The Book of the Year
Page 32
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‘Aa’ is the way that Oromo people write the ‘long a’ that you get in words like ‘father’ or ‘water’.
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The combined total of all the lawsuits levelled against Presidents Obama, Bush (W) and Clinton at the same point in their presidencies was just 48.
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Despite the fact this is the opposite of what most people want from a hotel.
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Equally undesirable in a hotel, one would think.
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Cambridge University also hired its first ‘Professor of Innovation’. The post was funded by the man who invented the switch that turns kettles off once they’ve boiled.
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The real Colonel Sanders died in 1980. The new book is by the fictional character on the side of the bucket.
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When they emerged in September, the lavanauts gave advice to future Mars adventurers: ‘remember the toilets…are a living system…let them talk to you, if they smell a certain way or act a certain way they’re trying to tell you something, so listen.’
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Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been awarded a black belt in Taekwondo even though he’s never set foot in the ring.
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Micronation (n): An area or territory that claims national sovereignty despite not being recognised by most or all other nation states.
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This, of course, is now also true of the other Steve Bannon.
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This wasn’t Martinez’s first attempt to prove Dalí is her father. In 2007 she collected hair and skin from his death mask and had that tested, but the results were inconclusive.
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Some readers may remember that ‘God Save the Queen’ was played at the end of films in UK cinemas until the 1960s, and that audiences were expected to stand and wait for it to finish before leaving.
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Tomatoes, of course, are not vegetables either.
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Kate Middleton revealed this year that at school her nickname was ‘Squeak’ because her sister, Philippa, was known as ‘Pip’. We also discovered that when he was a toddler, Prince William couldn’t pronounce ‘Granny’ and so would call the Queen ‘Gary’.
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For other much-loved political figures with Napoleonic art, see Paintings.
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After the Rihanna incident, Graham went on to present a documentary for the BBC about the overly sexualised state of pop, saying, ‘Some of these videos are simply porn to music.’ Celebrities including Barbara Windsor expressed support for him and he began receiving fan mail that managed to reach him despite being addressed simply to ‘Rihanna’s Farmer, Northern Ireland’.
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A more appropriately named political figure is David Sterling, the civil servant who was given the responsibility of sorting out Northern Ireland’s budget in March.
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Branson bought Necker Island in 1978 to impress a girl he’d just met. It did the trick: they’re still married.
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In fact, there are three identical submarines called Boaty McBoatface. They all have a fax number written on them in case they get lost and someone finds them, as well as a big label saying ‘HARMLESS SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENT’.
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An offensive lineman is a player who blocks the opposition from tackling the guy with the ball. They’re not (necessarily) offensive in character.
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Dating back rather further than that: this year scientists in the Antarctic confirmed they’d found the oldest known ice – a core (a cylinder drilled out of a glacier or ice sheet) that’s 2.7 million years old. This easily beat the record, which was previously held by ice that was a mere 800,000 years old.
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The Vatican’s universities hold regular courses for exorcists-in-training.
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Another of the trains was named Glenn, after an in-joke that everyone in Gothenburg is called Glenn. (This has a grain of truth: at one point in the 1980s, the city’s football team had four players called Glenn.)
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Strange quarks are so named because they exist for a strangely long amount of time. Charm quarks are so named because their discovery fitted in charmingly with existing theories.
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The British Armed Forces also faced criticism this year when a parliamentary question revealed that 230 members of their Parachute Regiment weren’t qualified to use parachutes.
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Rats get the blame for everything in Bihar province. After devastating floods, the water resources minister said it was all because rats had weakened river embankments by gnawing through them. Others expressed their doubts.
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She can’t be called the oldest Japanese porn star though, because there is an 82-year-old man who is still going strong.
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Better known as James Bond actor Roger Moore.
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Relic thefts are not uncommon. In 1991, armed men stole the chin of St Anthony from a Padua church. The man behind the crime, underworld don Felice Maniero, later said he’d wanted St Anthony’s tongue, which was more valuable, ‘but those blockheads came back with the chin’.
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A glass eel is a name for a young eel, so called because it’s transparent. The US Fish and Wildlife Service also cracked down on glass eel smuggling rings this year in an exercise called Operation Broken Glass.
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Not technically a spider.
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Warning: may contain strong language.
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A coloured trim no wider than 1 centimetre around the cuffs and neck is permitted. But coloured underwear that’s not initially visible, but becomes visible when the overgarments are dampened with sweat, is not allowed.
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It’s being built on the River Qi.
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After 300 years of wearing wigs in the House of Commons, clerks were told they could take them off. The change was approved partly to save money, partly to make the Commons less ‘stuffy’, and partly because clerks found them too itchy.
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Though it probably would have been banned anyway, since it’s about a government losing a referendum.
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This is not the first time this has happened. The month before, another Chinese firm, Wukong Bicycles, which shared bikes, closed down after 90 per cent of its bikes disappeared. The founder says he now prefers to think of it as ‘a charity project’.
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Edwards has owned the world’s biggest rabbit since 2008, holding the record with various different bunnies. She says the secret to breeding large rabbits is to make sure they have large parents.
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When Prince Philip announced he was retiring, British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah said to him, ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re standing down.’ Philip replied, ‘Well, I can’t stand up much longer.’
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Maduro blames US interference. He also blames opposition leaders, for conspiring to cause poverty – accusing them, among other things, of hoarding toilet paper so ordinary people face shortages.
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Actually, there were only 43 wax presidents for sale, as Grover Cleveland served as both the 22nd and 24th, and the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies in Gettysburg decided it was only worth sculpting him once.
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Trump claimed this year that he has been on the cover of Time ‘like, 14 or 15 times’, and that this is a record that will never be broken. In fact, he had been on the cover 11 times when he made the claim. Former president Richard Nixon featured on it 55 times.
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As a result of this font scandal, Pakistan is now sans-Sharif.
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Marston was furious when, in 1942, Wonder Woman joined DC Comics’ Justice League (whose members included Batman, Superman and The Flash) and the DC writer made her the society’s secretary. When all the male superheroes headed off to war,
she stayed behind to answer the post.
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He was also the first astronaut to sleep in space. Not only this, he’s also the only one known to have slept on the launch pad. He did so during countdown, and co-workers had to shout his name several times over the communications link to wake him up.
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This is important because water is denser than air. If you can lift your boat into the air and only have small planks touching the water then you can almost fly in your yacht. The planks are known as foils and are also used in foilboarding (see Obama, Barack).
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31 March, in case you’re wondering, the same as National Bunsen Burner Day.
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They’re probably right. Scientists concluded this year that the average T. rex top speed was about 1mph faster than the average human top speed, so the speedier runners among us could have outpaced them. In fact, the T. rex couldn’t run at all. New computer modelling of their movement has revealed that if they’d tried to, their legs would have snapped under their own weight.
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Over its 3,000-year history, city locals have called it Peiping and Beiping, but never Peking, which was a name given to it by French missionaries and then taken up in the West.
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Hardly the most sceptical sceptic in the world – she believes that Nessie did live, but that it died in the 1930s.
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Published by Random House Books 2017
Text copyright © Quite Interesting Ltd 2017
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Random House Books
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ISBN 9781847948199