The Weirdest, Wildest, And Most Viral Trivia People Loved In 2025
If there’s one thing I love, it’s a bit of trivia – whether it’s to do with the composition of paprika, or what singers do if they have to pee mid-performance.
Which is why I’m a regular browser of Reddit’s r/todayilearned, a forum dedicated to “interesting and specific facts about something that you just found out here”.
And seeing as we’re already in Advent (gulp), we thought we’d share some of the most-upvoted entries to the group this year.
1) “Anthony Bourdain called Ratatouille ’simply the best food movie ever made.’”
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Yup – speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2011, the chef said, “It’s a measure of how deficient Hollywood has been in making an accurate restaurant-food-based film that far and away the best was about an animated rat.”
2) “Ken Allen, an orangutan at the San Diego Zoo, became famous for his many successful escapes.”
“He never acted aggressively toward patrons, but would throw rocks at Otis, another orangutan he ‘despised.’”
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After his first 1985 escape, Newsweek reported, Ken’s keepers built the walls behind his enclosure’s moat (!) higher. But, yup, Ken made his way out again. He was temporarily moved to a single room with a black and white TV after that.
To be fair, though, The Los Angeles Times said his nemesis Otis was “not known to be amiable.”
3) “Danny Trejo has a clause in his movie contracts that requires his villainous characters to die by the end of the film.”
“He wants children to learn that crime doesn’t pay.”
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The actor seemed to confirm the clause on his X (then Twitter) page in 2017. That might be why his characters have one of the highest on-screen death counts in the world, according to Collider.
Plays a bad guy in all of his movies. Requires that his character dies so kids learn crime doesn't pay. #DannyTrejopic.twitter.com/ZMFFiEzQbu
— Danny Trejo (@officialDannyT) June 28, 2017
4) “After Breaking Bad, many meth manufacturers in real life dyed their product blue.”
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Kevin Abar, an assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New Mexico, said the authorities had noticed the trend after the show aired.
It was believed to be a marketing tool (others dyed their product red), which Abar worried would make the highly addictive drug “sexy” to buyers.
5) “A sunfish in a Japanese aquarium became so lonely after the aquarium closed to visitors for renovations that it stopped eating.”
“Only after staff placed photos of people’s faces near its tank did the sunfish perk up and start eating again.”
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The poster shared a link to a BBC article, which said the move was a “last resort” from the aquarium staff. Per a translated X post from the business, the 30kg fish soon felt better and began “waving its fins” at the cutouts.
6) “Eva Longoria spent six million dollars saving a film after her agent told her it was the right call... That film? John Wick.”
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Business Insider reported that she’s pretty happy with her investment, which she made during a crisis moment for the film.
After $6 million in “gap financing” fell through, the actor quietly stepped in to cover the cost.
She is believed to have received more than double her money from the film since.
7) ”[There was a] 2024 Antarctica expedition where flat Earth YouTubers saw the 24-hour sun, which could not be explained by non-spherical models.”
“This prompted at least one YouTuber to publicly admit they were wrong, and leave the flat Earth community.”
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Yup: begun by pastor Will Duffy, who wanted to “end the debate over the shape of the Earth... once and for all,” the 2024 trip was at least partly successful.
Jeran Campanella, for instance, said after the so-called Final Experiment, “Sometimes you are wrong in life. I thought there was no 24-hour Sun. In fact, I was pretty sure of it.”
But this did not seem to make members accept that the Earth is not flat.
8) “Roman Emperor Diocletian was the first to voluntarily retire in 305 AD to grow cabbages.”
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History Today shared that the emperor, who retired at roughly 60, moved to Split to grow vegetables.
In his book Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, author Stephen Williams said that voluntary retirement among Roman emperors was pretty rare, with Emperor Diolectican being the first one to do so.