ceremony. The groom kissed the “bride,” and locals reported to the Korean media that the pair went everywhere together, including out to dinner and on theme park rides.

The wedding isn’t legal, of course, but it came on the of a Japanese man “marrying” his Nene Anegasaki, a character who only exists in the Nintendo DS game “Love Plus” in November 2009. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Man marries pillow” — Metro UK

WTF Fun Fact 12596 – Martin Luther’s Christmas Tree

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Christmas trees are a pagan tradition that predates Christianity (and, therefore, Christmas). That might lead someone knowledgeable about theology or Christian history to believe that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther wasn’t a fan since he wasn’t exactly known for going all-out on the holidays.

In the 16th century, so the story goes, Martin Luther was taking a Christmastime walk and was inspired by the twinkling stars above him. That’s when he got the idea to gussy up a Christmas tree. He used candles, of course, since they didn’t have those infuriating strings of lights yet.

It became a wider German tradition after that (since Martin Luther was also known for spreading his ideas around). And when German emigrated all over Europe and North America, they brought that tradition with them.

Decorated trees became an even more visible tradition when Queen Charlotte introduced the practice to her new husband, King George III, and his English court in the mid-18th century. After that, Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree was illustrated in an 1848 edition of Illustrated London News. That immediately made it more fashionable.

The tradition of lighting up Christmas trees probably came to the US around the 18th century as well when Hessian troops came to back up the British during the Revolutionary War. When German immigrants moved over in later decades under more polite circumstances, they reinvigorated the trend that others then found fascinating and decided to copy.

So just remember to blame Martin Luther when you’re untangling those lights next Christmas. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Why do we have Christmas trees? The surprising history behind this holiday tradition” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 12595 – A Dream Job That Gives You Nightmares

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Well, it may not be a long-term gig, but someone is going to make $2,400 to watch true crime documentaries.

The offer has been extended by MagellanTV and they’re technically offering one lucky person $100 an hour to watch 24 hours of documentaries and report back to them on the experience as part of their Third Annual True Crime Watch Dream Job.”

MagellanTV is a streaming service and they’re offering the money plus a free year-long subscription to one person. However, you don’t have a whole year to get your “job” done.

The winner needs to watch all 24 hours’ worth of true crime documentaries in a 48-hour period AND document the experience on social media.

Here’s who they’re looking for:

“Our ideal candidate lives for True Crime—they can handle the most menacing serial killer, the goriest details, and don’t flinch at the chilling paranormal. And they love it so much that they’re willing to stream it nonstop for 24 hours. Along with watching, they’ll be documenting their True Crime all-nighter on social media so everyone will see if they can hack it… or not.”

Documentaries include: “Lady Killers: Elizabeth Bathory,” “The Writer With No Hands,” “Nurses Who Kill: Paul Novak,” “Murder on the Internet: Fatal Targeting,” “21st Century Killer,” “Body Snatchers of New York,” “Nightclub Killer,” “The Family Who Vanished,” “Great Bank Heists,” and “CyberCrimes with Ben Hammersley,” and “Murder Maps.”

Sounds like you might have to plan for some nightmares and maybe spend some of that $2,400 for therapy. – WTF fun facts

Source: “You could earn $100 an hour — just by binging true crime” — CNN