Editor Ruby here this week to round up some stray facts we’ve discovered while writing trivia questions.

The world’s first selfie: taken by a guy who had to set up a tin plate daguerreotype and then stand perfectly still for 15 minutes. Robert Cornelius did a pretty good job for 1839! Check out the giant lens he used.
I was trying to write a question about the phrase “when pigs fly” and wondering if there’s a term for that kind of phrase and there are two: adynaton and idiom of impossibility. The Greek “adynaton” literally means “impossible” and was translated to Latin as “impossibilia.” I recommend clicking those links for good examples, but a few I’d like to call out are the Portuguese “not even if it rains penknives,” Turkish “when fish climb poplar trees,” and German “on St. Never's Day” (“Am Sankt-Nimmerleins-Tag”). A lot of them are about things blooming that are not capable of blooming, such as salt, an owl’s tail, clogs, a flagpole, or bamboo, but also apricots, which are on a blossoming plant! Going off this one Instagram post I found, it looks like maybe that one is more about the brevity of the apricot season than about the impossibility of their flower. Egyptian Arabic speakers, get at me about this one. Also, Arabic for apricot is formally “al-barqouq,” but people tend to actually say “mish-mish,” which rules.
Speaking of what stuff is named in other languages, Swedish people call thumbprint cookies “hallongrotta,” or “raspberry caves.”
Coca-Cola is not available in Cuba or North Korea, but you can buy it in every other country in the world. Here’s a good podcast episode about “coca-colonization,” but more specifically, we wanted to draw your attention to this sentence from the BBC link: “[Dwight Eisenhower] also introduced the drink to top Soviet general, Georgy Zhukov, who asked if a special, colourless version - one that looked like vodka - could be made, and Coca-Cola duly obliged for a while.” Do we think clear Coca-Cola tasted different? Is this a Crystal Pepsi situation?
We all know the ocean is full of giant terrors. But few pause to wonder: why? What about the deep sea makes big animals like squid and jellyfish even bigger? This phenomenon has a name and it’s “abyssal gigantism” — which is coincidentally not a bad name for your next doom metal band. (Paradoxically, tiny animals get even tinier down there.) What’s going on? Scientists have a few theories — reduced predation, efficiency of larger animals’ metabolisms in a food-scarce environment, increasing size with lower temperature — but it’s so hard to do research on the deep ocean we just don’t know. The ocean: leave it alone, probably.

While trying to write a question where the answer was Tommy, I discovered several facts. First of all, the question I ended up with was: “Half of a stoner comedy duo, half of a team of paranormal federal agents, and all British infantrymen in World War I share what name?” The first part refers to Tommy Chong and the second part refers to Tommy Lee Jones in “Men in Black.” A friend raised to me that “Jay” also seems like it would fit those parameters — Jay of “and Silent Bob” fame, and Agent J from the MiB. I regret not wording it as “the actor behind half a team of paranormal federal agents”! That’s my bad!

But turning to the last part, as U.S. WWI infantrymen were called “doughboys,” British soldiers were called “Tommy Atkins,” which seems baffling until you think about stuff like “John Q. Public” or “Joe Six-Pack.” The nickname is actually even older, first documented in Jamaica in 1743. Weird!! Even weirder: there is a kind of mango called a Tommy Atkins for totally unrelated reasons (named after a specific guy). Tommy Atkins are kind of the Red Delicious of the mango world: they’re fine, they have a long shelf life, but they’re not the mango you’d choose if you had options. Editor Ira wants to make sure you know that both the soldier and the mango are completely unrelated to horror leading man Tommy Atkins of “The Rockford Files.”
Anyway, while doing all that research, I also found out that Tommy Tune is not a stage name. His given name is Thomas Tune.