QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  Terminal velocity is the point at which a body’s weight equalises against the resistance of the air and it stops accelerating – in humans it’s nearly 195 kph (about 120 mph), reached in free fall at about 550 metres (1,800 feet).

  There are cats on record that have fallen thirty storeys or more without ill effects. One cat is known to have survived a forty-six-storey fall, and there is even evidence of a cat deliberately thrown out of a Cessna aircraft at 244 metres (800 feet) that survived.

  A 1987 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association studied 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise windows in New York. On average they fell 5.5 storeys. Ninety per cent survived, though many suffered serious injuries. The data showed that injuries rose proportionally to the number of storeys fallen – up to seven storeys. Above seven storeys, the number of injuries per cat sharply declined. In other words, the further the cat fell, the better its chances.

  The most famous human free-falls are Vesna Vulović, who fell 10,600 metres (34,777 feet) when a terrorist bomb destroyed her Yugoslavian airlines DC-10 in 1972, and Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade, an RAF tailgunner who leaped from his burning Lancaster in 1944, falling 5,800 metres (19,000 feet).

  Vulović broke both legs, and suffered some spinal damage, but was saved by the fact that her seat and the toilet booth it was attached to took the impact.

  Alkemade’s fall was broken by a pine tree and then a snowdrift. He escaped unharmed and remained sitting in the snow, quietly smoking a cigarette.

  CLIVE Have they done … Have they done this with other animals? Have they done hamsters, dogs …?

  STEPHEN I’m not quite sure!

  ALAN Cows, I’d like to see them do cows …

  Why did the dodo die out?

  a) Hunted for food

  b) Hunted for sport

  c) Loss of habitat

  d) Competition with other species

  The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) has the unenviable double distinction as a byword for being both dead and stupid.

  A flightless native of Mauritius, it evolved in an environment free of ground-based predators and was wiped out in less than a hundred years by the destruction of its forest habitat and the introduction of pigs, rats and dogs to the island.

  Improbably enough, the dodo was a species of pigeon, but, unlike the other famous extinct fowl, the passenger pigeon, it was not hunted for food as it was barely edible – the Dutch called it walgvogel, the disgusting bird.

  The Portugese name dodo is also unkind; it means ‘simpleton’ (as in ‘durrr-durrr’), a reference to the fact that it had no fear of humans so didn’t run away, making it of limited value as a sporting bird. It was extinct by 1700.

  In 1755, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that their specimen was too moth-eaten to keep and threw it on a bonfire. It was the only preserved dodo in existence. A passing employee tried to rescue it, but could only save its head and part of one limb.

  For a long time, all that was known about the dodo derived from these remains, a handful of descriptions, three or four oil paintings and a few bones. We knew more about some dinosaurs. In December 2005, a large cache of bones was found on Mauritius which has allowed for a much more accurate reconstruction.

  From the time of its extinction until the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 the dodo was pretty thoroughly forgotten. Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) was an Oxford maths lecturer who must have seen it in the Ashmolean.

  The dodo appears in Alice in Wonderland in the Caucus Race, a ‘race’ with no precise start or end, in which everyone gets a prize. Each of the birds corresponds to a member of the boating party present when Dodgson first told the story and the dodo is said to be based on himself.

  Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations in the book quickly made the bird famous. The phrase ‘dead as a dodo’ also dates from this period.

  What buries its head in the sand?

  Wrong.

  No ostrich has ever been observed to bury its head in the sand. It would suffocate if it did. When danger threatens, ostriches run away like any other sensible animal.

  The myth about ostriches may have arisen because they sometimes lie down in their nest (which is a shallow hole in the ground) with their necks stretched out flat and scan the horizon for trouble. If the predator gets too close they get up and leg it. They can run at speeds up to 65 kph (40 mph) for thirty minutes.

  The ostrich is the largest bird in the world: a male can reach 2.7 m (9 feet) tall, but their brains are the size of a walnut, smaller than their eyeballs.

  The ostrich was classified by Linnaeus as Struthio camelus or ‘sparrow camel’, presumably because they live in the desert and have long, camel-like necks. The Greek for ostrich was ho megas strouthos, ‘the big sparrow’.

  The head-burying myth was first reported by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who also thought ostriches could hatch their eggs by looking at them aggressively.

  He didn’t mention their ability to swallow odd things.

  As well as the stones they use to aid digestion, ostriches will eat iron, copper, brick or glass. One ostrich in London Zoo was found to have eaten a metre-length of rope, a spool of film, an alarm clock, a cycle valve, a pencil, a comb, three gloves, a handkerchief, pieces of a gold necklace, a watch and a number of coins.

  Ostriches in Namibia have been known to eat diamonds.

  ALAN If you see an ostrich running backwards, it looks like a person.

  JIMMY It looks like a person?

  ALAN The legs look like a person.

  JIMMY You’ve been going out with some dodgy birds, haven’t you?

  What’s at the middle of a pearl?

  A worm, usually.

  Pearls hardly ever result from a grain of sand or grit getting into an oyster’s shell. There is perhaps a thousand-to-one chance of a pearl forming that way. If all it took were sand – which oysters spend their lives sucking in and blowing out – pearls would be far more common.

  Oysters have numerous predators. Parasitic worms, starfish, snails, sponges and mussels attack them by prising open or drilling into their shells. The larger creatures usually kill the oyster, but the worms trigger its defence mechanism and may be contained in a ‘pearl sac’ then smothered by repeated coatings of nacre, to stop their irritating wriggles. Nacre is an extraordinary substance: a mixture of calcium carbonate (from which marble is made) and an organic secretion very like keratin (the material responsible for human fingernails). The aggressors suffer a glorious doom. The nineteenth-century French natural scientist Raphael Dubois said: ‘The most beautiful pearl is nothing more, in fact, than the brilliant sarcophagus of a worm.’

  Oysters with parasites in them are often spurned by polite oyster society and go and live under rocks out of the way, which makes it slightly easier for pearl-fishers to find them. Nevertheless, a finished pearl can tale up to fifteen years to make and a ton of oysters might yield as few as three pearls. The chances of any of them being perfectly spherical are, literally, one in a million.

  Cultured pearls are an attempt to fast-track this process. An oyster is opened and a bead of mussel shell inserted, along with part of another oyster’s mantle (the fold of an oyster’s skin covering its internal organs). The ‘donor’ oyster’s mantle fuses with the tissue of its host, and is stimulated into producing a pearl sac, coating the mussel bead with nacre.

  Pearls can be found in clams, whelks, conchs, abalones, mussels and snails as well as in oysters. But don’t get too excited as you shuck your English natives this Christmas. The pearl oyster is actually a kind of scallop – and is about as closely related to the edible variety as humans are to marmosets. Edible oysters don’t produce nacre – their ‘pearls’ look like rather dull pebbles.

  Where do gorillas sleep?

  In nests.

  These large, muscular primates build new nests every evening (and sometimes after a heavy lunch) either on the ground or in the lowe
r branches of trees.

  Aside from the very young, it’s strictly one gorilla, one nest.

  They aren’t works of art – bent branches woven together, with softer foliage as a mattress – and usually take ten minutes to make. Females and young animals prefer to sleep in trees; males or ‘silverbacks’ sleep on the ground.

  According to some accounts, lowland gorillas are hygienic and houseproud, whereas mountain gorillas regularly foul their nests and sleep on a mound of their own dung.

  Gorillas cannot swim. They have forty-eight chromosomes, two more than people.

  More gorillas are eaten by people in the form of ‘bushmeat’ every year than there are in all the zoos in the world.

  What’s the commonest bird in the world?

  The chicken, by miles.

  There are about 52 billion chickens in the world: that’s almost nine for every human. Seventy-five per cent of them will be eaten but, for almost 3,000 years, they were farmed primarily for their eggs. Until the Romans came to Britain it had never occurred to anyone to eat the bird itself.

  All the chickens in the world are descended from a kind of pheasant called the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus gallus), native to Thailand. Its nearest modern relative is the gamecock used in cockfighting.

  Mass production of chickens and eggs started in about 1800. Eating chicken began as a by-product of egg production. Only chickens too old to produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat. In 1963, chicken meat was still a luxury. It wasn’t until the 1970s that it became the meat of choice for most families. Today it accounts for almost half of all meat eaten in the UK.

  As a result of selective breeding and hormone treatment, it now takes less than forty days to grow a chicken to maturity, which is twice as fast as allowing nature to take its course.

  Ninety-eight per cent of all chickens raised anywhere in the world – even organic ones – come from breeds developed by three American companies. Over half the world’s ‘broilers’ (eating chickens) are Cobb 500s, developed in the 1970s by the Cobb Breeding Co.

  There were no chickens at all in the Americas before 1500. They were introduced by the Spanish.

  More than a third of all UK chicken is produced by one Scottish company, the Grampian Country Foods Group. They supply all the major supermarket chains, and are a major donor to the Conservative Party. They process 3.8 million chickens a week through their eight vast Integrated Chicken Units, one of which is in Thailand. Their motto is ‘Traditional Goodness’.

  Most chickens sold for eating are female. Male ones for eating are castrated cocks and are called capons. Nowadays castration is done chemically with hormones that cause the testicles to atrophy.

  The industry term for chicken feet is ‘paws’. Most of America’s ‘paws’ get exported to China even though three billion chickens already live there.

  Danish chickens go gok-gok; German chickens go gak gak; Thai chickens go gook gook; Dutch chickens go tok tok; Finnish and Hungarian chickens go kot kot. The rather superior French hen goes cotcotcodet.

  RORY [discussing sex with chickens] I don’t know what the female chicken’s, erm, aperture – is that the right word?

  ALAN Well, they get an egg out of it! So you’d probably be all right girth-wise …

  JIMMY What a lovely thought, Alan.

  SEAN Especially if you’ve got an egg-shaped cock!

  What’s the ‘sport of kings’?

  At various times this phrase has been applied to chariot racing, jousting, falconry, bowls, polo, and, most recently, horse-racing.

  However, for the best part of 2,000 years there was one ‘sport’ which earned the ‘royal’ tag above all others: cockfighting.

  Until it was banned in 1835 it was Britain’s national sport, with every village boasting at least one cockpit. Everyone from royalty to schoolboys joined in: there were even cockpits in the palace of Westminster and on Downing Street. On Shrove Tuesday, for a fee of one ‘cock-penny’, boys could bring their gamecocks to school and fight them for the day.

  No one knows how or when the Old English Game fowl (OEG) arrived in Britain. There is a legend that Phoenician tradesmen introduced them but it seems likely they were carried here by Iron Age tribes migrating from the East. In 54 BC Julius Caesar was impressed that the ancient Britons bred birds for fighting rather than meat.

  OEGs are universally acknowledged as the most aggressive of all fowl. A good gamecock will fight to the death with no special encouragement, hence their pre-eminence as fighting birds.

  Competition among their breeders was intense. Recipes for special bread to ‘build courage’ were jealously guarded, though the practice of soaking it in warm urine was universal. The cock had his comb and wattles removed (dubbed) and steel spurs (gavelocks) attached.

  A good cocker would think nothing of cleaning his cock’s wounded head by sticking it in his mouth and sucking it clean. Racing and cockfighting often took place together, as both involved gambling.

  Some bloodlines were legendary; the White Piles bred by Dr Bellsye near Chester were famous for the ‘Chesire drop’, a sudden burst of murderous violence just when the cock looked finished.

  Cockfighting is still legal in Louisiana and New Mexico, and only classed as a ‘misdemeanour’ in sixteen other states such as Tennessee and Arkansas.

  A cock is a male bird over a year old; under a year he’s a cockerel, or ‘stag’ in cocker-speak. Other words and phrases deriving from the ‘sport of kings’ include ‘game’ (i.e. up for it), ‘pitted against’, ‘turn tail’, ‘show the white feather’ (cowardice), ‘show a clean pair of heels’, ‘well-heeled’ (which originally meant possessing sharp natural spurs), ‘cocksure’ and ‘cock-eyed’ (to squint).

  What’s Britain’s smallest bird?

  The goldcrest and the firecrest tie for the title of the smallest bird in Britain. Both are a mere 9 cm (3.5 inches) long, whereas the wren measures in at 9.5–10 cm (3.75–4 inches), making it the third smallest British bird.

  However, the wren is Britain’s commonest wild bird and can be found in every kind of habitat. There are currently ten million breeding pairs.

  Its name, Troglodytes troglodytes, means ‘cave dweller’. Wrens build their dome-like nest in the most unlikely places: caves, burrows, inside the carcasses of dead animals, the folds of church curtains, watering cans.

  The male usually builds six nests in his territory for the female to choose from, although there are records of them building five times that number.

  Despite their size, the piercing ‘squitter’ of the wren can carry for half a mile and is one of the few bird songs that can be heard all year round. Wrens are susceptible to cold, and communal roosts of anything up to thirty birds can be found, as they huddle together for warmth.

  The word wren comes from the Old English wrenna, which also meant ‘horny’, perhaps referring to the bird’s cocked tail. The wren is still called a ‘stag’ in Norfolk, from the Danish stag meaning ‘spike’.

  On St Stephen’s Day (26 December) in the west of Britain and Ireland, ‘Hunting the Wren’ was an important Hallowe’ enstyle custom. A wren was captured, nailed to a pole, and paraded from door to door by children and adults wearing masks. In return for a song and a feather from the bird, householders offered food and drink, preferably beer.

  The goldcrest’s Latin name, Regulus regulus, means ‘little king’, presumably because of its ‘crowning’ gold stripe. A fully grown c weighs about the same as a five-pence piece (5 g, less than a fifth of an ounce). There are stories of hungry goldcrests latching on to dragonflies and being ‘towed’ by the heavier insect.

  Goldcrests are tough, regularly migrating across the North Sea to overwinter in Britain. They nest in conifers and the spread of British conifer plantations over the last fifty years means they are much less rare than they used to be.

  The firecrest, on the other hand, remains elusive. It was only added to the list of British breeding birds in 1962 and there are still probably fewe
r than 100 breeding pairs.

  What animal are the Canary Islands named after?

  Dogs. Canary birds are named after the islands (where they are indigenous), not the other way round.

  The archipelago gets its name from the Latin name for the largest of the islands, which the Romans named ‘Isle of Dogs’ (Insula Canaria) after the large numbers of dogs there, both wild and domesticated.

  The volcano on La Palma in the Canaries is said to have the potential to cause a catastrophic collapse of the western half of the island, creating a tsunami that could cross the Atlantic and hit the eastern seaboard of the United States of America eight hours later with a wave as high as thirty metres.

  In ‘Canarian Wrestling’ the participants confront each other in a sand circle called a terrero; the aim is to make your opponent touch the sand with any part of his body other than the feet. No hitting is permitted. The sport originated with the Guanches, the islands’ pre-Spanish indigenous people.

  The Silbo Gomero (‘Gomeran Whistle’) is a whistled language used in the Canary island of La Gomera to communicate across its deep valleys. Its speakers are called ‘silbadors’. Although it was originally a Guanche language, it has been adapted so that modern silbadors are, effectively, whistling in Spanish. It’s a compulsory subject for Gomeran schoolchildren.

  Canaries are a kind of finch. For centuries, British mining regulations required the keeping of a small bird for gas detection. They were used in this way until 1986, and the wording wasn’t removed from the regulations until 1995. The idea was that toxic gases like carbon monoxide and methane killed the birds before they injured the miners. Canaries were favoured because they sing a lot, so it’s noticeable when they go quiet and fall over.