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An American urologist bought Napoleon’s penis for $40,000.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
Lionfish (Pterois) is a venomous fish with ornate fins and spines, an invasive species in some parts of the world
Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters “MT”.
Glass Catfish (Kryptopterus bicirrhis) is a transparent fish with a streamlined appearance, native to Southeast Asia
$283,200 is the absolute highest amount of money you can win on Jeopardy.
Almonds are members of the peach family.
Rats and horses can’t vomit.
The penguin is the only bird that can’t fly but can swim.
There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.
Cardinal Tetra (Paracheirodon axelrodi) is a small, schooling fish with vibrant blue and red colors, native to the Amazon River
Clown Loach (Chromobotia macracanthus) is a distinctive, brightly colored freshwater fish often kept in aquariums
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room during a dance.
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
Every time you lick a stamp you consume 1/10 of a calorie.
You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
Hedenophobic means fear of pleasure.
Ancient Egyptian priests would pluck every hair from their bodies.
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Logan’s Run’ (1976)
It’s the year 2274, and human civilization is one giant pleasure dome, where the youthful citizens indulge in nonstop hedonistic delights. There’s just one catch. Everybody gets slaughtered the day they turn 30, in a gory public ritual called the “Carousel.” Logan 5 (Michael York) is a “Sandman,” whose job is hunting and killing the “runners” who try to escape their fate outside the sealed city. But what happens when Logan is 29? He runs for his life, hand in hand with the sanctuary-providing Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter). Michael Anderson’s mega-stylish thriller has everything: future-chic set design, Oscar-winning effects, slinky tunics-and-drainpipes fashion, a Farrah Fawcett cameo, a prescient satire of the already-collapsing 1970s youth-culture utopia. But best of all, it has York and Agutter, two of the era’s glammiest British stars, as a pair of 23rd-century foxes on the run, fleeing a society where life after 30 is unimaginable. —RS
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Escape From New York’ (1981)
Lee Van Cleef makes Escape From New York’s plot sound so simple when he explains it to Kurt Russell’s character, Snake Plissken: “You go in, find the president and bring him out in 24 hours, and you’re a free man.” But those words alone cannot convey how filmmaker John Carpenter had to invent a New York City that was even grittier and more dangerous than it already was in 1981. The Rotten Apple is now a walled-off, maximum security prison. Plissken, a former special ops tough guy, will be pardoned for robbing the Federal Reserve if he can return the president (Donald Pleasance), who has been taken captive, to safety. The catch is: He must deal with New York crazies and a cast that includes Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, and Harry Dean Stanton, among others, if he wants to escape. Part of you hopes he does. Another part of you hopes he can’t, just to see what happens. —KG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Fahrenheit 451’ (1966)
Say the phrase “science fiction filmmaker,” and it’s likely that the first name that pops into your head is not François Truffaut. (It’s probably not even the 101st name that comes to mind in association with the genre.) And yet the 400 Blows director proved he was well-suited to bring Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel — about a “fireman” named Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) who spends his days burning books — to the screen. In Bradbury’s vision of a cursed tomorrow, all literature from Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss has been outlawed, and anyone caught with the contraband is an enemy of the state. Montag’s wife, played by Julie Christie, is the epitome of a brain-dead citizen, forever glued to her screen at the expense of all else. (A reminder that yes, it’s still a work of fiction.) Then he meets a revolutionary, also played by Christie, who introduces him to the forbidden fruit of reading. Truffaut understood the liberating passion of moviegoing, which is why he identified with these keepers of an art form’s flame rather than those who used flames to banish it. You never doubt what side he — or you — are on. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Andromeda Strain’ (1971)
A precursor to the biohazard thrillers that have occasionally infected multiplexes over the past 20 years, Robert Wise’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel about a deadly space pathogen trades in the genre’s cosmic pulp and head-trippiness for a procedural-like seriousness. Having discovered a downed satellite has brought back a spore — code name: Andromeda — that threatens to wipe out humanity, a team of scientists have to contain this lethal visitor or die tryin’. The era’s predilection for sterile white environments and emphasis on the first part of the term “science fiction” gets a nice workout here, as will your nervous system. Germaphobes, proceed with extreme caution. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Fantastic Planet’ (1973)
René Laloux and Roland Tapor’s hand-drawn 1973 animated feature took five years to complete, which means that its production spanned the peak years of the psychedelic counterculture. And the influence is evident, both in the hallucinatory world-building — the film’s planet, Ygam, is populated by impossible fauna and breathing, moving flora — and the wide-ranging peacenik themes. A story about humans (Oms, a homophone for the French homme) who are kept as pets by an advanced race known as Draags stands in as a metaphor for everything from animal rights to Soviet aggression, served with a potent dose of mind-expanding surrealism. —KR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Liquid Sky’ (1982)
Everybody loves an Eighties NYC time capsule, but you’ve never seen one like this decadent 1982 punk thriller with so many kinky thrills: sex, drugs, neon, pastel sleaze, spandex, Manhattan nightlife, Eurotrash party monsters, interplanetary endorphin-suckers. Anna Carlisle stars as the bisexual drug-fiend model Margaret, toast of the downtown New Wave club scene, declaring, “I am androgynous no less than David Bowie himself!” No wonder aliens land their flying saucer on the roof of her penthouse. Margaret finds she suddenly has the power to kill people by having sex with them, which means dead bodies piling up all over the Village. This obsessively worshipped cult fave was thrown together by a tiny Russian crew in NYC, written by director Slava Tsukerman, his wife Nina Kerova, and Carlisle herself, who also plays a male model. But Liquid Sky was years ahead of its time, flaunting both feminist bravado and visionary cosmetics. —RS
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Annihilation’ (2018)
Writer-director Alex Garland understands that the journey is more important than the destination in the movies, and that mystery tickles the imagination more than explanation ever can. In his highly allegorical sci-fi thriller, the enemy here isn’t a single monster or alien but “the shimmer,” a color-blasted zone where species rapidly mutate to inflict as much damage as possible. As Natalie Portman’s biologist and her fellow intrepid explorers (including Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tessa Thompson) enter the beautiful void, the horrors get more elaborate and the puzzles more unnatural. Humankind never fares well in Garland’s work. And from the moment a “scream bear” shows up, you can tell he’s truly pushing his Darwinian ideas to their outer limits. —CV
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Interstellar’ (2014)
So much ink has been spilled about the intellectual ambition and architectural trickery of Christopher Nolan’s work that people sometimes miss the emotional turbulence behind the twists in films like Memento or The Prestige. But those big emotions are right on the surface in his story of an ex-NASA pilot (Matthew McConaughey) who, along with his team of researchers, scramble to find a planet to replace an uninhabitable Earth. It’s heady stuff, yet the film also aches deeply for a character whose mission to save mankind separates him from his family; a sequence on a planet where 60 minutes on the surface represents seven years on Earth is like watching the sands of time run through a smashed hourglass. Nolan presents us with a worst-case-scenario of the path we’re already on, then connects to the raw desperation of the human species as it fights extinction. —ST