by John Lloyd
than were killed in action.
In 117 AD, Emperor Hadrian declared
attempted suicide by soldiers
a form of desertion
and made it a capital offence.
Jack Bauer,
the lead character in the TV series 24,
killed 112 people
in the first five seasons of the show.
The longest hangover
in medical literature
lasted four weeks.
It belonged to a 37-year-old man
from Glasgow.
In 1715, a group of Jacobite rebels
failed to take Edinburgh Castle
because their rope ladders
were six feet too short.
The first manager
of the first McDonald’s franchise
was called Ed MacLuckie.
Coca-Cola in the Maldives
is made from seawater.
A ‘riot’ in England and Wales
must legally involve
a minimum of 12 people.
Under US federal law
it’s only three people
and in Nevada
only two.
More than 1 in 20 football injuries
are caused by
celebrating goals on the pitch.
Slavery was not made
a statutory offence in the UK
until 6th April 2010.
Diagnosed with pleurisy,
Sir Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of
Vaseline, decided to coat himself
in his product from head to foot.
He survived and lived to be 96.
In 1915, Charlie Chaplin entered
a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest
in San Francisco. Not only did he not win,
he failed even to make the final.
Male fruit flies rejected by females
drink significantly more alcohol than
those that have had a successful encounter.
In Inuktitut,
iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga
means
‘I should try not to become an alcoholic’.
2,520 is the smallest number
that can be exactly divided
by all the numbers
1 to 10.
2.5 million Mills & Boon novels
were pulped and added to the tarmac
of the UK’s M6 toll motorway
to make it more absorbent.
In 1999, more than 3,000 people
were hospitalised after
tripping over a
laundry basket.
In 1997, 39 people in the UK
found themselves in
hospital with
tea-cosy-related
injuries.
Deipnophobia n.
The fear of
dinner party conversations.
Nomophobia n.
The fear of being
out of mobile phone contact.
Metrophobia n.
Fear of poetry.
Lachanophobia n.
Fear of vegetables.
Since 1990, the number of people
living in poverty in China
has fallen from
85% to 15%.
A ‘knot’ is something
tied in a single piece of rope or line.
Something that joins two ropes
together is a ‘bend’.
A baby oyster
is called a ‘spat’.
More chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos
are eaten by people every year
than there are in
all the zoos in the world.
In the 19th century,
sausages were marketed as
‘bags of mystery’.
If a vampire were to feed once a day
and turn each of his victims
into a vampire,
the entire human population of the planet
would become vampires
in just over a month.
Relative to our galaxy,
the Earth is travelling through space
at more than 500,000 mph.
The Sun takes 220 million years
to orbit the galaxy,
a journey it has made
20 times so far.
Abbey-lubber n.
A lazy monk.
Acrochordon n.
A wart that hangs down
like a string.
Apport n.
Something that appears out of thin air:
the opposite of a vanishing.
Autotelic adj.
Worth doing for its own sake.
Although Shakespeare’s works run to
more than a million words,
only 14 exist in his own handwriting:
12 of them are his signatures
and the other two are ‘by’ and ‘me’.
George W. Bush named
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
as his favourite childhood book. It was
published when he was 23 years old.
In 2012, Britain’s Eurovision entrant,
Englebert Humperdinck (76), was
not only the oldest of the contestants,
he was older than more than 20
of the countries they represented.
Swans do not sing (before dying or
otherwise), although one species, the
Whistling Swan, whistles a bit.
There are ten times as many stars
in the known universe
as there are
grains of sand in the world.
The ties bought in America
for Father’s Day each year
would stretch from New York to Rome.
There are thought to be 100,000
uncharted mountains under the sea.
Only 1,000 or so have ever been mapped.
Aborigines, whose culture reaches back
to the last Ice Age, have names for
(and can locate) mountains
that have been under the sea
for 8,000 years.
Just like humans,
British cows moo in accents
specific to their region.
95% of all data in the world
is still stored on paper.
Most of it is never looked at again.
The common shrew
protects itself from predators
by dying of fright.
The next person to walk on the Moon
will almost certainly be
Chinese.
Almost half of all babies in China
are born by Caesarean section.
The half a million tonnes of chocolate
eaten each year in Britain
represent 87% of the entire
annual cocoa production
of Latin America.
A single zinc mine in Namibia
uses a fifth of the country’s
electricity supply.
Per gram per second, more energy
runs through a sunflower
than through the Sun itself.
It takes ten times
as much energy to heat water
as it does to heat iron.
It takes ten times
as much energy to turn water into steam
as it does to bring it to the boil.
It takes an hour
to soft-boil an ostrich egg
and an hour and a half
to hard-boil one.
It takes between 70,000 and 150,000
crocuses to make
a kilo of saffron.
Alexander the Great
washed his hair in saffron
to keep it shiny and orange.
In 1999, a four-year-old girl
turned yellow
after drinking too much
Sunny Delight.
Russian has no word for ‘blue’,
>
only two different words for
‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.
Andy Warhol always wore
green underpants.
25 million Bibles were printed in 2011,
compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.
The English version of Wikipedia
has 50 times more words than
the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken
100 million person-hours to write:
about the same amount of time
that the population of the USA
spends watching TV ad breaks
in a single weekend.
There is more information
in one edition of the New York Times than
the average person
in 17th-century England
would have come across in a lifetime.
When Einstein published his
Theory of General Relativity,
the New York Times sent their
golfing correspondent
to interview him.
The historic news of the
first manned powered flight
by the Wright Brothers
first appeared in the magazine
Gleanings in Bee Culture.
Dune, by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling
science fiction novel, was rejected
over 20 times before being accepted
by a publisher of car manuals.
Ernest Hemingway bought the
shotgun that he used to kill himself
at Abercrombie & Fitch.
Leonardo da Vinci
was the first person to observe
the curvature of the human spine.
Until then everyone had assumed
that it was straight.
Rosa whitfield is a rose
named after actress June Whitfield.
As she pointed out,
‘The catalogue describes it as
“superb for bedding,
best up against a wall”.’
Someone who is cock-throppled
has an extremely prominent
Adam’s apple.
The symbols used by !$%@ing cartoonists
to indicate swearing are called grawlixes.
Jeremy Bentham’s body
has been dressed
in moth-resistant underwear
since 1939.
When Jeremy Paxman
was at Cambridge, he failed
to get into his college’s
University Challenge team.
Before Jeremy Clarkson
became a journalist,
he sold Paddington Bears
for a living.
Jeremy Kyle’s father
was the Queen Mother’s
accountant and personal secretary.
A babalevante
is someone who makes
feeble jokes.
Babeship
is another word for
infancy.
Borborygmi
are stomach rumbles.
Buggerare
is Italian for
‘to cheat’ or ‘swindle’.
If you have a pizza
with radius z and thickness a,
its volume is pi*z*z*a.
In 1998, 10,113 American women
insured themselves against
Virgin Birth
at the millennium.
The first motorist to be fined
for speeding in the UK was
Walter Arnold in 1896.
He was doing 8 mph in a 2 mph zone.
The first London Underground
trains were nicknamed
‘sewer trams’.
The world’s lightest metal
is 100 times lighter than styrofoam
and can rest on a dandelion puff
without damaging it.
Graphene,
the world’s strongest material,
is a million times thinner than paper
but 200 times stronger than steel.
To break through a sheet
of graphene as thick as cling film
would take the force of an elephant
balanced on the point of a pencil.
The pressure in the deepest ocean,
at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,
is equal to the weight of ten brown bears
balancing on a postage stamp.
All polar bears are Irish:
they’re descended from brown bears
that lived in Ireland
over 10,000 years ago.
More than half the world’s population
is under 25
and more than half of it
is bilingual.
Established writers and artists are
18 times more likely
to kill themselves
than the general population.
People with schizophrenia
are three times more likely to smoke
than the average person.
Zischeln
is a useful German verb meaning
‘to whisper angrily’.
The Italian verb asolare
means ‘to pass time in a delightful but
meaningless
way’.
Hungarian has no words
for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’,
but nine specific words
for different kinds of brother or sister.
In North Welsh,
the word for ‘now’ is rwan,
in South Welsh it is nawr,
the same word spelt backwards.
Gold has its own E number.
E175
is officially suitable for consumption
by vegetarians, vegans and members
of all religious groups.
The Victorians
made tiepins
out of badgers’ penis bones.
Some parts of Tasmania
are so fertile that
the topsoil is 70 feet deep.
Trinity College, Cambridge,
has won more Nobel Prizes
than the whole of Italy.
The human body has 100 trillion cells,
each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead
but containing enough DNA instructions
to fill 1,000 600-page books.
Every three seconds,
the Sun emits more neutrinos
than the number of atoms
in all the humans who have ever lived.
Neutrinos are 100,000 times
smaller than electrons,
but there are so many of them
that they may outweigh
all the visible matter in the universe.
If an atom were the size
of the Solar System,
a neutrino would be the size
of a golf ball.
The man who sees to the needs of VIPs
in the official presidential guest house
in Washington DC
is called Randy Bumgardner.
The founder of Pan American Airlines
was called
Juan Trippe.
The Archbishop of Manila
from 1974–2003
was called Cardinal Sin.
Robert Burns was never called
Rabbie or Robbie – though he did
occasionally call himself Spunkie.
The film Jaws was based on a novel
by Peter Benchley.
When he couldn’t think of a title,
his father, Nathaniel, suggested
What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.
As soon as tiger shark embryos
develop teeth
they attack and eat each other
in the womb.
If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom
were scaled up to the size of garden peas,
the hydrogen atom
would be 1,000 miles across.
If all the land in Finland