Most of the time, we think of famous people as larger than life. They become idols that we look up to as something beyond human, and we forget what they really are.

However, sometimes, you hear about the silliest little personality quirks of famous people. It brings you back down to Earth, reminding you that they are really just people like you in the end.

These notable individuals may have incredible wealth, reputations, or similar traits. But they also have very funny things about them that will make you laugh and forget for a moment that you think of them as above you.

10 Mark Zuckerberg Will Only Eat Meat From Animals That He Kills Himself

Mark Zuckerberg is well-known for being a strange guy in general. He was privileged enough to go to Harvard but dropped out to pursue Facebook. Of course, this worked out well for him.

He is now worth a staggering amount of money, but that hasn’t changed the fact that he is weird. During recent Congressional hearings, people often joked that his behavior seemed strange and compared him to an android or an alien in disguise who was trying to mimic human behavior.

While these jokes are amusing, some of Zuckerberg’s real habits are even stranger. Every year, he likes to challenge himself to do new things. In 2011, his new commitment was to only eat animals that he killed. With his riches, he believes that he shouldn’t take healthy eating for granted and should have to participate in the process up close.^[1]

Zuckerberg has his own livestock that he slaughters, and then he has a butcher friend prepare it for him. Yes, he obsessively uses every last part of the animal, even if it means making a stock out of chicken feet.

9 Ronald Reagan Liked To Touch The Earlobes Of His Friends And Relatives

Ronald Reagan was the first major celebrity to become an elected politician and then president. He had a certain charisma that really struck a chord with a large portion of the American people, securing himself a second term and remaining fairly popular throughout that time. Also a bit of a joker, he was a very affectionate man with his friends and family.

Although most people think about him as a politician and president, his friends and family knew him as a warmhearted man who really had a thing for earlobes. He grabbed the ears of immediate family members, friends, and even actors (during Screen Actors Guild negotiations while he was president of that group).^[2]

There is no reason to believe that it was at all sexual in nature or at least not overtly so. As far as anyone ever knew, Reagan had just grown up to feel natural showing affection and closeness to others by grabbing a bit of their ears.

8 Kanye West Falls Asleep All Over The Place And Always Blames It On Jet Lag

Kim Kardashian is famously married to Kanye West. During a recent appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Kim took part in a game called “Spill Your Guts Or Fill Your Guts.”

Essentially, the host and a celebrity guest ask each other questions prepared by the show’s writers. The individual who is asked the embarrassing question gets to choose whether to answer or eat something disgusting that the other person picked out—such as a 1,000-year-old egg, pickled pig’s feet, clam juice, or something similarly repulsive.

When asked to dish on Kanye’s weirdest habit, Kim immediately explained that Kanye tends to fall asleep everywhere—in inappropriate places or situations—and doesn’t understand why his behavior might be a bit of a problem.

She has had situations where he took her to see designers whom she had never met. Then he fell asleep during the meeting, leaving her feeling rather awkward as she faced the new people on her own. According to Kim, anytime she gets a little annoyed with him about it, he blames it on jet lag—even if he hasn’t flown anywhere in months.^[3]

7 Jeff Bezos Dismantled His Own Crib As A Child Because He Wanted To Sleep In A Bed

Jeff Bezos has been in the news a lot recently, mainly because he is now neck and neck with Bill Gates and had beaten him for the top spot on Forbes’ 2019 list of richest people in the world. Also, as Amazon becomes more and more of a household name, it is no surprise that the founder and leader would increasingly become known to everyone in America and in most of the world as well.

While most people only know Bezos as the bald, wannabe supervillain who is running the largest e-store in the world, he was a precocious genius even at a young age. Back then, he surprised everyone around him with his desire to change his surroundings and move up in the world—before he even knew how to properly read and write.

The stories claim that when Jeff Bezos was a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver when the adults were not watching. He no longer wanted to sleep in a crib. Instead, he wanted to move up to a real bed like a big boy.^[4]

This precocious youngster was so obsessed with moving to greater heights even at such a young age that he took apart his entire cot to prove a point. Even then, his parents likely realized that he was destined for great things. They certainly did everything they could to foster and nurture his intellectual growth.

6 Donald Trump Is Convinced An Exercise Regimen Will Do Him More Harm Than Good

When US President Donald Trump was first given a serious presidential physical by White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, he stated that the president was mostly okay except that he was close to the line of obesity. Jackson recommended that Trump eat less in terms of portion size, cut down a bit on unhealthy foods, and add some regular exercise to his routine.

The president took to the diet advice fairly well. He has reportedly cut his portions and removed a bit of fat from his meals. But he’s struggling with the exercise routine.^[5]

He is convinced that exercise mostly does more harm than good. As a slightly younger man, he once was quoted as believing that humans overall have a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and may die younger if they regularly exercise.

Actually, we are more like rechargeable batteries. Nevertheless, working out too much or in the wrong way can hurt you, so there is a certain level of truth to how he came to believe what he does.

5 President John Quincy Adams Took A Naked Bath In The Potomac at 5:00 AM Every Day

John Quincy Adams was known for being an incredibly stern man. He was the sixth president of the United States and a no-nonsense leader who had almost no sense of humor. As a leader, he was especially known for being a great negotiator, having spent much of his earlier career helping to craft treaties with various foreign powers. This included the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war of 1812.

However, like all men, he had his silly quirk and it once got him into a bind. Adams liked to go for a naked bath in the Potomac River every morning around 5:00 AM. He was a creature of habit, so he could be relied upon to do this.

Now presidents did not answer questions from female reporters during that time period, and Adams was no exception. For a while, female reporter Anne Royall had been trying to get an interview with the president. When she learned about his quirky, publicly nude bathing habit, she came up with a devious but effective plan to secure her interview once and for all.

She waited until he had gone into the water for his morning swim and had been moving around for some time. Then she asked him for the interview again. When he refused to answer her questions, she explained that she had his clothes and he could have them back after he talked to her. And that’s how Royall became the first woman to get an interview with a sitting president.^[6]

4 Eminem Refused To Star In Elysium Because He Won’t Leave Detroit For That Long

The movie Elysium was a sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian future where the rich lived in space with a magic heal box that could keep them healthy and alive almost forever. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the remaining people were living in squalor and with horrible diseases on the surface of the planet.

Eventually, the hero manages to bring a bunch of heal boxes down to Earth, as if this will somehow solve things like hunger, dehydration, or the desire of most humans to take the best land for themselves. Nevertheless, it was a fairly popular movie at the time, but it could have been very different.

The movie starred Matt Damon, and most people would say that he fit the role well. However, the part had originally been written and planned out with Eminem in mind. They asked him to do the film, and he wasn’t entirely uninterested. But he wanted the movie shot in Detroit because he did not want to leave home for that long. He is really just a huge homebody.

Eminem was willing to star in 8 Mile because it was about his life and could be filmed at home. However, with the producers unwilling to meet his demand to film Elysium in Detroit, he backed out of any role in the project.^[7]

3 Lady Gaga Is A Traditionally Minded Catholic Who Doesn’t Believe In Premarital Sex

Lady Gaga is one of the most famous pop stars in the world mostly because she shocked the living daylights out of almost everyone when her type of act was far beyond what anyone would expect from a pop idol. Her garish displays, ridiculous dance numbers, and provocative outfits and lyrics kept everyone talking about her.

Most extremely religious people considered her a bad influence. They imagined her to be quite the promiscuous individual who promoted such a lifestyle to others.

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Lady Gaga is a devout Catholic who went to a Catholic school as a youth and still believes strongly in her faith. While she isn’t one to push it on others to an evangelical degree, she does not believe in premarital sex for herself as it is against her faith.^[8]

Now we aren’t saying that being against premarital sex is itself a weird quirk as this is a belief held by many who adhere to various religions around the world. Rather, it is strange that a woman known for being so provocative and using the trappings of a sex symbol to her advantage could not imagine using her body in the way that so many people would accuse her of doing.

2 Bill Gates Used To Keep Track Of Employee License Plate Numbers In His Head

Bill Gates is known for being one of the most philanthropic rich people of all time. Despite being the richest man in the world for many years, he pledged a huge portion of his billions to charity, fought tirelessly for charitable causes, and convinced many other rich people to do the same.

Since actively leaving the management of Microsoft, Gates has done incredible good in the world. However, while he is now a billionaire who has apparently seen the light, he was once a man who was trying to create a thriving business.

Back when Microsoft was a small start-up, Gates would mentally keep track of all employee license plate numbers to better know their comings and goings. This gave him a better idea of who was staying late, showing up late, or coming in early and helped him keep an eye on productivity.^[9]

Some people would find this behavior rather weird, and it certainly does have a bit of a stalker vibe to it. But it didn’t hurt overmuch as Microsoft continued to grow to the point that he simply couldn’t keep track of all the license plate numbers anymore.

1 Ulysses S. Grant Was Extremely Sensitive And Would Not Let Others See Him Naked

Ulysses S. Grant was one of the most important men in the early days of America, but he was also a really strange guy. Although he was the brilliant leader who led the Union troops to victory over the South, he wasn’t much of a politician. He only managed to make his way into the presidency because of his fame as a war hero.

Once Grant became president, he mostly just put many of his friends into office and failed to do the job properly at all. A lot of people say that he regretted taking the position once he fully understood what it entailed.

However, Grant strangest trait was perhaps his inability psychologically to allow others to see him naked. Today, Grant’s position on being seen naked may not seem that weird, but for the time, it was really rather odd.

Even if you were of a high rank, soldiers tended to get naked rather publicly and servants would douse them with water. It was also common for servants to dress higher-status people and see them naked all the time.

While Grant showed no aversion to seeing others showering around him, he was a very private man and preferred to bathe by himself in his own tent. He did not even want servants to see him. As far as anyone knows, only his wife and perhaps his physicians ever saw Grant naked during his adult life.^[10]

Watching a scary movie on Halloween has become as much of a tradition as anything else associated with the day, so let’s all stay in this Halloween, shall we? Not that there is much of a choice, given that a rampant plague will prevent us from going to a costume party or knock on stranger’s door and threaten them for a Mars bar or two… I mean, who’s even scared of masks anymore? Seems more like social responsibility nowadays.

Some of us enjoy subverting traditions, even newer ones like the watching of horror movies—so this is a list for you! Here are 10 non-horror movies (with as few spoilers as possible—you MUST watch these films) that are guaranteed to scare you at least 35% more than 2005’s ‘House of Wax’ starring Paris Hilton. It’s science.

WARNING: Some footage on this list is disturbing. Proceed with caution.

Top 10 Disturbing Movies You’ve Never Heard Of

10 Come And See (1985)

War is hell. This film is hell. This may well be the most uncompromising, visually terrifying, best acted and pants-shittingly tense war films ever made.

Based on the 1975 book “I Am From A Fiery Village”, the film shows the horrors of Nazi-occupied Belarus through the eyes of a teenage boy named Flyora. He joins the Belorussian resistance and bears witness to some of the most brutal atrocities mankind has ever inflicted on itself—piles of executed bodies, horrible maimings, random deaths from buried landmines, burnings and rape. But it is the reactions of Flyora, played by the incredible Aleksei Kravchenko, that’ll stick with you. It grounds the horrors in reality—you’ll imagine yourself seeing what he sees, you’ll feel his pain and terror. Or you could stick to Scary Movie 5…^[1]

9 Woyzeck (1979)

Almost any film from maverick German genius Werner Herzog could have made this list. From the depictions of individuals on society’s periphery in ‘Stroszek’, the uncaring cruelty of the natural world coupled with a protagonist’s slow slip into madness in ‘Fitzcaraldo’ and ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ to the strange, cruel world in ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’, Werner Herzog is the king of the avant-garde weirdos. His attempt to finish Georg Büchner 1836(ish) unfinished play ‘Woyzeck’ is perhaps the most creepy and affecting film (Grizzly Man is pretty rough, but Woyzeck includes a wild-eyed Klaus Kinski at his best).

The film is a character study of an extremely downtrodden man. Franz Woyzeck tries to support his mistress and their illegitimate child by taking on menial, degrading jobs to supplement his wage as a common soldier in 19th century Germany. He undergoes various humiliating tasks and medical experiments, growing increasingly unhinged. His partner, played by the criminally little-known German actress Eva Mattes, gets bored of the hapless Woyzeck and sleeps with a handsome Drum Major. Woyzeck confronts the other soldier, only to get beaten up , emasculating him further. The depiction of madness in the film’s final scenes are deeply unsettling, giving the viewer a real window into what can happen when you push an unhinged man too far.^[2]

Fun Fact: Woyzeck was put to music in the opera entitled Wozzeck by Austrian composer Alban Berg who also wrote the opera Lulu, about prostitutes, lesbians, and Jack the Ripper—as featured on our Top 10 Truly Disturbing Classical Pieces.

8 Anything By Animator Jan Švankmajer (1964—2018)

Whether you watch one of this man’s feature length films or a selection of his short films, a bit of Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s works are a perfect addition to your Halloween evening. You’ll certainly have the weirdest nightmares.

Watching his 1982 ‘Dimensions of Dialogue’ is meant to feel like cutting edge, conceptual art, a comment on late-stage communism, consumerism and ideological confusion. It’s more likely to make you feel uneasy and more than a little queasy. The sight of the stop-motion clay figures tearing into one another, ripping gobs of greyish ‘flesh’ and heavily pounding their heads to blown-out, roiling mush feels like you’re watching an Eastern European snuff film, albeit an artsy one.

1988’s ‘Alice’ a dark re-imagining of Lewis Carroll’s classic ‘Alice in Wonderland’ would be perfect for Halloween. Imagine the Disney version, but part live and part stop-motion, without the whimsy and wonder. If you have any qualms as to how horrific this silly little fantasy story could be, here’s Alice’s last line in the film (referring to everyone’s favourite dope from the Disney film—the White Rabbit) “He’s late as usual. I think I’ll cut his head off.”^[3]

7 Mulholland Drive (2001)

Like most of David Lynch’s output, ‘Mulholland Drive’ has plenty of strange, surreal and disconcerting sequences. But jump scares? In a non-horror flick? You better believe it, and it’s a whopper—perhaps the best shot, most tense, nerve-shattering jumps ever committed to celluloid. Or an SD card.

The film itself is a head-scratcher—Lynch’s penchant for blurring the lines between dreams/nightmares and reality causes any attempt at definitive explanations of his films quite futile. All we can say for sure is the diner scene is one of the best made, artfully set-up scares in cinematic history. Dreams and flights of fancy are hard to show on the big screen, but Lynch gets as close as anyone to capturing the essence of a nightmare in this scene, and more broadly, in his cinematic oeuvre.^[4]

6 Threads (1984)

For a good, long period during the 20th century, people across the planet feared potential nuclear annihilation above all else. Films like ‘Threads’ didn’t help that fear for the public (even if such works helped politicians visualise a nuclear catastrophe and realise the follies of their sabre rattling). No blurry symbolism here—just sledgehammer-to-the-gut realism depicting one of the worst possible outcomes mankind nearly faced.

The film is set in the northern English city of Sheffield. As the common English saying goes, “It’s grim up north”. A young couple, still living with their respective parents, prepare to get married due to an unplanned pregnancy. You get lulled into thinking this will be a Ken Loach-esque, gritty working class drama about some struggling twenty-somethings starting their lives together in a post-industrial England. Is that grim enough for you? It gets so much worse…

The Soviet Union and the USA exchange nuclear fire and the world burns, including Sheffield (a centre for UK industry that was indeed a Soviet target in the event of an all-out nuclear war). The film then charts the life of Ruth Beckett, the young expectant mother, as she traverses a post-nuclear attack England, showing us just how terrible it would have been. If you’re a fan of dystopian artworks, this may even be too rough for you. Orwell’s 1984 was scary, ‘Threads’ was scarily plausible.^[5]

Top 10 Disturbing True Crime Books You Won’t Want To Read Twice

5 Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Surrealist director Luis Buñuel, the man behind this strangest of films (collaborating with Salvador Dali), described it as “nothing other than an desperate, impassioned call for murder”. Horrified yet?

Much like David Lynch’s later efforts, Buñuel’s film is a musing on dreams, employing a Freudian free-associative lack of regular logic or chronology. Salvador Dali was employed to bring his strange styling to the creative process. The film has no discernible plot, but the imagery ranges from unnerving to haunting and even quite visceral—a death’s head moth, a gripping hand reaching through a door whilst covered in ants and, most memorable of all, a man slicing a young woman’s eyeball with a razor. Can we get back to melting clocks now, please?^[6]

4 High Plains Drifter (1973)

You’d be right to raise a eyebrow quizzically if somebody suggested a Clint Eastwood western movie for Halloween. Most of his cowboy films are about as scary as a tall glass of sarsaparilla (unless you are allergic to sarsaparilla, of course). ‘High Plains Drifter’ is different.

Eastwood stars as a nameless drifter (similar to his famous ‘man with no name’ character from Sergio Leone’s classic ‘Dollars’ trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns) who comes across an isolated mining town in California. The frontier feeling you get from this vision of the Old West is gritty and dangerous, stark and creepy—that’s before the action begins. After he kills the town’s sheriff and his deputies and rapes a local prostitute, the weak-willed and terrified townsfolk beg the stranger to be their new sheriff. Why would they do this? Because an evil band of grudge-baring criminals are about to be released from prison. What happens next is a master class in gothic mood-making, with enough misery and creepiness to make this one rootin’-tootin’ Halloween, y’all… sorry.^[7]

3 Spirited Away (2001)

This is perhaps the most beautiful film on the list. Hayao Miyazaki’s seminal work of cinematic magic is often held up as one of the greatest animated films ever made. It can also be pretty damned scary.

As cute as the little soot creatures are, the ‘No-Face’ monster is as scary. As wonderfully elegant Haku is as a dragon, giant-headed witch Humbaba is as tough to look at. Then there’s the scene where Chihiro (the film’s little girl protagonist) sees that her parents have turned into grotesque hog-monsters, gluttonously gorging on some magically prepared street food.

‘Kawaii’, romantic fluff? Hardly. As with most works from Studio Ghibli, there is a rough, gruesome and quite frightening undercurrent to even this most beautiful of movies.^[8]

2 Marathon Man (1976)

To many, a trip to the dentist is as fear-inducing as any scary film. What about a Nazi dentist? One that will use his tools to torture you for info? Sweaty palms yet?

This taught thriller isn’t the scariest film you’ll ever see. It does use Dustin Hoffman’s character’s love of running to great use, a device that adds to the tension, making us feel as though we’re as much on the run as he is. Is that enough to keep you under a blanket though? Not really.

Then there’s the torture scene. Much as ‘Jaws’ kept a generation of kids out of the water (even swimming pools), the pained screams of Dustin Hoffman’s character and the high-pitched whine of a drill wielded by Lawrence Olivier’s on-the-run Nazi dentist kept cinema-goers from their yearly check-up with the dentist.^[9]

1 Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)

This cult classic from director Shane Meadows really gets under your skin, then lays some eggs which hatch into tiny fear spiders that will eat you from the inside out long after you’ve finished watching. With a gritty realism reminiscent of many great English working class classics like ‘This Sporting Life’, ‘Kes’ and ‘Secrets & Lies’ crossed with outsider/revenge films like ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Death Wish’ and ‘Se7en’. That’s as close as we can get using existing films as references- it’s not even close, though. ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ is very much its own thing.

The film employs many classic horror/slasher film tropes—a scary mask (a particularly grim looking gas mask), gruesome killings, a general sense of foreboding and choppy editing. But a horror film this is certainly not. It’s a psychological thriller and, more poignantly, a study of brotherly love and loss as well as a look into the harsh treatment many disabled people receive without a support network. If that sounds too much like a charity PSA, fear not—for fear you will. I haven’t looked inside any suitcases for years since watching this movie…^[10]

Top 10 Disturbing Movie Props

About The Author: C.J. Phillips is a storyteller, actor and writer living in rural West Wales. He is a little obsessed with lists.

Life as a scientist, economist, computer expert, or structural engineer can be pretty boring. Even if you have a natural drive and passion for your subject, it requires grindingly long hours to master these highly complex jobs. Who could blame them for occasionally making up a stupid name and plonking it on one of their discoveries or inventions?

OK, so some of these entries were intended as a joke, but that will not diminish their hilariousness. Scientists with a sense of humor, we salute you. Excelsior!

Related: 10 Famous People With Extremely Silly Quirks

10 Here’s Looking at You, Skid

Most people who have had a general physical exam with a doctor have had their reflexes checked. A quick tap on the knee, a little involuntary kick, and you’re free of serious nervous system disorders. But the knee tap isn’t the only way to check an involuntary reflex. Indeed, the knee jerk is one of many reflexes the human body is capable of. One of them concerns the eye. The brown eye, that is.

An “Anal Wink” occurs when the skin around the anus is stimulated (please try to read that sentence back without giggling like a small child). As with other reflexes, the absence of this wink is suggestive of a breakdown in the neural pathway that controls the central nervous system, damage to the pudendum, or damage to the spinal cord. So, you better hope you have a balloon knot cheeky enough to wink at whoever decides to tickle it.^[1]

9 A Rock to Knock Your Socks off if You Wanna Get Your Rocks Off

There is a type of rock-forming mineral found in New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, and the Northeastern U.S. that has quite a wonderful name. It was discovered and named near the town of Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1824. They named the mineral after the town.

Cummingtonite.

Chester Dewey, according to mindat.com, “did not analyze the species, but noted its unusual physical appearance.” He later added that, despite the clear coincidence of the mineral being found near a place that bears a similarity to his chosen name, it was in fact based on a promise he had made to his wife at the breakfast table that morning…^[2]

8 Cootchy-cootchy-coo! Now, Where’s My Hammer?

Contradictory terms are good for two things—as names of punk bands (like “The Razor Clouds” or “Shotgun Kittens”) or for laughing at. These linguistic quirks come up quite regularly, especially in the study of human behavior. We are complex organisms, perhaps the most complex on Earth (given our massive brains), and we should expect a great deal of seemingly contradictory aspects when describing ourselves. Mood, gains in knowledge, and changes in the environment all contribute to this ever-shifting profile.

Maybe the funniest sounding term in this regard is “Cute Aggression” (See! What a great name for a punk band). This is the expressed desire to bite, pinch, squeeze, or crush something perceived as extremely cute due to its intrinsic cuteness (without a desire for actually causing harm…probably).

You see a little puppy; it rolls around as it plays, sits up, and looks into your eyes. And sneezes. It isn’t uncommon for you to exclaim, “Ooooh, I could just squish you.” Followed by five minutes of gibberish baby talk. This phenomenon is an example of a “dimorphous expression,” like laughing during a funeral or gently striking your partner when they do something romantic. It is postulated that cute aggression, as with other dimorphous expressions, is an evolutionary adaptation to help humans regulate overwhelming positive emotion, thus aiding with caregiving.^[3]

7 En Garde!

Flatworms, those gorgeous, scrap-of-colorful-silk-looking things you find floating around in tropical oceans, are actually weird little buggers. Like many organisms found in nature, they are hermaphroditic, having both male and female sex organs. Unfortunately, their mating ritual is also like many other organisms, too: traumatic and very violent.

Despite this surface-level similarity, flatworms have more of a Hollywood action movie feel to their copulation. Two flatworms will rear up when it’s time to mate, exposing their two pointy penises (like a rapier and a parrying dagger in human duels) and fighting to inseminate each other. If this were applied to humans, 17th-century duels would have been even more ridiculous/traumatizing/hilarious than they were in reality. The term for this mating ritual is gloriously anthropomorphized:

“Penis Fencing”^[4]

The “Flatworm Olympics,” of course, are a must-watch.

6 Really? You Couldn’t Think of a Less Suggestive Term

The Japanese have been responsible for a great many scientific and technological discoveries in the last 200 years—camera and lens improvements, video gaming, Tamagotchi, Ivermectin for curing parasitic illnesses like River Blindness (and that’s all.. .ahem), the Sony Walkman and Discman, and, of course, tentacle porn. Oh, and deep-fried matcha ice cream.

A discovery that you may not know is of Japanese origin is the accurate method for ascertaining the sex of a chicken. Japanese experts discovered a sure-fire way of ascertaining a just-born chick’s sex by checking the poop tract—males and females have a slightly different cornhole (great care must be taken in handling the tiny birds as they crush easily…apparently). The method, quickly implemented by the Zen Nippon school, cut the price of eggs worldwide overnight. Second-generation Japanese Americans found great success in turning this method into a lucrative line of work, virtually cornering the market in the States from the ’30s through to the ’60s, allowing for a boom in the agricultural/food industry.

Unfortunately for the English language, the term used for this process is “Sexing.” Sexing chickens. A person trained to do this is called, even more childishly, a “Chick Sexer.” This is because, unbeknownst to most, Japan is actually a population comprised solely of 13-year-old boys in a Playboy-magazine-littered treehouse from the movie Stand by Me.^[5]

5 Won’t Somebody Pleeeease Think of the Children?

“Mothers Against”-type groups were big news in the 1980s. These censorious, deeply worried, and often super evangelical matrons made it their job to right all the Western World’s moral failings during that decade (and well into the ’90s too). Their crusade against various transgressions (otherwise known as “fun”) covered all manner of things, from heavy metal and rap music lyrics to violence in films, TV, and video games to pushing for teen abstinence from . One big group (and one of the least contemptible) were “Mothers Against Drunk Driving”—despite their noble aims, they were a bit preachy.

The term was used by some scientists in the mid-1990s, their tongues firmly placed in their cheeks, after the discovery of a new protein in the genes of fruit flies (and later, related proteins called SMADs in many other species, including us). The piss-takingly-named “Mothers Against Decapentaplegic” acts to switch off the decapentaplegic gene, sending a message to the cell to stop dividing. This bizarrely named protein is now of special interest to the scientists who search for a cure to cancer.^[6]

4 The Teeny Croakers of Madagascar

Naming conventions in zoology can be confusing. The correct taxonomic name for a lion is Panthera leo—this means that the animal colloquially referred to as a lion is cataloged as the “leo” species of the “Panthera” genus in the family “Felidae.” Got it? Good.

A recently discovered genus of tiny frogs in Madagascar has been given a far simpler, easily parsed name by a team from Germany: “Mini.” And yes. Yes, they are.

The various species have been given awesome species names to follow the genus. We have Mini mum, Mini ature, and Mini scule, all tiny enough to fit comfortably on your fingernail with room to spare.^[7]

3 No, It Doesn’t Always Roll Downhill—Check the Chart

Sometimes, names and terms have extremely complex, byzantine derivations, sending etymologists on decade-long quests of discovery. Other terms are dirt simple. This is one of the latter.

An “SFD” is a high-level technical drawing used in the planning and improvement of sanitation and sewage systems, most often employed in developing countries. They are most useful in aiding planners against allowing effluent and waste to enter sources of drinking water and other such waterways—nobody wants shit in their river. Right?

And that is what SFD stands for—”Shit Flow Diagram.” Yes, that’s right, this integral tool in avoiding waterway pollution is called a shit-flow diagram. Was the word poop too infantile?^[8]

2 Programming Is Complex

Coding is a skill that, as we have been assured by tone-deaf and largely useless journalists, will be the new home economics or shop class in schools (as well as the new skill that workers whose jobs are soon to be taken over by automation should learn—like millions of truck drivers and coal miners will all soon be moving down to Silicone Valley…). Kids and adults in this brave new world will easily pick up enough coding to be able to build and run their own websites and decode a nuclear bomb.

And then we have “Brainfuck.”

This is a coding language invented in 1993 by Urban Müller with the sole intention of messing with coders. What is already a complex area is made all the more difficult by Brainfuck, the goal being to break down simple commands into micro-steps. Ad infinitum. It’s a Turing complete system, meaning it could be used to run a Turing machine, thus making it logically and practically sound. Just really, really, really, really annoying. Really.

So, instead of our students spending a couple of hours a week learning about capital cities or Shakespeare or long division, let’s give them a crash course on Brainfuck. And watch their tiny minds melt. Watch this space—the abacus will be making a come-back to a classroom near you!^[9]

1 Well, It Was Born That Way…

Although a “creepy little mammal with oddly shaped teeth” would be a very uncharitable way to describe many English peers in the House of Lords, paleontologists thought that naming an extinct ungulate after a flamboyant songstress was A-Okay.

Meet “Gagadon minimonstrum.”

This little critter, a weird-looking cross between a deer and a giant shrew, was named after the “Born This Way” singer Lady Gaga, the “gaga” coming from her stage name and the “mini monster” referring to her fans (“little monsters”). Or it’s due to both she and the long-dead beast having “unusually large teeth that were much broader, with wide ridges around the base of its molars and pointed protrusions called cusps rising along their sides”…have you ever seen her teeth?

The creature roamed what is now southwestern Wyoming; this genus is a unique addition to the fossil record, having teeth unlike any similar specimen found in the Americas. Much as Lady Gaga is unique in being a transgressive Italian American singer who has a large gay following.^[10]

What? Who’s this “Madonna” of which you speak?