funny

WTF Fun Fact 12972 – Lonnie Johnson and the Super Soaker

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The tale of NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson and the Super Soaker is one of intelligence, perseverance, and creativity. And who knew the iconic sibling-drencher was invented by accident?!

Lonnie Johnson’s story

Johnson was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1949 to parents who supported his ambitions to find out how things worked. Even as a kid, he played with rockets (and nearly burned down the house trying to make rocket fuel on the stove one day).

By the time he was in high school, he was trying to build his own robots. Despite going to a segregated school, he found ways to excel in the sciences and won a 1968 science fair for a robot created out of scrap metal. However, despite the attention that would have normally earned a young inventor, the University of Alabama showed no interest in admitting a Black student. So Johnson attended Tuskegee University, graduating in 1975 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in nuclear engineering on an ROTC scholarship.

After university, Johnson joined the Air Force, and during his service he received his first patent for a “Digital Distance Measuring Instrument.” According to Biography.com (cited below): “Simply put, it was an early version of DVD-reading technology, an innovation he later called “’he big fish that got away’ because he did not pursue it further.”

Lonnie Johnson’s accidental invention of the Super Soaker

In 1979, Johnson was recruited by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to his illustrious career in engineering (he was part of NASA’s Galileo mission that sent an unmanned spacecraft to Jupiter), he’ll likely be remembered for an invention that was largely an accident.

One day he was experimenting with new ideas for a refrigeration system that could use water instead of freon (which is hazardous). He happened to be in the bathroom at the time and hooked up a nozzle to the bathroom sink, accidentally shooting water across the room.

That’s when he realized it would make a great water gun toy. But it would be years before that toy would make it to shelves because Johnson rejoined the Air Force to help build B-52 stealth bombers in Nebraska.

The birth of the Super Soaker

At night, Johnson would work on his water gun, giving the first prototype to his 7-year-old daughter, Aneka. She quickly became the hit of the Air Force base with her new toy and Johnson knew it would do well in stores.

He was originally quoted $200K for the manufacturing of the first 1000 toys, which was more than he could afford. That meant he had to find a partner.

Biography.com explains that it was a company called Larami that helped Johnson launch the Super Soaker: “Larami put the first line of the gun, then known as the Power Drencher, on shelves in 1990. It was an instant hit, and after it was redesigned and rebranded Super Soaker the next year, sales went through the roof, with more than two million units sold in the summer of 1991.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “How Lonnie Johnson Invented the Super Soaker: The engineer tuned toy inventor gamed up the idea for the water gun while preparing for a NASA mission” — Biography.com

WTF Fun Fact 12969 – Manatees Fart to Swim

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Do you know a kid who loves to share fun facts about animals and just won’t stop telling you everything you never wanted to know about lizards or sharks or bugs? Well, it’s time to blow their minds with your superior animal knowledge and show them adults reign supreme in the world of truly fun facts. Manatees fart to swim.

Do manatees really fart to swim?

We’re totally serious. We even looked it up on Snopes because it seemed too good to be true.

While manatees are aquatic animals, they aren’t like fish, which can live underwater but also have something called a “swim bladder” to control their buoyancy. Instead, manatees need to float – and if you live in the water but need to stay atop it, you have three choices – be built to sit upon it (like a duck), tread water like your life depends on it (like a human), or have a mechanism that makes your body buoyant.

And since the animals we lovingly call “sea cows” eat about 100 pounds of vegetation a day, let’s just say staying perched upon a wave isn’t really an option for them. That’s why manatees developed a different mechanism to stay afloat. Farts.

Fart like your life depends on it

At Captain Mike’s Swimming with the Manatees in Crystal, Florida (whose website we’ve cited below), you’ll get a great explanation of how the fart propulsion actually works.

According to the experts who swim with the flatulent sea cows all day, all the vegetation they eat creates the same reaction in their bodies as it does in ours. Farts. Gas. Flatulence. Whatever you want to call it.

“For manatees, there is always enough gas in the body…The gas produced during digestion is stored in intestinal pouches ready for use in swimming,” note the experts.

And how does that lead to the ability to swim?

“The gas produced during digestion is lighter than water. So when the animals hold in a substantial amount of gas in intestinal pouches, they lower their overall density and float in water. On the contrary, releasing the gas from the body makes a manatee relatively denser than water and to be able to readily sink. That is why manatees fart to swim. For they have to continuously hold in enough gas in their bodies to be able to come to the surface to breathe. Then soon after, they have to fart in order to release some gas, become less buoyant, and sink underwater.”

Hold your breath

Manatees can actually hold their breath for up to 20 minutes (don’t try that one at home!). But rather than use the breath trick, they can use farts with a lot less effort.

So next time you’re in the pool, you can see how this works (without the farts – don’t use the farts). Take a big, deep breath, hold it, and then float on your back. Then release the air (from your nose or mouth, please) and notice that you sink a bit.

Then you can tell everyone around you to be grateful that you’re not a manatee. Otherwise, they would have seen a lot of bubbles from your backside. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Do manatees fart to swim?” — Swimming with the Manatees

WTF Fun Fact 12965 – The New Moon

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Have you ever heard that there was a new Moon only to look up at the sky and see no moon at all? Well, that’s because the Moon cycle is starting all over again.

Types of Moons

We obviously only have one Moon, but it goes through lots of phases. A “new” Moon is the opposite of a full Moon. During a full Moon, the sun is fully illuminating one side of the big ball. That’s what makes it glow so brightly in the night sky.

During the time when the Moon is “new,” we are seeing the side that is not illuminated by the sun. The Moon is still up there, but without the sun shining on it, we can’t see it in the night sky.

According to Farmer’s Almanac (cited below) “When the Moon is “new,” it’s located between the Earth and the Sun. In other words, the Moon is in line with the Sun, and the Sun and Earth are on opposite sides of the Moon. (Note that when the Moon is perfectly aligned in front of the Sun, it blocks out the Sun, giving us a solar eclipse.)”

Lunar cycles and the new Moon

The new Moon is the beginning of the lunar cycle. This lasts 29.5 days, and it’s the amount of time it takes for the moon to orbit the Earth.

The Moon cycle used to be used to measure months (each new moon signaled a new month).

Another fun fact: the new Moon always rises close to the time of sunrise.

And according to The Farmer’s Almanac:

“As the new Moon crosses the sky during the day, rising and setting around the same time as the Sun, it’s lost in the solar glare…The new Moon is also lit up from behind, showing us its dark side. It’s doubly invisible. New Moons generally can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

About a day (maybe two) after a new lunar cycle begins, you’ll be able to look up at the night sky and see a slim crescent off to the West after the sun sets. These crescent moons are often very bright. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Learn All About the New Moon” — Almanac

WTF Fun Fact 12964 – Our Obsession With Pumpkins

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Pumpking beer, pumpkin lattes, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin-spiced…you name it. Our obsession with pumpkins knows no bounds.

Even if you hate the taste of pumpkins, you might still be soothed by the sight of them. And there’s a reason for that.

What’s with our obsession with pumpkins?

Most pumpkin-flavored things don’t really taste like pumpkin or even contain pumpkin – in fact, most are made with a different type of squash altogether. We’re mostly in it for the spices.

Still, there’s a reason we market everything as “pumpkin flavored” – and it’s all about nostalgia.

According to NPR (cited below), a professor of American Studies at St. Louis University named Cindy Ott wrote a book titled Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon in which she describes why we’re so drawn to the round, orange gourds.

“It’s a vegetable that represents this idyllic farm life, and the best sort of moral virtue. And Americans have become attached to that,” she said.

“‘The rehab of pumpkin’s popularity began when 19th century Americans began to move away from rural life and into the city,’ Ott says. ‘People became stressed about… moving into the office and off the farms, and [the pumpkin] starts to appear in poems and in paintings,’ she says. ‘We’re celebrating the nostalgia for this old-fashioned, rural way of life that no one ever really wanted to stay on, but everyone’s always been romantic about.'”

Recycling pumpkin-flavored ideas

Did you know pumpkin beer isn’t a new phenomenon? Pumpkins were once the food of pure desperation.

NPR explains that “…pumpkin beers and pumpkin breads have been produced since colonial times, Ott says that they weren’t always the specialty foods that they are today. ‘Pumpkin beer was used when there was no barley. [If] there was no wheat for bread, they used pumpkin [for] bread,'”

If anyone mocks you for your pumpkin-flavored obsession, just tell them you’re helping the economy.

“Big corporations advertise many pumpkin-themed products, but due to their limited seasonal availability, many fresh pumpkins sold every fall still come from local family farms,” Ott told NPR. “And that’s actually helping to rejuvenate those farms.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Why Americans Go Crazy For Pumpkin And Pumpkin-Flavored Stuff” — NPR

WTF Fun Fact 12956 – Witzelsucht, a Joke Addiction

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Have you ever met anyone who couldn’t stop telling jokes, even if no one else found them funny? Maybe they had Witzelsucht.

What’s a joke addict?

In 2016, neuroscientists Elias Granadillo and Mario Mendez published a paper titled “Pathological Joking or Witzelsucht Revisited” in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences that described two patients with damage to their brains suffering from joke addiction.

They explained that “impaired humor integration from right lateral frontal injury and disinhibition from orbitofrontal damage results in disinhibited humor.” Two men were used as an example.

Compulsive jokesters

According to Discover Magazine:

“Patient #1 was a 69-year-old right-handed man presented for a neuropsychiatric evaluation because of a 5-year history of compulsive joking… On interview, the patient reported feeling generally joyful, but his compulsive need to make jokes and create humor had become an issue of contention with his wife. He would  wake her up in the middle of the night bursting out in laughter, just to tell her about the jokes he had come up with. At the request of his wife, he started writing down these jokes as a way to avoid waking her. As a result, he brought to our office approximately 50 pages filled with his jokes.“

“Patient #2 was a 57-year old man, who had become “a jokester”, a transformation that had occurred gradually, over a three period. At the same time, the man became excessively forward and disinhibited, making inappropriate actions and remarks. He eventually lost his job after asking “Who the hell chose this God-awful place?” The patient constantly told jokes and couldn’t stop laughing at them. However, he did not seem to find other people’s jokes funny at all.”

Diagnosis: Witzelsucht

Apparently, both men displayed signs of something called Witzelsucht, “a German term literally meaning ‘joke addiction.'”

“Several cases have been reported in the neurological literature, often associated with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. Witzelsucht should be distinguished from ‘pathological laughter‘, in which patients start laughing ‘out of the blue’ and the laughter is incongruent with their “mood and emotional experience.” In Witzelsucht, the laughter is genuine: patients really do find their own jokes funny, although they often fail to appreciate those of others.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Joke Addiction’ As A Neurological Symptom” — Discover Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12950 – Anatidaephobia

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Anatidaephobia is the fear of being watched by ducks. And despite this existing as a fun fact for decades, it may not actually be a real thing. If it is, it originated in an awfully strange place for a real phobia.

Who’s afraid of a duck?

Ducks are probably only watching you if you get too close to them or their nests. But we don’t want to downplay phobias, because they’re very real and produce real physical symptoms. So, could someone fear that a duck is watching them? Sure.

The question is whether this fear rises to the level of anatidaephobia. That’s less likely since the word was coined by Gary Larson in his comic The Far Side. The idea of this particular phobia is a hoax.

Phobias and anatidaephobia

Phobias spawn feelings of intense fear and worry about object or situations. While there’s no formal duck phobia, the idea of anatidaephobia comes from the Greek word “anatidae,” meaning “swan, ducks, or geese,” and “phobos,” meaning “fear.”

According to PsychCentral (cited below, and which does eventually get around to the point of mentioning it’s a hoax): “People who experience this phobia may not necessarily be worried that a duck might attack them. Instead, their fear centers around the idea that somewhere, a duck could be watching them — constantly.”

However, while “Anatidaephobia may seem like it could be a credible phobia, the fear of being constantly watched by a duck is actually a fictional phobia created for entertainment.”

In other words, you won’t find a fear of ducks in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), though you will find diagnostic criteria for “Specific Phobia: Animal type.”

That doesn’t mean a fear of birds, in general, is fake though. “Ornithophobia, or the fear of birds, is an animal type of specific phobia. Some people with this type of phobia may fear all birds or just a specific type of bird, such as a duck. Although anatidaephobia may not be real, the fear of ducks is a very real phobia.”

In the end, PsychCentral explains that: “Anatidaephobia can be traced back to Gary Larson, creator of the ‘The Far Side’ comic. Larson’s cartoon comic depicted a paranoid office worker with the caption, ‘Anatidaephobia: The fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.’ The comic showed a duck looking out a window from another building behind the office. The point of Larson’s cartoon was to illustrate that any object can be a source of fear. Since the fictional phobia debuted in 1988, anatidaephobia has gained popularity. This has led to the internet questioning the phobia’s veracity. While anatidaephobia is indeed a hoax and not a real phobia, fears and phobias are no laughing matter. Phobias can have serious affects on a person’s daily life.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Fear of Ducks Watching You: Is Anatidaephobia a Real Condition?” — PsychCentral

WTF Fun Fact 12935 – Pumpkin Spice Taste Mystery

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Traditionally, pumpkin spice flavorings have not contained pumpkin at all. Of course, pumpkin spice lovers have been mocked for their “fake flavor,” even though there are plenty of flavors that have no real foodstuffs in them. That pumpkin spice taste so many of us like is really just cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, etc.

Starting around 2015, things changed for Starbucks fans. They actually got pumpkin in their pumpkin spice drinks.

The new pumpkin spice taste

Even though Starbucks’ pumpkin spice drinks are sold in the fall and winter, they are the chain’s most popular offerings, with the pumpkin spice latte (or PSL) maintaining the #1 spot. In fact, Starbucks sells around 20 million of them per year. We don’t drink them, but we can’t deny there’s a certain tastiness there (thanks to lots of sugar and fat and stimulating spices like cinnamon and clove).

According to Newsweek (cited below): “On August 30,Starbucksofficially ushered coffee lovers into the fall season with the return of its pumpkin spice latte; however, the return has left some customers feeling disappointed, as they believe the iconic drink tastes different this year than in years past.
Posting to TikTok on Thursday, a purported Starbucks barista named Maria confirmed that the drink does, in fact, taste different this year because the company “changed” its pumpkin spice recipe.The videohas amassed over 860,000 views and more than 1,400 comments.”

How could they change such an iconic flavor?! Well, it turns out that some stores are getting an updated recipe, but pumpkin has been part of it for around 8 years.

Now with real pumpkin (kind of)

The newer Starbucks syrup contains “real pumpkin ingredient” – whatever that means.

While PSL fans on TikTok are insisting there’s something different about the 2022 lattes, Starbucks has maintained that they are using the same recipe as in previous years.

So what is pumpkin spice?

Until Starbucks relented and added some sort of pumpkin-derived flavoring, no pumpkin spice actually contained pumpkin. Even the pumpkin pie spice we buy in stores is simply a blend ofcinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, and ginger.

Regardless of whether it’s “real” or not, the flavor is now iconic. In fact, Merriam-Webster added the phrase “pumpkin spice” to their dictionary in 2022. —WTF fun facts

Source: “Why Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Tastes Different This Year: Barista Explains” — Newsweek

WTF Fun Fact 12933 – Two California Tomato Highway Spills

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It’s never fun to see a highway spill. You just know someone is in big trouble for letting a product spill out of their truck and onto the roadway to snarl traffic. But we couldn’t help but at least stifle a bemused “oops” when hearing about two California highway spills – partly because it just seems so absurd.

Granted, we doubt it was amusing to any of the drivers – or the people in need of tomatoes those days.

The first California highway spill

On August 30, 2022, a truck crash resulted in part of I-80 in Vacaville, California spilling its load of 50,000 pounds (!) of fresh tomatoes all over the highway on a Monday morning, disrupting traffic for hours.

The California Highway Patrol said the truck transporting the tomatoes crashed into another vehicle near an offramp. This caused the truck driver to lose control and hit the center divide and spill hundreds of pounds of tomatoes across the lanes. While drivers tried to maneuver around the mess, they also crashed into each other, creating an even bigger traffic disaster (we’re just guessing – but gawking while driving probably played a role here).

While the driver of the truck and two other people were treated at a local hospital, no major injuries were reported at the time.

The second spill

By sheer coincidence, the same thing happened again a few days later on another California highway. And we can only imagine the California Highway Patrol’s reaction when they got the call. Did they think they were being pranked?

According to Trucker’s News (cited below): “For the second time in a week, a tractor-trailer spilled a large load of tomatoes on a California highway. On Friday, Sept. 2, a load of tomatoes covered the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 in Elk Grove near Sacramento. The California Highway Patrol reported a trailer loaded with tomatoes detached from a truck around 7:45 a.m. PDT. There were no injuries reported.”

The two California highway spills took place about 50 miles away from one another. Considering just how big California is, that’s quite a coincidence.

Playing ketchup

A Sacramento Bee story on the crash by Michael McGough was full of puns on the messy coincidence:

“Running late in morning rush-hour traffic? Time to ketchup.
For the second time this week, a truck carrying tomatoes spilled on a Northern California freeway near Sacramento, painting the roadway red and causing delays.
A trailer carrying the fruit detached from a truck around 7:45 a.m. Friday on southbound Interstate 5, south of Elk Grove Boulevard, according to the California Highway Patrol’s online activity log.“

We’re glad no one was hurt and just hope this doesn’t lead to a BLT shortage in the area. — WTF fun facts

Source: “For 2nd time in a week, large load of tomatoes spilled in California” — Trucker’s News

WTF Fun Fact 12932 – Nigel Richards, French Scrabble Champion

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Nigel Richards is from New Zealand. He’s a worldwide Scrabble champion, but his most impressive feat may just be winning the French-language Scrabble World Championship without actually knowing how to speak French.

Memorizing vs learning

If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you know that there are two parts to success – grammar and vocabulary. You can be great at grammar, but if you can’t memorize new words then it doesn’t do you much good. Equally, you can know lots of vocabulary words, but if you can’t put them together in a sentence (or even pronounce them), you can’t actually speak the language.

Nigel Richards memorizes the dictionary

Before trying his hand with French, New Zealander Nigel Richards won a couple of English-language Scrabble championships. But that clearly wasn’t enough of a challenge. That’s when he decided to tackle French.

But when you’re playing Scrabble, grammar doesn’t matter, only the words in the dictionary do. So Richards decided to try and memorize as many words as possible from the French dictionary.

Clearly, he did a great job, because he beat all of the actual French speakers in a 2015 tournament.

According to NPR (cited below): “It was only in late May [of 2014] that Richards began his quest to win the French world title, according to theFrench Scrabble Federation. That’s when he set about memorizing the French Scrabble dictionary.”

Richards obviously has an impeccable memory. After all, there are 386,000 words in French Scrabble and only 187,000 in North American Scrabble.

Scrabble expert Stefan Fatsis told NPR: “Basically, what he does is, he looks at word lists and looks at dictionary pages… he can conjure up the image of what he has seen. He told me that if he actually hears a word, it doesn’t stick in his brain. But if he sees it once, that’s enough for him to recall the image of it. I don’t know if that’s a photographic memory; I just think it’s something that his brain chemistry allows him to do.” —WTF fun facts

Source: “Winner Of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French” — NPR