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

by John Lloyd

  Only the male canaries sing; they can also mimic telephones and other household devices. ‘Tweety’ in the Warner cartoons is a canary.

  Canaries were originally a mottled greeny-brown, but 400 years of cross-breeding by human beings produced their familiar yellow colour. No one has ever bred a red canary but a diet of red peppers turns them orange.

  London’s Isle of Dogs was first so-called on a map dated 1588: perhaps because it was home to the royal kennels, though it may simply have been a term of abuse. It’s an odd coincidence that Canary Wharf is located there.

  STEPHEN There is an island called La Gomera. Do you know they communicate across valleys in La Gomera? Instead of using their vocal chords, they?

  ALAN Fart.

  STEPHEN No, they whistle.

  ALAN Ah.

  What’s the smallest dog in the world?

  The smallest dog on record was a Yorkshire terrier owned by Arthur Marples of Blackburn. It was 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) high at the shoulder, 9.5 cm (3.75 inches) long from the tip of its nose to the root of its tail, weighed 113 g (4 oz), and died in 1945.

  The world’s smallest breed of dog is usually said to be the chihuahua. Nonetheless, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for today’s smallest living dog is not necessarily held by one.

  It depends what you mean by ‘smallest’. The current record is shared by a chihuahua (shortest in length) and a Yorkshire terrier (shortest in height).

  Whitney, the Yorkshire terrier, lives in Shoeburyness, Essex and is 7.3 cm (3 inches) tall at the shoulder. The chihuahua, called Danka Kordak Slovakia, is 18.8 cm (7.4 inches) long and lives in Slovakia.

  There are more than 400 breeds of dog and all are members of the same species. Any dog can breed with any other. No other creature in the world comes in such a wide range of shapes and sizes. No one know why this is.

  The unique variety amongst dogs owes a lot to human intervention, but the puzzle is that all dog breeds are originally descended from grey wolves.

  Doberman pinschers were created from German pinschers, Rottweilers, Manchester terriers, and possibly pointers, in just thirty-five years, apparently flying in the face of the Darwinian evolution of species, a process thought to operate over thousands or even millions of years.

  For some unknown reason, when dogs are cross-bred, instead of getting an average between the two types you quite often get something totally unexpected. This new ‘breed’ also retains the ability to interbreed.

  The chihuahua is named after a state in Mexico, because it was believed (on the basis of Toltec and Aztec art) that the breed was indigenous there. However, there are no archaeological remains to support this belief; and it is now thought that the animal depicted is most probably a variety of rodent.

  It is much more likely that the ancestors of the breed were brought by Spanish merchants from China, where the practice of dwarfing both plants and animals has had a long history.

  Chihuahua cheese is popular in Mexico but it comes from the state, not from the dog.

  STEPHEN This one was, er, a Yorkshire Terrier which, erm, died in 1945, and it was 2½ inches high and 3¾ inches long, weighed four ounces, and would fit in this box [takes out a tiny wooden box from under the desk].

  JEREMY CLARKSON Or between two pieces of bread.

  How do dogs mate?

  Dogs mate back to back, not doggy style.

  When you see a dog doing the mount-and-pump it’s actually performing a dominance gesture. Ejaculation is very rare.

  That is why your next-door neighbour’s dog seems to choose children’s legs to hump. It isn’t primarily sexual: it’s establishing its position in the pack and chooses the smallest first.

  Dogs actually mate by going in from behind but then getting a leg over so that they end up rear-to-rear. Once this happens the tip of the male dog’s penis (called the bulbus glandis) engorges with blood making withdrawal impossible.

  This is called ‘knotting’ (as in the expression ‘get knotted!’). It is designed to minimise semen leakage: a classic example of ‘sperm competition’, or keeping other dogs’ genetic material out. There’s a period of ‘jostling’ until ejaculation occurs and the penis eventually shrinks so the dogs can separate.

  First-timers do sometimes react badly to finding themselves ‘knotted’. In these cases the jostling and its accompanying yelps sound much more like fighting than romance.

  How did Catherine the Great die?

  Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, died of a stroke, in bed, in 1796, aged sixty-seven.

  It’s true that when she collapsed from the stroke she was at her toilette, but she was cared for thereafter in bed, where she died.

  She wasn’t crushed by a well-hung stallion being lifted on to her, or through injuries sustained by crushing her chamber pot under her enormous derrière. Nor is there any evidence that she had an especial fondness for horses as a younger woman, except as creatures to ride on.

  It isn’t clear where these stories come from. It may be a spectacularly successful piece of black propaganda invented by her resentful son, Paul I, whose court was notoriously gossipy. Or it may be the dastardly French, who were at war with a coalition of nations including Russia in the years after the Revolution (the stories about Marie Antoinette were even worse).

  Wherever it started it is certainly true that Catherine’s behaviour created an erotic frisson. She did take many lovers and it seems some of them were road-tested on her ladies-in-waiting. If they passed, they were given an honorary position and installed at Court.

  One of her procurors was a former lover himself – Potemkin of Battleship fame, who died at the age of fifty-two ‘in consequence of eating a whole goose while in a high state of fever’.

  Whether her extra-marital relationships number just eleven (confirmed by her correspondence) or the 289 cited by scandalmongers, Catherine’s more important legacy is in her political and cultural achievements.

  She built more of St Petersburg than Peter the Great himself; sorted out the complexity of Russian law; commissioned magnificent gardens; filled Russian galleries with great European art; introduced smallpox inoculation and became a patron of writers and philosophers across Europe, including Diderot and Voltaire, who called her ‘the Star of the North’.

  Her genetic legacy was less impressive. Her son Czar Paul I (1754–1801) once court-martialled and executed a rat for knocking over his toy soldiers. Later, he had his horse courtmartialled and sentenced to fifty lashes. In due course, he was murdered by his own nobles (without trial) and replaced by his son.

  What surprised John Ruskin on his wedding night?

  It is generally believed that John Ruskin was shocked into impotence by the sight of his wife Effie’s pubic hair on their wedding night.

  The story was that, as the most influential art critic of his day, his knowledge of the naked female form derived entirely from the ‘pubes-free’ marble of classical sculpture and painting.

  There is no evidence for this theory, which was first advanced in Mary Lutyens’s biography of the Ruskins in 1965, and it is clear from a frank correspondence he had with his mother that he was not ignorant in the way suggested. The notion of extreme prudery amongst the Victorians is, at least to some degree, an invention of the mid-twentieth century.

  What is true is that Ruskin did not consummate the marriage. This situation continued for six years until, on a painting expedition, Ruskin left Effie alone in a rustic cabin with his friend, the painter John Everett Millais (1829–96). Millais knew what to do, and Effie enjoyed it so much she filed for divorce. The marriage was annulled on the grounds of Ruskin’s ‘incurable impotency’.

  Effie married Millais and had a large family with him. The whole business caused a scandal and meant that Effie was no longer asked to any party at which the Queen would be present.

  Ruskin’s underlying problem was that he had a penchant for young girls. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), Ruskin was a h
uge influence on Victorian art and architecture, an early promoter of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, a founding father of the Trades Unions and the man behind the Arts and Crafts movement and the National Trust.

  He wrote 250 books and taught art to Oscar Wilde. He paid the Friends of the Guild of St George to sweep the steps in front of the British Museum. He resigned as Slade Professor of Art when vivisection was allowed in the medical school, and in later life went mad, believing that his cook was really Queen Victoria. Gandhi cited him as the single greatest influence in his life.

  Another possible example of pubic hair being blamed for dysfunction concerns the alleged affair of D. H. Lawrence and the painter Dorothy Brett in 1926. Lawrence apparently left the naked Brett in bed having made the excuse for his incapacity: ‘your pubes are wrong’.

  Most of Lawrence’s biographers believe this was fantasy on Brett’s part, not least because she first told the story months before her death in 1976.

  How long do your fingernails and hair grow after death?

  ‘For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off’ was one of the late, great Johnny Carson’s best lines.

  But hair and fingernails don’t grow at all after death. This is a complete myth. When we die, our bodies dehydrate and our skin tightens creating an illusion of hair and nail growth.

  The idea owes a great deal to Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front, in which the narrator, Paul Bäumer, reflects on the death of his friend Kemmerich: ‘It strikes me that these nails will continue to grow like lean fantastic cellar-plants long after Kemmerich breathes no more. I see the picture before me. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and grow, and with them the hair on the decaying skull, just like grass in a good soil, just like grass …’

  Despite this, there is plenty of action after death: your body will positively thrive with life. Bacteria, beetles, mites and worms will enjoy a feeding frenzy, contributing enormously to the decomposition process.

  One of your body’s most enthusiastic customers is the humpbacked phorid or ‘coffin fly’. The fly, also known as the ‘scuttle fly’ because of its awkward flight, is able to live its entire life underground in a corpse.

  Scuttle flies are particularly greedy when it comes to human flesh, and it’s not uncommon for them to dig nearly a metre (3 feet) down through the soil to reach a buried coffin.

  One type of phorid, from the genus Apocephalus, has recently been deployed in an attempt to control the rampant fire ant populations in the American south-east which were introduced via a Brazilian cargo ship in the 1930s. The flies lay their eggs in the head of the ant. The larvae feed on the contents of the fire ant’s head and emerge several days later.

  CLIVE I’m just … I’m fascinated to know that your hair grows after you die, ’cause I’m looking forward to that.

  What did Atlas carry on his shoulders?

  Not the world but the heavens.

  Atlas was condemned to support the sky by Zeus after the Titans revolted against the Olympians. However, he is often shown holding up something that looks like the globe, most famously on the cover of a collection of maps by the Flemish geographer Mercator.

  Closer inspection reveals that this globe was, in fact, the heavens, not the Earth. Furthermore, Mercator had actually named his volume, not after the Titan, but the mythical philosopher King Atlas of Mauretania (after whom the mountains are named) who was supposed to have produced the first such ‘celestial’ (as opposed to ‘terrestrial’) globe.

  The volume became known as Mercator’s Atlas and the name was applied to any collection of maps thereafter.

  Gerard Mercator, the son of a cobbler, was born Gerard Kremer, in 1512. His surname meant ‘market’ in Flemish, so he latinised this to Mercator, meaning ‘marketeer’.

  Mercator was the father of modern cartography and arguably the most influential Belgian of all time.

  His famous projection of 1569 – the first attempt to portray the world accurately with straight lines of latitude and longitude – remains the most persuasive vision of ‘the world’ for most people. More importantly it enabled accurate navigation for the first time, giving the Age of Discovery its scientific basis.

  Because of its distortions, Mercator’s projection is now rarely used in maps and atlases: in 1989 the leading US cartographic associations asked for it to be eliminated altogether.

  Oddly, that hasn’t stopped NASA using it to map Mars.

  ALAN I’ve always seen pictures of him with the Earth.

  STEPHEN On atlases.

  ALAN As child I thought, ‘Where are his hands on the Earth?’ You could go and find his hands!

  How high is Cloud Nine?

  According to the International Cloud Atlas scale, Cloud 0 is the highest type of cloud, known as cirrus, the wispy streaks that can be as high as 12,000 metres (nearly 40,000 feet).

  Cloud Nine is the cumulonimbus, the massive, brooding thunder cloud. It’s at the bottom of the scale because a single cloud can cover the whole range from as low as a few hundred feet to the very edge of the stratosphere (15,000 metres or nearly 50,00 feet).

  As with the origins of most phrases, it’s unlikely that ‘cloud nine’ can be tied to one specific source. Clouds seven, eight, seven and thirty-nine have all been recorded, so it seems likely that people settled on nine because it’s regarded as a lucky number (‘dressed up to the nines’ and ‘the whole nine yards’ have equally obscure origins). And the idea of being carried along on a big billowy cloud is undeniably attractive.

  The International Cloud Atlas was published in 1896, as a result of the International Meteorological Conference establishing a Cloud Committee to agree an international system for the naming and identification of clouds.

  The ten categories were themselves based on the pioneering work of Luke Howard (1772–1864), an English chemist, who published his Essay on the Modification of Clouds in 1802.

  Howard’s work was influenced by his experience of freak weather conditions as a child, when volcanic eruptions in Japan and Iceland in 1783 created a ‘Great Fogg’ which covered much of Europe.

  His work inspired the landscape paintings of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. Goethe wrote four poems in Howard’s honour and considered this modest English Quaker to be the ‘Godfather of Clouds’.

  Clouds are collections of tiny water droplets or ice crystals held in suspension in the atmosphere. The droplets or crystals are formed by the condensation of water vapour around even smaller particles of things like smoke or salt. These are called condensation nuclei.

  Cirrus clouds are the only clouds in the sky made entirely of ice. They are much more common in the atmosphere than was once thought and help to regulate the Earth’s temperature. They are often triggered by the condensation trails of high-flying jets.

  When air traffic was stopped after 11 September 2001, daily temperature variation across the USA grew by up to 3 °C over the following forty-eight hours as the cirrus protection shrank: letting more heat out by night and more sunlight in by day.

  What makes champagne fizz?

  It’s not carbon dioxide, it’s dirt.

  In a perfectly smooth, clean glass, carbon dioxide molecules would evaporate invisibly, so for a long time it was assumed that it was slight imperfections in the glass which enabled the bubbles to form.

  However, new photographic techniques have shown that these nicks and grooves are much too small for bubbles to latch on to: it’s the microscopic particles of dust and bits of fluff in the glass that enable them to form.

  Technically speaking, the dirt/dust/lint in the glass act as condensation nuclei for the dissolved carbon dioxide.

  According to Moët et Chandon, there are 250 million bubbles in the average bottle of champagne.

  Chekhov’s last words were ‘I haven’t had champagne for a long time.’

  German medical etiquette of the time demanded that w
hen there was no hope, the doctor would offer the patient a glass of champagne.

  What shape is a raindrop?

  Raindrops are spherical, not teardrop-shaped.

  Ball-bearing and lead-shot makers exploit this property of falling liquids in their manufacturing process: molten lead is dropped through a sieve from a great height into a cooling liquid, and comes out spherical.

  Shot-drop towers used to be built for the purpose – until the Festival of Britain in 1951 there was one next to Waterloo Bridge in London.

  At just over 71 m (234 feet) Phoenix Shot Tower in Baltimore (still standing) was the tallest building in America until the Washington Monument surpassed it after the Civil War.

  What produces most of the earth’s oxygen?

  Algae.

  They release oxygen as a waste-product of photosynthesis. Their net oxygen output is higher than that produced by all the trees and other land-based plants put together.

  Ancient algae are also the main constituent of oil and gas.

  Blue-green algae or cyanobacteria (from Greek kyanos – ‘dark greeny blue’) is Earth’s earliest known life form, with fossils that date back 3.6 billion years.

  While some algae are included with the plants in the Eukaryote domain (eu, ‘true’, and karyon, ‘nut’, referring to their cells having true nuclei, which bacteria don’t), the cyanobacteria are now firmly in the Bacteria kingdom, with their own phylum.