Ryan Menezes

People did not eat whole bananas (sliced them instead) and did not display bananas, because the fruits looked so phallic

Andrew Preston of the Boston Fruit Company launched a campaign to counter this, with postcards showing women eating bananas in a non-erotic manner www.cracked.com/article_3709...

The banana has a phallic reputation. Odd, since it's curved, unlike most phallic objects.

The reputation goes back at least as far as the 1800s, back when the variant we eat today, the Cavendish banana, did not yet exist. They ate Gros Michel bananas, which curved less.

Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko moved from the USSR to the US. Pajitnov is still alive and made more games. Pokhilko killed himself, his wife and his son. www.cracked.com/article_3331...

If Tetris pieces fell randomly, you'd soon hit a long stretch of zigzag tiles you couldn't possibly eliminate, no matter how well you play. Modern versions of Tetris avoid this with nonrandom drops.

One A.I. playing the NES version decided the optimal strategy was to give up.

When confronted in October 2016 about saying "grab 'em by the pussy," Trump issued a statement, saying, "Bill Clinton has said far worse to me."

Call it deflection, but it really did come off as an oddly honest response, and quite believable.

The story got an update this month. The two pleaded guilty, and a judge rejected the plea, calling the maximum prison sentence of 240 months too lenient. www.cracked.com/article_4080...

Messages between a husband and wife, two undertakers caught piling 190 bodies in their funeral home instead of cremating them.

Rather than opening stored files, the app is designed for playing purchased content. However, it also does not let you purchase content. It used to, apparently, but it no longer does.

Every time it runs, Windows Audio crashes and must be manually restarted from Services.msc.

There is one app on Windows that displays Dolby color: Movies & TV. It offers no option to open files. Meaning, it has no "open" button anywhere, or title bar, and ctrl+O does nothing.

But if you right-click the file, pick "open with" and navigate to Movies & TV, it plays it.

Pluribus opened with a green and purple tint, and I thought that was an interesting artistic choice. I only gradually realized it uses Dolby Vision color, and my screen wasn't decoding it properly.

If the article reads as very scattered and confused, remember that January 2021 was a scattered and confused time, and we were all hungover. Marjorie Taylor Greene had just filed an article of impeachment against Joe Biden. www.cracked.com/article_2947...

Just remembered I wrote this in 2021, as a joke. Then this year, it became actual White House strategy.

Still, it wasn't exactly a fortune, given the situation. Jack's ticket giving him a bed in third class cost almost twice that.

The Titanic's parlor suites, meanwhile, each cost $130,000 in today's money, and Cal booked three of them.

"A twenty should do it," says the Titanic guy, about compensating Jack for saving Rose's life. Then he reconsiders and offers something more gracious: one dinner with the first class crowd.

A twenty was $660 in today's money and could rent a room in 1912 New York for six months.

Car pulls over.

Driver: "Hey, do you know how to get to ___"
Me: "Let me see. I could show you on my phone."
Driver: (angry) "Even I could look it up on my phone." *drives away*

People magazine didn't start doing Sexiest Man Alive because they thought it would be a good idea to pick the sexiest man alive. They were just doing a profile of a celeb one month, like they do regularly, and they went with "sexiest man alive" as the line to stick on the cover.

This would be more obvious if we described efficiency in gallons-per-mile (or gallons-per-hundred-miles).

When you think about it, gallons-per-mile is what you really care about it. www.cracked.com/article_4467...

What saves more gas? Raising an engine's efficiency from 10 MPG to 15 MPG or raising it from 25 MPG to 50 MPG?

Answer: Raising from 10 to 15.

Hitler was nominated for the Peace Prize, but only satirically.

If you heard Hitler got nominated and assumed this was genuine, don't feel bad. Some people back then thought that too, and they responded by canceling lectures from the guy who nominated him www.cracked.com/article_3984...

Hitler did not try getting a Nobel Peace Prize, no.

He did get so angry about one going to an enemy that he banned all Germans from accepting Nobel prizes going forward. He set up a rival German prize for Art and Science (but not for peace, as he did not honor peace).

Some people think poison ivy is contagious, or at least that scratching it spreads it from one part of your skin to another.

But poison ivy rashes are an allergic reaction, and the rash doesn't contain the allergen. So, touching the rash can't spread it. www.cracked.com/article_4525...

If a disease makes someone's skin look weird, you might assume you'll catch it by touching them. That's often untrue.

For centuries, people thought leprosy transmits via skin contact. It doesn't. It transmits via the respiratory system. Also, 95% of people are naturally immune.

"But what if, instead of food for their children, parents buy crack?!"

If they like crack that much, they'd also launder their EBT cards into cash, and use that to buy crack. At least direct money lets them buy that crack more efficiently, leaving more cash leftover for food.

If the sole goal is instead to help needy people, the government should eliminate SNAP and replace it with direct payments, of money.

"But what if people spend the money suboptimally?!" That's their problem, not yours.

Food stamps were originally restricted to specific kinds of food to provide a subsidy to farmers.

Stamps were administered by the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, whose job was to sell surplus farm products without letting prices drop naturally to the market rate.

One time, poison Halloween candy did kill a kid, but it turned out the boy's own father was the culprit and framed a neighbor.

This case did not create the myth. It piggybacked off it.
www.cracked.com/article_3577...

Sociologists have researched where the fear of neighbors poisoning Halloween candy came from. There are no actual cases of that ever happening.

One theory: People started mistrusting neighbors more thanks to racial integration.

The story makes much more sense if you imagine the present-day timeline is really just 15-year-old Lily's fantasy.

Of course you think you can open Boston's top flower shop using just one employee, whom you don't pay. You're 15. www.cracked.com/article_4448...

I'd been looking for an excuse to write this synopsis somewhere

In 2003, Billboard ranked 5,000 songs' success. Defending their methodology (pure stats), they also listed alt picks they might otherwise have chosen for their influence, such as Satisfaction and Stan.

Crazy they pegged Stan as that influential, with the influence (the slang term) still years off.