A couple years back, I interviewed a married couple my parents knew who had once worked at Industrial Light and Magic (that's the special effects company for a lot of movies).

They had worked on multiple Harry Potter films, and they told me that in order to get the Dementors' robes to flow in the exact way that was wanted, they had to animate it like it was cheesecloth under water.

Yes, cheesecloth under water. That's exactly what they said. I find that to be the greatest bit of trivia I have ever found out.

-Twistey

The black and orange color genes in cats are linked to the X-chromosome. In each cell, one of each matching pair of chromosomes is inactivated, so in calicos and tortoiseshells, you get patches of a different color depending on which X is active. This pattern is only possible in cats with two X-chromosomes, ergo, almost all girls. {= D

It doesn't actually surprise me that most people don't know this, but it DID surprise me when an episode of Star Trek: TNG insisted a tortie was male. It CAN happen, if you get an XXY cat for instance, but it's very rare. I kinda ranted about it. Phobos was not impressed. >.>;

Further reading: X-inactivation.

~Neshomeh

Coca-Cola gets its name from two ingredients it no longer contains: cocaine and kola nuts. It began as Pemberton's French Wine Coca, a wine fortified with cocaine, which was legal at the time. When prohibition came about John Pemberton created a new recipe which did not contain alcohol, and called it Coca-Cola. This version did still have cocaine, considered temperance advocates a safer alternative to alcohol. With the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, cocaine was removed from the Coca-Cola formula.

Vin Mariani, another brand of coca wine, was endorsed by such notables as Queen Victoria, Pope Leo XIII, Pope Saint Pius X, Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas Edison, who claimed it helped him stay awake longer.

A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet. The best-known one in English is of course The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, but there are others, and many of them are glorious.

For instance, some time ago I ran into a perfect pangram (ie, a sentence containing every letter exactly once; Wikipedia charmingly uses the term 'an anagram of the alphabet'):

Fjord-bank cwm glyphs vext quiz.

... or 'the runes in the valley beside the fjord irritated the professor'. Assuming you accept 'cwm' as an English word (it's Welsh originally), the archaic spelling of 'vexed', and the use of 'quiz' to mean a professor, it's perfect!

Meanwhile, on the more intelligible side, Kaitlyn recently came across this marvel:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!

At only 29 letters, it only duplicates a, o, and u, and is of course amazing.

I would be remiss not to mention here the book Ella Minnow Pea, which is pretty much an exploration of 'what if pangrams got out of hand'. I bought it for Kaitlyn a few years back and it's hilarious. ^_^

hS

...around 1900, though they'd apparently existed in​ Britain as early as 1875. The design hasn't changed much since.

Before that, there were the metal bedwarmers with coals in them (had to be taken out before going to bed, as they could cause burns; if you've seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the maid puts one at the foot of Elizabeth's bed in...I think it's the night scene after she meets Jack Sparrow). However, in between these two, which I didn't know, there were earthenware ones (hardened clay). They were oblong, with a stopper at one end, and would frequently shatter if dropped.

~Z

PS: all that comes from an article on the history of hot water bottles, which I could probably find again. I got curious two days ago and looked this up.

(Actually, it took me a while to think of something I figured might be suitable to post. Hopefully this is alright...)

Our fingernails and hair are both made out of keratin—the same substance that forms a rhino's horn.

My entire family, on my mom's side, who are well over 40, learned this Christmas that Red Velvet, is not in fact, a new flavor, but simply chocolate with red food coloring.

... Because the nature of the Lucky 10,000 is that you don't think it's noteworthy until you encounter someone who doesn't know it. Following the idea of the Lucky 10,000 will just lead to a thread full of common facts like how swords were mostly a sidearm and not a main weapon historically.

So, here's an uncommon fun fact in case people want to talk about those instead: Water doesn't conduct electricity. The stuff dissolved in water does; if you have a circuit to power a light bulb, cut one of the wires into two pieces, and dip both pieces in distilled water, the light bulb won't turn on. Try it with tap water and it will light up.