33 Wicked Awesome Facts For National Trivia Day

mind-blowing facts pub trivia questions national trivia day
Image by Frank Fox, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany license.

January 4 is National Trivia Day. Bars around the country will likely be filled to capacity with people drinking expensive beer and attempting to collect prizes by answering pub trivia questions of varying difficulties. It’s sure to be a wonderful Monday night.

In the spirit of National Trivia Day, here are 50 facts, some of which are quite mind-blowing and may appear as part of the plethora of bar trivia questions you may encounter should you venture out tonight.

1. Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, has such low density, it could float in water.

2. At one point in the 1990s, 50% of all CDs produced worldwide were for AOL.

3. A Licking Machine at Purdue University needed, on average, 364 licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.

4. Antechinus, a small mouse-like mammal in Australia, spends two to three weeks doing nothing but having sex. The repeated violent, frenetic, marathon encounters leave the male antechinus engulfed in testosterone and stress hormones, to the point where his fur falls off, he bleeds internally, his immune system fails, and he becomes riddled with gangrene. Antechinus literally fucks to death.

5. Due to the placement of the voice box, human’s are biologically incapable of breathing and swallowing at the same time.

6. Many words in the English language that relate to scientific concepts, such as algebra, alkaline, and algorithm, are derived from Arabic, where the prefix al- means “the.”

7. What’s 111,111,111 multiplied by 111,111,111? Answer: 12,345,678,987,654,321.

8. More than one-third of the world’s 6,800 spoken languages are endangered. According to UNESCO, about 200 of those languages have fewer than ten speakers worldwide.

9. The total weight of all ants on Earth is about the same as the total weight of all humans on Earth.

10. Once upon a time, Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because the perpetually-agitated anthropomorphic duck doesn’t wear pants.

11. Alaska is, simultaneously, the most northern, western, and eastern U.S. state. This is because part of Alaska’s Aleutian archipelago crosses the 180th meridian (180 degrees longitude), also known as the International Date Line, placing the state in both the eastern and western hemispheres.

12. HD 189733b, an exoplanet 63 light years from Earth, has an atmospheric temperature of over 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), winds that gust in excess of 7,000 kilometers per hour (4,349.6 mph), and rains glass… sideways.

13. When early episodes of Sesame Street were released on DVD in 2007, they came with an “Adults Only” warning.

14. Smoking bans and anti-smoking campaigns are fascist! After all, the first government to endorse anti-smoking and anti-tobacco movements were the Nazis.

15. The last execution by guillotine conducted in France was on September 10, 1977. For comparison, Star Wars: A New Hope was released in theaters four months prior.

16. The surface gravity of a neutron star is a trillion times greater than the surface gravity on Earth, which is why if you were drop a marshmallow into a neutron star, the impact would be akin to a 3-megaton nuclear warhead.

17. Actress Betty White is older than sliced bread. Pre-sliced bread was not a thing until 1928, while Betty White was born in 1922.

18. In 1983, Redondo Beach, Calif. adopted the Goodyear Blimp as the city’s official bird.

19. It wasn’t until after World War II that lobster became an aristocratic delicacy. Before, the “cockroach of the sea” was primarily eaten by the poor, the homeless, slaves, and convicts.

20. Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn.

21. If you were to turn your TV to a dead station, about one percent of the static is leftover radiation from the Big Bang.

22. Scientists discovered that human bellybuttons contain 2,368 different species of bacteria, of which 1,458 may have been entirely new to the scientific record.

23. When written, the word “almost” is the longest word in the English language that has all of its letters in alphabetical order.

24. John Tyler, 10th President of the United States of America, has two living grandchildren. His son, Lyon, was born in 1853, when his father was 63 years old. Lyon Tyler would have two sons, Lyon, Jr. and Harrison, at the ages of 71 and 75, respectively. As of 2015, both Lyon, Jr. and Harrison are still alive.

25. The longest word recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of volcanic silicon dust.

26. In response to Dr. Seuss’ popular book The Lorax, the forest products industry published a kid’s book called Truax, which taught the kids the importance of logging.

27. You are three times more likely to get a computer virus from a religious website than you are a pornographic one.

28. More time passed between the era of the Stegosaurus and the era of the Tyrannosaurus rex than has passed between the era of the Tyrannosaurus rex and now.

29. 2013 was the first year since 1987 to be made up of four different numbers.

30. If the entirety of Earth’s history were compressed into a single calendar year, humans would not appear until December 31 at around 10:24 pm.

31. In 2001, anti-porn filters forced Beaver College to change its name to Arcadia. The filters kept blocking access to the school’s website.

32. The woolly mammoth was not yet extinct when the Giza Pyramids were built. The last woolly mammoths died off around 1650 BCE, at which point the Giza Pyramids were already about 1,000 years old.

33. Tardigrades are the toughest animal on Earth. They have survived all five mass extinctions is Earth’s history, can change form to survive without water, and can survive in space in open space conditions.

Robert could go on about how he was raised by honey badgers in the Texas Hill Country, or how he was elected to the Texas state legislature as a 19-year-old wunderkind, or how he won 219 consecutive games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots against Hugh Grant, but those would be lies. However, Robert does hail from Lewisville, Texas, having been transplanted from Fort Worth at a young age. Robert is a college student and focuses his studies on philosophical dilemmas involving morality, which he feels makes him very qualified to write about politicians. Reading the Bible turned Robert into an atheist, a combative disposition toward greed turned him into a humanist, and the fact he has not lost a game of Madden football in over a decade means you can call him "Zeus." If you would like to be his friend, you can send him a Facebook request or follow his ramblings on Twitter. For additional content that may not make it to Liberal America, Robert's internet tavern, The Zephyr Lounge, is always open