Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge (10 page)

(a really, really fat one)

USEFUL FOR:
impressing 4th-grade teachers, nerdy dates, bullies with weight problems (hey, someone’s gotta give ’em hope!)

KEYWORDS:
hefty, healthy, pudgy, paunchy, big boned, or obese

THE FACT:
The crown for the world’s chubbiest autocrat goes to the longtime king of Tonga, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, weighing in at a lovable 462 pounds.

Nothing establishes power over the people quite like making it abundantly obvious to them that you have access to more food than they do. Just think of the adorably pudgy (and slightly paranoid) Kim Jong Il or the rotund Idi Amin. But by far the fattest autocrat is Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga. But don’t let the chub fool you: despite weighing in at a clunky 400-plus pounds, the Tongan king is 100 percent dictator. And, in fact, he can be pretty unpleasantly plump. For instance, he actually led one of the strangest imperialist campaigns of all time. After an eccentric Nevadan named Michael Oliver piled sand onto a reef in the Pacific and declared his newly built paradise the Republic of Minerva in 1972, Tupou and a force of 350 Tongans invaded the one-man nation and annexed it in history’s most minor act of colonialism.

(specifically, one that never existed)

USEFUL FOR:
impressing preschool teachers, preschool students, and anyone fond of the gentle giant Brontosaurus

KEYWORDS:
Jurassic Park
,
The Land Before
Time
, or anytime you spot a dinosaur Band-Aid

THE FACT:
No matter what you remember from school, the Brontosaurus never existed. Apparently, someone’s been making a fool out of you for far too long.

Turns out there’s no such thing. In 1874, scientist O. C. Marsh uncovered dinosaur fossils in Wyoming and thought he’d discovered another prehistoric genus, which he named
Brontosaurus
. What Marsh didn’t find was the body’s head, but that didn’t stop him from constructing a full-scale model of the “newly discovered” dinosaur. He just used the head of a Camarasaurus, even though it was a drastically different genus. When scientists finally found out about the great head switcharoo in the early 1970s, they revealed the Brontosaurus for what it really was: an Apatosaurus with a Camarasaurus head. In 1974, the name was formally rejected, but many elementary school teachers still haven’t gotten the memo.

(of the PEZ variety)

USEFUL FOR:
chatting with kids and ex-smokers, and making pals with those with a sweet tooth

KEYWORD:
PEZ

THE FACT:
The first PEZ dispensers were actually made for adults, and made to look like lighters to help nonsmokers fit in.

The whole PEZ craze started back in 1927 when Austrian baker and candy maker J. Eduard Haas and a chemist friend developed the first cold-pressed hard candies. Mint flavored and wrapped in paper, these originals bore little resemblance to today’s PEZ other than the name, derived from PfeffErminZ, the German word for “peppermints.” Like we said, PEZ wasn’t even a children’s candy. Haas marketed his creation to adults, hyping it as a way to stop smoking—like nicotine gum, but without the rush. In fact, when Haas made the first PEZ dispensers almost two decades later, he designed them to look and work like Zippo lighters. When everyone else was lighting up, PEZ users could flick their own “lighter” and pop a peppermint instead. The brand’s familiar plastic heads didn’t appear until 1950, after PEZ arrived in North America and shed its medicinal image for those of cult heroes like Popeye and Santa Claus.

(and a dropout with a really bad rep)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, first dates, and Sunday school

KEYWORDS:
Casanova, Catholicism, quitters, or sex

THE FACT:
Giacomo (“Jacques”) Casanova, as in the 18th century’s most notorious cad, actually began his lecherous escapades as a seminary student.

That is, until he was expelled under “cloudy circumstances” (we’re guessing it was for sleeping with someone). As you well know, everyone’s favorite 18th-century libertine led a postseminary life that’s as ungodly as it gets. By the age of 30 he was sentenced to prison for engaging in “magic,” but he escaped after only a year to Paris. Oddly enough, he made a fortune there by introducing the lottery to France. But before settling down to pen his ribald, self-aggrandizing autobiography, Casanova was expelled from more European countries than most of us will ever get to visit. Along the way, he slept with tons of women, dueled with many of their husbands, and generally sinned his way to the top of European culture, befriending such figures as Madame de Pompadour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau along the way.

USEFUL FOR:
chatting at watercoolers and whenever you find yourself using a Dixie Cup, really

KEYWORDS:
Dixie, Harvard, or Kansas’s greatest contribution to drinking

THE FACT:
Who knew it was a Harvard dropout who started the little cup craze that swept the nation?

You can thank Hugh Moore, Dixie Cup genius, and Ivy League underachiever for putting his education, or lack thereof, to good use. It all started in 1909, when Kansas’s Board of Health outlawed public wells and communal water dippers based on the novel logic that they spread disease. Unfortunately, this left Kansans at a loss for a way to distribute water. Enter Moore. He invented an ice-chilled dispenser that served customers five ounces of water in a disposable paper cup. Moore’s Health Kups didn’t exactly take the country by storm, but they sold well enough to keep him in business until 1919, when he thought of a better name. The choice was Dixie. Moore adopted the name from the Dixie Doll Company in New York, simply because he liked the sound of the word. And judging from the increase in post–name-change sales, so did most of America.