The lead singer of Iron Maiden
has a day job as a
Boeing 757 pilot.
A greetings card
that can play ‘Happy Birthday’
has more computing power
than existed in the whole world in 1950.
You are 14% more likely to die
on your birthday
than any other day.
Oranges and lemons smell different
due to chemically identical molecules
that are mirror images of each other.
An orange is really
just a left-handed lemon.
Moon dust
smells like gunpowder.
A typical microwave oven
uses more electricity
keeping its digital clock on standby
than it does heating food.
As it grows,
sweetcorn makes a squeaking noise
like two balloons
rubbing against each other.
Emissions from car exhausts
are responsible for
more deaths every year
than road accidents.
You can legally buy cannabis
in the US, but only as birdseed:
the feathers of birds that eat it
acquire a particularly
glossy sheen.
Fidel Castro
estimated that he saved
ten working days a year
by not bothering to shave.
Wild Bill Hickok’s brother Lorenzo
was nicknamed
‘Tame Bill Hickok’.
From 1912 to 1948,
painting was an Olympic event.
In 1924, Jack Yeats,
brother of the poet W. B. Yeats,
took the silver:
Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.
William Blake’s one-man exhibition
of paintings in 1809
received only one review.
The critic described him as a lunatic.
In 1891, Claude Monet won 100,000 francs
in the French national lottery.
Pigeons can tell the difference between
impressionist paintings by Monet
and cubist works by Picasso.
They can even tell when
the Monets are hung upside down.
There are no cubes in Cubism.
Cézanne’s theory was that everything
could be broken down into
cylinders, spheres and cones.
Tour de France riders
need to eat the equivalent of
27 cheeseburgers a day.
Lightning strikes the Earth
8.6 million times a day or
about 100 times a second.
A single bolt of lightning
contains enough energy
to cook
100,000 pieces of toast.
Bovril
was originally called
‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef ’.
Hovis
was originally called
‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.
7-Up
was originally called
‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.
The Bank of America
was originally called
the Bank of Italy.
Reducing the voting age to 18,
the introduction of 24-hour licensing
and passports for pets
were all policies initiated by
the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.
The smallest known dinosaur
was about four inches tall
and weighed less than
a chihuahua.
Each year, drug baron Pablo Escobar
had to write off 10% of his cash holdings
because of rats nibbling away
at his huge stash of bank notes.
The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror
came with a free mirror.
a pair of jeans will have grown
a 1,000-strong colony
of bacteria on the front,
1,500–2,500 on the back
and 10,000 on the crotch.
If all the salt in the sea
were spread evenly over the land,
it would be 500 feet thick.
The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883
was the loudest sound in recorded history.
It was heard 3,000 miles away
in Mauritius.
Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years,
but the temperature is minus 200°C.
Summer nights in the Faroe Islands
are so well illuminated that
between May and July
the lighthouses are turned off.
In the 1st century ad most ships
in the northern hemisphere only sailed
between May and September.
William Carstares (1649–1715)
was the last man in Britain
to be given the thumbscrew.
As torture was illegal in England,
he had to be taken to Edinburgh.
Mussolini tortured his enemies
by forcing them to swallow
massive doses of castor oil.
The second-largest lake in Bolivia
is called Lake Poopó.
It’s not a freshwater lake.
The whole of Shakespeare
contains only about 20,000
different words –
less than half the vocabulary of the
average English speaker today.
The whole of Liechtenstein
can be rented for $70,000 a night,
for a minimum of two nights.
It sleeps 900.
St Vitus
is the patron saint of oversleeping.
The International Space Station
is as roomy as a five-bedroom house
and travels at 17,500 mph.
A marshmallow travelling at sea level
would not begin to melt
from friction caused by air resistance
until it reached Mach 1.6
(1,218 mph).
When a medium in a trance
offered to answer any question,
Groucho Marx asked,
‘What’s the capital of North Dakota?’
The popular Los Angeles beverage
Original New York Express Iced Coffee
is made in a factory in Singapore.
Cameroon is home to the Eton tribe.
The Eton word for ‘thank you’ is
abumgang.
Arabic words are written right to left, but
Arabic numbers left to right.
Arabic speakers reading anything
with a lot of numbers in
have to read in both directions
at once.
In 2010, the Catholic Church had an
income of $97 billion.
Trombone
is French for
‘paperclip’.
The word ‘gas’ was invented by
the Flemish chemist
Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644).
He also invented the word blas
but it didn’t catch on.
The word ‘gasoline’
doesn’t come from ‘gas’. It comes from
Cazeline – after John Cassell,
founder of the publisher Cassell & Co.,
who was the first to sell it commercially.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)
invented the thesaurus
and the slide rule.
Edwin Beard Budding (1775–1846)
invented the lawnmower
and the adjustable spanner.
In 1928, the Solomon Islands pidgin
for ‘adjustable spanner’ was
spanner he go walkabout
and a ‘saw’ was
this fella pull-him-he-come-push-him-he-go
brother belong axe.
The Zulu for ‘Jack-in-a-Box’ is
udoli ohlala ebokisini ukuthi ufuna
ukusabisa abantu abaningi.
The Malay for ‘slate’ is
sejenis batu berwarna kelabu
kebiru-biruan yang selalu digunakan
sebagai atap ruman.
Wanklank
is Dutch for
a discordant noise.
In 2010,
Ghana banned
the sale of second-hand underpants.
No one has ever seen an atom.
They’re too small to be seen
by a microscope and can’t be counted
or weighed individually.
Plato thought
that the smallest particles of matter
were tiny right-angled triangles.
Since at least the time of Pythagoras in
500 BC, no sensible educated person
has believed the Earth
was flat.
A snowflake that falls
on a glacier in central Greenland
can take 200,000 years
to reach the sea.
The King James Bible
has inspired the lyrics
of more pop songs
than any other book.
In 2001,
the World Christian Encyclopaedia
counted 33,830 different
Christian denominations.
Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate
Easter, Christmas or birthdays.
For 48 years
after tinned food was invented,
people who wanted to eat it
had to use a hammer and chisel.
The can opener wasn’t invented
until 1858.
The screwdriver was invented
a hundred years before the screw.
It was originally used
to extract nails.
‘Marking’ was invented
at Cambridge University in 1792
by a chemistry tutor
called William Farish.
Margaret Thatcher
was part of the team that invented
Mr Whippy ice cream.
A single sperm contains 37.5 mb
of DNA information.
One ejaculation represents a data transfer
of 15,875 gb,
equivalent to the combined capacity
of 62 MacBook Pro laptops.
70% of all animals in the jungle
rely on figs for their survival.
In Antigua,
‘fig’ means banana.
Linnaeus named the banana
Musa paradisiaca because he thought it
might have been the forbidden fruit
of the Garden of Eden.
The citizens of Kuwait
celebrated the end of the first Gulf War
by firing weapons into the air.
20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets
falling from the sky.
The main predators of flamingos
are zookeepers.
At the outbreak of the Second World War,
zookeepers killed all the poisonous
insects and snakes in London Zoo,
in case it was bombed
and they escaped.
The boa constrictor
is the only living animal
whose common name is
exactly the same
as its scientific name.
In the 318 years between 1539 and 1857,
there were only 317 divorces
in England.
At the 1900 Paris Olympics,
events included Live Pigeon Shooting
and Long Jump for Horses.
Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act,
it is explicitly illegal in Britain
to use a machine gun
to kill a hedgehog.
In ancient Greek
the word ‘idiot’ meant
anyone who wasn’t a politician.
The Icelandic phone book
is ordered by
first name.
The human eye
can detect 10 million
different shades of colour.
Wombats
have cubic faeces.
Harvard University
has the largest ant collection
in the world.
It takes a photon 40,000
years to get from the centre of the Sun
to its surface, but only 8.3 minutes
to get from there to the Earth.
For water to flow 100 metres
through the ground down a 1° slope takes
5 days through gravel,
13.7 years through sand and
137,000 years through clay.
In 1969,
Apollo 11 returned from the Moon
in half the time it took to get from
Boston to New York by stagecoach
in 1769.
New York City drifts about one inch away
from Europe every year.
Between 1960 and 1977, the secret number
authorising US presidents
to launch nuclear missiles was
00000000.
Jimmy Carter once
sent a jacket to the dry-cleaner’s
with the nuclear detonation codes
still in the pocket.
Worried about his grades at law school,
Richard Nixon broke into the Dean’s
office – only to discover that he was
top of his class.
The highest scoring word in Scrabble
is oxyphenbutazone, potentially earning
1,178 points.
(It’s a drug used to treat arthritis.)
A coal-fired power station
puts 100 times more radiation into the air
than a nuclear power plant
producing the same amount of energy.
Treasure Island in Lake Mindemoya
on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron
is the largest island in a lake on an island
in a lake in the world.
The strongest creatures on Earth are
gonorrhoea bacteria.
They can pull 100,000 times
their own body weight.
A dog has the same ecological footprint as
two Toyota Landcruisers;
a cat the same environmental effect as a
Volkswagen Golf;
two hamsters the same as a plasma TV.
Humans
have the same number
of hair follicles
as chimpanzees.
Gorillas and potatoes
have two more chromosomes
than people.
The average person who lives to be 75
will have spent six years
dreaming.
The word ambisinistrous is the
opposite of ambidextrous;
it means
‘no good with either hand’.
James Garfield,
20th president of the USA,
could write Greek with one hand
while writing Latin with the other.
Young Neanderthal girls
had bigger biceps
than an adult male human.
The second man to go over
Niagara Falls in a barrel,
Bobby Leach, survived the fall
but later died as a result of
slipping on a piece
of orange peel.
An orange is a berry but
a strawberry isn’t.
Vatican City has
the highest crime rate in the world.
Though the resident population
is only just over 800,
more than 600 crimes
are committed there each year.
90% of the crime
in Helmand province
is committed
by the Afghan police.
50% more US soldiers committed suicide
in Afghanistan in 2012