wtf fun fact

WTF Fun Fact 12710 – Elvis Is Leaving Vegas

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Chapels can no longer use Elvis’s image and likeness for Las Vegas weddings, according to cease-and-desist letters obtained by CNN.

Authentic Brands Group (ABG) asked Vegas Weddings and Viva Las Vegas Weddings to stop conducting The King-themed weddings because they are infringing on intellectual property rights owned by Elvis’s estate and creating “the false impression that Elvis Presley Enterprises has approved, endorsed, or sponsored the Infringing Chapel. The Infringing Chapel is clearly trading off the Elvis Presley intellectual property rights, image, name, and likeness without the consent of Elvis Presley Enterprises.”

Authentic Brands Group purchased the intellectual property associated with Elvis in 2013. 

They released a statement saying:

“As the guardians of the Elvis Presley estate, it is our responsibility to safeguard his legacy. This includes ensuring that all products, services, and advertisements utilizing Elvis’ name, image, or likeness are officially licensed by Elvis Presley Enterprises. The estate has strong relationships with official Elvis tribute artists, fan clubs, and festivals, as well as a robust global network of licensed merchandise partners. There is no intention to shut down chapels that offer Elvis packages in Las Vegas. We are seeking to partner with each of these small businesses to ensure that their use of Elvis’ name, image, and likeness are officially licensed and authorized by the estate, so they can continue their operations.”

In case you need the tl;dr version, it’s not so much that Elvis is leaving Vegas but that the owners of his name, image, and likeness would like a cut of the profits from Elvis-themed weddings.

The wedding industry in Las Vegas has argued that they help keep The King’s legacy alive. ABG has backtracked a bit on their initial statement:

“We are working with the chapels to ensure that the usage of Elvis’ name, image, and likeness are in keeping with his legacy. Elvis is embedded into the fabric of Las Vegas, and we embrace and celebrate Elvis fandom. From tribute artists and impersonators to chapels and fan clubs, each and every one of these groups help to keep Elvis relevant for new generations of fans.”

It remains to be seen how it’ll all work out, but if you had an Elvis-themed wedding planned in Vegas, you’ll want to double-check your plans! – WTF fun facts

Source: “Las Vegas wedding chapels receive Elvis cease-and-desist letters” — CNN

WTF Fun Fact 12709 – The Josh Fight

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It all started with a guy named Josh Swain who found a bunch of other Josh Swains on social media. Then it grew to encompass all Joshes. Now, anyone with a pool noodle and a good sense of humor can show up.

It’s The Josh Fight.

The Josh Fight is a now-annual event held in Lincoln, Nebraska (since that’s where the coordinates that the first Josh randomly picked out led people). The whole city is now in on the fun and the second annual The Josh Fight in 2022 had food trucks, games, and the traditional pool noodle fight. (Only soft, flexible pool noodles are allowed.)

Instead of getting out of hand in a bad way, the Joshes of the world really stepped up, crowning 5-year-old Josh Vinson Jr. as the Ultimate Josh. He returned to successfully defend his title.

According to Complex: “The event isn’t just for fun. With the pool noodle fight, the group raised almost $21K for Omaha’s Children’s Hospital and Medical Center. Some of those funds will be given to the Joshua Collinsworth Memorial Foundation. The Josh Cellars wine label also said it will match the same funds.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Hundreds of People Named Josh Once Again Gathered in Nebraska for Pool Noodle Fight to Select the No. 1 Josh” — Complex

WTF Fun Fact 12708 – Parents Sue For Grandchildren

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In a story that raised eyebrows around the world, a couple in India is telling their son and daughter-in-law that waiting six years for a grandchild is just too long (or at least long enough).

Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad and Sadhana Prasad paid for an education in the U.S. so their son could become a pilot, bought him a luxury car, and financed his lavish wedding and overseas honeymoon. And now they are looking for payback in the form of a grandchild to dote on.

The couple’s lawyer, Arvind Srivastava, seems to understand: “I feel very sorry for them because I am also an Indian and I can understand their pain,” he said. “This is an Indian parent thing.”

There are probably plenty of prospective grandparents around the world who can sympathize with the disappointment, but it’s the lawsuit (and the accompanying feeling of entitlement) that is…let’s say…puzzling.

They seem to feel that the money was an investment in their own child so they could get something back – in the form of a grandchild. They’ve expressed sadness, embarrassment, and now a bit of litigious rage that the couple seems to have no interest in having a baby after six years. And they seem to think that they are now owed $650,000 for the disappointment and humiliation they have endured.

The deal is that the young couple can now take a year to produce the heir or pay up, and a northern Indian court is overseeing the case (which, according to most legal scholars, will go nowhere).

But regardless of whether or not the case just goes away, it’s raising a debate about what kids owe their parents, legally and spiritually.

According to the NYT: “In the Hindu faith, as in other traditions, children have a duty to repay a moral debt to their parents by taking care of them in their old age. Having grandchildren is also seen as necessary to carry forward a family’s lineage and help one’s parents achieve enlightenment.”

Here’s an interview with the parents involved:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “No Grandchild? Six Years After Son’s Wedding, These Parents Are Suing” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12707 – The Role Of Goats In Argan Oil

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Maybe you’ve heard of argan oil. It’s very trendy in skin and hair products and the oil is quite expensive. It comes from the nuts of Argania trees, which are found in Morocco.

But argan oil isn’t so easily harvested from these nuts. In order to make the oil easier to harvest, you generally have to wait for the nut to pass through the digestive tract of a local mountain goat first. So, yes, what we mean here is that the nuts are eaten by goats, softened by their digestive tracts, pooped out, and THEN gathered by people for creating argan oil.

Of course, there are other ways of harvesting (humans doing the hard work of peeling them) and you’ll find many companies insisting that their argan oil comes from goat-free nuts. In those cases, the goats end up being a nuisance (and all because people are squeamish).

But frankly, it’s hard to know for sure how the nuts get into human hands. And it doesn’t really matter since the oil has no traces of goat poop in it by the time it gets to you.

The other fascinating thing about the mountain goats that helped launch the argan oil industry is that they became talented tree climbers precisely because the Argania trees bear fruit. There’s not much fruit on the ground in Morocco for goats, especially in summer. Once the goats eat all the low-hanging fruit, they have no other choice than to head upward.

While there are other goats around the world that climb trees, many of the pictures we see of multiple goats in trees are probably Moroccan mountain goats getting their fruity dinners.

And because they’re goats, they end up eating the nuts as well. Since they can’t digest those, the nuts end up on the ground later on (via poop mostly, but some goats will spit them out after trying to chew them). – WTF fun facts

Source: “Tree goats” — CBS News

WTF Fun Facts 12706 – Oxygen From The Ocean

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It’s easy to think all our oxygen comes from trees on land – and a LOT of it does (especially rainforests, which there are lots of, and which need protection). But, in fact, most of it comes from the oceans.

That’s a bit harder to believe, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Plankton, specifically phytoplankton, produce most of the Earth’s oxygen. It also serves as food for sea creatures, but they don’t do much else that makes them interesting to most people. They just float around, completely at the mercy of the currents. They’re green and cruddy and you might even look at them and think “eww.”

And that’s fine since they also can’t be offended.

Here’s the deal: even though oceanic phytoplankton isn’t nearly as pretty as trees, it does similar work for us. These little organisms mostly float along the surface of the water or the upper part of the ocean where light still penetrates. They require sunlight to live and grow and produce food for other ocean creatures. They contain chlorophyll to capture the sunlight. If you remember back to grade school science, you probably see where this is going – photosynthesis.

Our oceanic phytoplankton turns the energy from sunlight, as well as carbon dioxide, and mineral salts partly into oxygen. There’s a lot of other stuff going on there too (other byproducts of photosynthesis, like the sugar they feed on), but oxygen is the byproduct we care about at the moment since we need it to breathe.

The cool thing is that even if you don’t live anywhere near an ocean, you still get the benefits because of the way the planet works. Oxygen is great because it just fills the atmosphere and doesn’t need to be shipped via trucks and planes to far-off destinations.

Scientists estimate that 50-80% of the oxygen production that takes place on Earth comes from the ocean. That’s a big range, but even if you go with the more conservative number, it’s clear that we can’t live without them. However, a lot of that oxygen also goes back into the ocean for other ocean life that needs it.

Don’t get us wrong, we love rainforests and regular trees too. But phytoplankton is doing more work than other flora when it comes to keeping breathing creatures alive.

We can do things like track plankton and get some readings off them, but it’s hard to know exact numbers of what they’re producing at any given time. The amount of oxygen they give off can change with the time of day or the time of year. It can also change depending on how healthy the oceans are.

One problem is that things like dead and decaying plants and animals in the ocean also consume oxygen when they decompose. That’s just one reason why killing off aquatic life (such as coral reefs) can be bad for us.

But if you remember one thing, it should be that these tiny, single-celled creatures do a lot of work for us by not only producing oxygen but by absorbing some of the CO2 we emit.

Some people call them “the lungs of the sea.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “How much oxygen comes from the ocean?” — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

WTF Fun Fact 12705 – Invasive “Jumping Worms”

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In a not-so-fun turn of events, people in the U.S. are concerned about an invasive species of worm that can reproduce on its own, destroy soil, and spread quickly.

Usually, worms are a vital part of ecosystems and help the soil provide nutrients to crops. But not the Amynthas agrestis, or Asian jumping worm. They’ve been troubling people since 2013 in the U.S., but they’ve been spotted far and wide now and farmers are concerned. They are native to east Asia, and Japan and the Korean peninsula in particular.

There are lots of ways worms can move around the world, but we’ve never seen them pose this kind of threat. More recently, they’ve been seen as far west as California’s Napa county (although to be fair, that’s actually closer to Japan).

We import a lot of beautiful plants from overseas for our gardens, so it’s no surprise the U.S. is now home to new kinds of worms. But these ones can cause long-term damage (and startle gardeners quite a bit!). They’re called “jumping worms for a reason.

According to The Guardian, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) warned in a report:

“These earthworms are extremely active, aggressive, and have voracious appetites. True to their name, they jump and thrash immediately when handled, behaving more like a threatened snake than a worm, sometimes even breaking and shedding their tail when caught.”

Yikes. Good thing they’re still small.

Normally, we’d say let nature be, but it turns out that they may cost a lot of money (and even livelihoods) down the line since this isn’t the soil they’re supposed to be in. The Guardian warned: “Jumping worms can destroy a forest ecosystem by chewing through fallen leaves, in turn destroying the top layer of forest soil upon which many plants and organisms depend.”

The CDFA report continued the dire warning: “They are destructive and cause severe damage to hardwood forests, especially those consisting of maple, basswood, red oak, poplar or birch species that rely on thick layers of leaf litter that serve as rooting medium.”

Sometimes we don’t realize how important soil is to our lives, and these are capable of completely changing the nature of soil (and therefore the crops that can be grown in it).

The Guardian also provided some advice (since, as you likely know, even chopping a worm into pieces with your garden shovel isn’t going to do the job – in fact, it can just create more worms):

“Experts have recommended several strategies to detect and eliminate the worms, including using a mustard pour – a mixture consisting of water and yellow mustard seeds – over soil to drive out any worms to the surface, and covering moistened soil with a sheet of transparent polyethylene for two to three weeks until soil temperature exceeds 104F for at least three days, destroying the worm’s cocoons.”

You can also bag the worms and bake them in the sun – anything that keeps them from thriving and spreading. And you may want to double-check your potting mixes and mulches before you spread them around your yard. Even the wind can blow around their egg sacs, spreading them easily.

It may even be the case that over the last few years, leaf pick-ups that turn our autumn leaves into compost have helped spread the worms.

Want to see a jumping worm in action? Check it out:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Extremely active’ jumping worms that can leap a foot raise alarm in California” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12704 – The World’s Oldest Wine

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It turns out we’ve always loved fermenting grapes!

The evidence is an archaeological find around 20 miles away from Tbilisi, Georgia (the country!). Amidst low, mud-brick houses, there is a mound called Gadachrili Gora where Stone Age farmers lived around 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists found pottery decorated with grapes and a pollen analysis conducted on the surrounding hillsides found evidence that grape vines were grown there. (It turns out we’ve always liked to draw grapes on things as well!)

In a 2017 paper published in PNAS, called “Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus,” an international team of archaeologists laid out the proof that the people who lived around Gadachrili Gora were likely the world’s earliest vintners. And while we could have guessed the area, it was hard to believe how early in human history people were producing, storing, and enjoying wine on a large scale – since 6000 BCE! We were still prehistoric and used stone and bone tools (hopefully not while drinking).

National Geographic explained the evidence and talked to the archaeologists involved in the dig (which began in the 1960s but was only finished up recently):

“When the samples were analyzed by University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern, he found tartaric acid, a chemical “fingerprint” that shows wine residues were present in fragments of pottery from both sites.

Combined with the grape decorations on the outside of the jars, ample grape pollen in the site’s fine soil, and radiocarbon dates from 5,800 B.C. to 6,000 B.C., the chemical analysis indicates the people at Gadachrili Gora were the world’s earliest winemakers. (Tipplers at a Chinese site called Jiahu were making fermented beverages from a mixture of grains and wild fruit a thousand years earlier.)

Because they didn’t find many grape seeds or stems preserved in the village’s soil, archaeologists think the wine was made in the nearby hills, close to where the grapes were grown.

“They were pressing it in cooler environments, fermenting it, and then pouring it into smaller jugs and transporting it to the villages when it was ready to drink,” says University of Toronto archaeologist Stephen Batiuk, who co-directed the joint expedition alongside archaeologist Mindia Jalabdze of the Georgian National Museum.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Oldest Evidence of Winemaking Discovered at 8,000-Year-Old Village” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 12703 – The Ancient Art of Topiary

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The art of topiary has a long history and going in and out of style. And we’re not exactly sure who made the first shaped and trained tree or shrub or why.

While the word “topiary” is a 16th-century English term, it comes from the Lain topiarius, meaning ornamental gardener. You can find that word in letters from 1st/2nd century CE author Pliny the Younger’s letters. He described the Tuscan villa of Gaius Matius Calvinus as having many animals and other figures made out of cypress. He introduced the art to his friend Julius Caesar.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, no one really had time for topiary (or for ornamental gardens at all) for a couple of hundred years, although the art was largely preserved among monks who manicured their gardens. (Even a manicured hedge is technically a topiary.)

The artistic boom of the Renaissance brought topiary back into favor among those who could afford ornamental gardens and Italian villas were home to everything from topiary animals to giant bushy obelisks and pyramids.

Of course, many of us associate topiary with the French because of the gardens of Versailles, which is still a premier place to view them to this day. But each country had its own way of doing things – some favored large cones, others liked things at smaller scales.

English gardens are also famous for topiaries, but things got a bit out of hand as people became obsessed with more elaborate shapes and sizes.

By the 18th century, topiary was primed for a take-down as being both too trendy and too ridiculous in some of its forms. So when satirist Alexander Pope wrote a widely-read essay called “Verdant Sculpture” in the newspaper in September 1713, it seemed so spot-on that people were soon embarrassed by their elaborate mazes and giant tree animals. By the 1730s, many mansions had their topiaries removed as people decided they were unstylish in light of the mocking.

Of course, people who didn’t care about the trendiest way to garden still had them, but aristocrats didn’t push the art forward for another century and a half.

By the 1870s, the style became popular in England again and remains popular today.

The U.S. caught up to the gardening trend in the 1950s and 60s when Walt Disney decided to introduce topiaries to Disney World in the shape of his cartoon characters. Now topiary was portable as well and could be brought indoors, which coincided with the rise in popularity of the U.S. houseplant.

(And let’s not forget that many of us aged 40 and up remember Edward Scissorhands as the ultimate topiarist!)

Now you can find topiary around the world in all shapes and sizes, and it shows no sign of going out of style any time soon. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Topiary Tango” — Center for Architecture

WTF Fun Fact 12702 – A North American Hydrangea

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There are nearly 75 species of hydrangea (depending on who you ask) and most hydrangeas are native to Asia. In fact, we once thought all hydrangeas were Asian natives until 1910.

As the story goes, Harriet Kirkpatrick, a wealthy woman from Illinois, was out on horseback one day when she discovered a wild hydrangea along a wooded trail. Known to indigenous Americans, no one else had been aware of it. It’s the variety we know refer to as the “Annabelle” hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens), also called a “smooth” hydrangea.

As far as we know, Kirkpatrick is responsible for the propagation of the flower since she came back later, dug it up, planted it on her property, and began to share it with her friends.

According to Fairfax Master Gardener Ray Novitske, Kirkpatrick was an artist:

“Kirkpatrick’s ceramics were known for utilitarian and ceremonial presentation pottery
(mostly ceramic pigs) throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Pottery manufacturing at this time was usually located where the clay and the railroads met, and geologists reported that some of the finest clay for pottery was found in and around Anna. This became a natural
place for pottery. Today the Kirkpatrick’s Anna Pottery pieces have found their way to museums and collectors. With its successful business, the family was wealthy so it could participate in leisure activities such as horseback riding.”

The rest of the Annabelle hydrangea’s story, including its name, comes fifty years later when it was “brought to the attention of J.C. McDaniel, famous plantsman and professor of horticulture. He loved it and set the wheels in motion for it to become a commercial success. Two years later, after some nursery propagation and further investigation, it was introduced to the world. McDaniel first wanted to register the hydrangea as “Ballerina”…but a name was selected to honor the belles of Anna who discovered it.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Story of the Annabelle Hydrangea” — Fairfax Gardening