Show Off Your Smarts! Winners

Man, oh man! With all the great facts you guys provided, we had a doozy of a time picking the winners. For the holiday movie/music trivia fact, we narrowed it down to our two favorites: the submissions on It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story. When it came down to it, though, we had to give the decision to Kate Hansen for submitting this great fact:

When the movie A Christmas Story was being cast, Jack Nicholson was given the script and was very much interested in the role of Mr. Parker, “The Old Man”, according to director, Bob Clark. However, Clark didn’t learn of this until later, and the studio didn’t want to pay Nicholson’s fee anyway, which would have doubled the budget. Regardless, Clark says that Darren McGavin was still the better choice and was born to play the role.

And for the plant-themed day, Thomas surprised us with this great trivia nugget:

The vast majority of our breathable oxygen comes from oceanic plants and single-celled plantlike protists. Only about 20 percent comes from terrestrial plants.

We had our fact-checkers look into it and most sources say between 20 and 30 percent so we’ll give him credit (and a shirt) for that one. Kate and Thomas, 2 great mental_floss T’s will be coming your way. And thank you to everyone else for sharing your smarts with us. Don’t forget, Neatorama readers can use the discount code “Neatorama” when you order from mentalfloss.com to get 10% off anything at our store.