Things I Learned in March 2025
Serendipitous Factoids 14: Happy Meals, Gummy Worms, and Legislative Branch Immigrants.
Trivial things I’ve learned while looking for something else…
The longest gum wrapper chain is 23 miles long (37 km), or 122,066 feet. It is made up of over 2.9 million wrappers. It continues to grow at a rate of about 5.5 feet (1.7m) a day. It is the work of one guy who has handily beat the previous record of 7,400 feet (2,255m).
The full-size replica of the ancient Greek Parthenon located in Nashville, TN, took a little while to build. The cornerstone was laid in 1895. The final touch, gilding a statue of Athena, took place 107 years later, in 2002.
On October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain, Don and Maria gave 12 middle names to their first-born child, a boy. Those middle names: Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz. The exact order and spelling of those names varies from source to source. His talent made knowing them, or even his first name, unnecessary. We know him today as Picasso.
Immigrants and children of immigrants make up at least 15% of the current U.S. Congress.
Sorry Avatar fans. When adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing film of all time was Gone With The Wind. In current dollars GWTW took in $3.44 billion (vs. $2.92 billion for the one with the blue people). During its theatrical run in the US (1939-1943), 202 million tickets were sold to see the nearly 4-hour flick…and there were only 130 million people in the US at the time.
The very large, very beautiful polyphemus moth (pictured here) is classified by the Guinness Book of Records as “the greediest animal.” As larvae, they consume 86,000 times their weight in the first 56 days of life. The human equivalent would be for a newborn weighing in at 7 pounds taking in 273 tons of food before they’re even two months old.
Henry Ford famously said that a customer could buy a Model T in any color they wanted, so long as it was black. Black was the only color Ford offered because the type of paint used was cheaper (reducing cost), dried faster (reducing cost), and offering only one color streamlined the process (reducing cost).
I’m sure you hear this being asked all the time: “What is the world’s largest toy distributor?” Well, wonder no more. It is McDonald’s. There are 1.5 million toys distributed in Happy Meals annually.
The dishwasher was invented in the 1880s. By a woman. Who was a wealthy socialite. Josephine Garis-Cochran was issued US Patent 1,223,380 for her self-contained machine that could clean 200 dishes in two minutes. And today’s Whirlpool dishwashers have a direct lineage to those original Garis-Cochran machines.
Research has shown that the best way to get rid of an ‘ear worm’ - a song stuck in your head - is to chew gum.
That’s it for now. The Goblins of Minutiae that live in my head are signing off for this month! They’ll be back to enlighten you in bite-sized bits in April!
2W:LYK
Your rabbit hole learnings are among my very favorite things to read. Rabbit hole begets a rabbit hole?
🤔