ZOOLOGY, NON-CRYPTO-▶
For CPR on an aardvark, see Aardvarks; for controlling populations with sausages, see Airdrops; for a surfeit of hogs, see Boar; for how borders affect animals, see Border Wall; for condoms that look like otters, see Condoms; for cattle acting like lemmings, see Cows; for a drastic alternative to mating, see Dragonflies; for the plans of the Carpinator, see Fish; for fluorescent amphibians, see Frogs; for sperm orbiting the Earth, see Mice, Space; for a spread that stops squirrels spreading, see Nutella; for weird creatures of the deep, see Oceans; for recreational drug use in parrots, see Opium; for birds mistaken for rocks, see Penguins; for a reptile mistaken for a stone, see RSPCA; for animal attacks, see Shark Attack; for avian asps, see Snakes; for gold members, see Spiders; for rhino conservation, see Tinder; for a bird with two dads, see Vultures; for a species that had a bad year, see Wasps; and for sterilising mosquitoes, see Zika.
ZOOS▶
A zoo in Russia sued a company for giving a raccoon an unnatural interest in human breasts.
The Moscow petting zoo lent Tomas the raccoon to a production company, thinking he would be used in a regular advertisement. When he was returned, they found that he was traumatised, withdrawn – and attracted to women’s breasts. It turned out he’d been used in what the zoo called an ‘erotic photoshoot’ in which he snuggled up with a naked woman. Zookeepers suspect he was lured to her breasts with treats, with the result that he now associates them with food. The advertising company said the lawsuit was absurd, and complained about Tomas’s behaviour, saying he was constantly running away during the shoot and had chewed up the actress’s underwear.
Another objectionable use of zoo animals emerged in Thailand, where a safari park just outside Bangkok put on orangutan boxing shows for tourists. The apes were dressed in boxing shorts and gloves, placed in a ring and trained to kick and hit each other. Other apes wearing bikinis stood at the ringside, holding up round cards. Animal rights groups (unsurprisingly) called for the practice to be banned.
Animals don’t always need human encouragement to start fighting each other. In fact, a baboon war that had been raging at Toronto Zoo for more than two years required human intervention to end it. The war began in 2015 after the matriarch died, triggering a succession crisis where baboon factions fought to install their candidates as the dominant ‘queen’. The violence led to dozens of injuries and multiple surgeries, with one monkey having to have part of her tail amputated. Zookeepers eventually gave the baboons hormonal contraceptives to regulate their tempers and reduce rivalries. A new queen, Kalamata, has finally emerged and a truce seems to have been reached, at least for now.
A zoo in China is charging people £100 to clean up polar bear poo. As well as paying for the privilege of sweeping the dung from the enclosures and preparing the creatures’ food, you get to take a selfie with the bear and post it on social media afterwards.
ZUCKERBERG, MARK▶
Facebook, which has been accused of peddling ‘fake news’, accidentally reported its founder was dead.
A glitch in the system meant that a memorial was posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, along with those of 2 million other users. Zuckerberg was very much alive though, and on a huge tour of all 50 states of America. He said he was undertaking this so that he could meet ‘ordinary Americans’, many of whom are Facebook users, in order to improve his website. Most people, however, assumed that the tour was a precursor to him announcing a presidential bid in 2020. His claims to the contrary didn’t convince many people, as it was pointed out that he was travelling with former official White House photographer Charles Ommanney, who was official snapper for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
If Zuckerberg does become president, he will be the youngest person to get the job. He’s got a long way to go to convince the American public though. In a July poll asking who would win in an election between him and Trump, Zuckerberg only managed to poll 40 per cent, meaning that at that moment he wouldn’t even beat the most unpopular president in US history.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook has a secret division at its California headquarters that is working on mind-reading technology. The experiments to crack telepathy are being conducted in Facebook’s mysterious ‘Building 8’, which employs over 60 scientists.
ZYZZYVA▶
The Oxford English Dictionary added a new last word.
As of this year, the very final entry in the OED is ‘Zyzzyva’ (pronounced ‘zih-zih-vah’). It’s the name of a genus of tropical weevils found in South America. Before ‘Zyzzyva’ took over, the last word in the dictionary was ‘zythum’, which was a kind of beer brewed in ancient Egypt. Other new entries in the summer 2017 intake included ‘barebacking’, ‘devil’s shoestring’, ‘ginge’, ‘hygge’, ‘unclenched’ and ‘zoomable’.
The OED doesn’t know why ‘Zyzzyva’ has 3 ‘z’s, 2 ‘y’s, one ‘v’ and only one ‘a’. The word was coined by an Irish entomologist in 1922. It could be that it was intended to mimic the noise the weevils make; then again, it could have been chosen deliberately to be annoying and secure a position right at the very end of an alphabetically ordered book.
For another word that appears at the extreme end of dictionaries, see Aardvarks.
LATE NEWS
There are a lot of people we’d like to thank.
Our colleagues at QI – Alex Bell who chewed over many ideas with us and brought crucial design inspiration to the table, as always; Anne Miller who provided heaps of ideas and news stories, without which this book would have been poorer; and Alice Campbell-Davies, who painstakingly read through the manuscript, making sure that we didn’t say see Insects when, of course, we meant see Stick Insects. And to the wider QI family: Coco Lloyd, James Rawson, Liz Townsend, Freddy Soames and Natascha McQueen, who all chipped in at vital moments too.
Our editor, mentor and wrangler, Nigel Wilcockson, who knew there was a book in us two years before we did, and who coached us into producing one we could be proud of. He’s done ten jobs at once, and done them all better than we could have hoped. Scientists are currently studying how he managed to deal with all four of us and still, somehow, maintain a sunny disposition throughout.
Our thanks also go to everyone at Cornerstone and the rest of the fantastic team at Penguin Random House: Rowan Borchers, Fergus Edmondson, Laura Brooke and Francesca Russell. Natascha Nel delivered a stonking cover and Lindsay Nash was a brilliant designer, and both were remarkably tolerant of our constant back-and-forthing over the tiniest of details. Thanks, too, to our superb illustrator, the doughty Adam Doughty, who never batted an eyelid when we sent over requests for him to draw (for example) an aardvark receiving mouth-to-snout.
To all the Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber family members – thank you for buying at least 30 copies of this book each to give to your friends this Christmas. And thank you for not giving them the receipt, so they can’t exchange it for something else.
Thanks, most importantly, to John and Sarah Lloyd, QI’s founder-managers and fountainheads of advice, encouragement and understanding. When we first told them about the idea for the podcast – something that would probably make no money and chew up a lot of our work time – they said ‘go for it’, because what they value more than anything is a good idea. Without them both, there really would be no such thing as The Book of the Year.
Who could have known that when we first gathered around a microphone those three-and-a-bit years ago that it would eventually lead to a book? We have only managed to get this far because each week a group of people from all over the world press play on the latest episode we’ve posted online. To those listeners, we want to say thank you so much, and we promise that if you keep listening, we’ll keep dorking out. May the Mongolian Death Worm bless you all.
That’s it, that’s all of our thanks. A lot of early errors were caught by our publishers, early readers and well-wishers: any that remain belong to us four alone (mainly Dan). If you spot any inaccuracies, w
e warmly encourage you to write in to us on [email protected] or @nosuchthing on Twitter, and we’ll make sure to apologise in the introduction to the Book of the Year 2018.
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It was a big year in animal-puddle-drinking news. Researchers in Australia found that koalas, which were assumed to get all their water from eucalyptus leaves, have begun drinking from puddles – probably due to climate change.
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That’s the equivalent of every church bell in England being rung 2,400 times.
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In February, Poincheval spent a week inside a 12-tonne limestone boulder slightly larger than he was, with only small niches in which he stored food, water and his excrement. As he emerged, he said he was ‘a little dazed, which I imagine is totally normal after one week living in a rock’. Eccentricity runs in the family: his father invented a pill to make farts smell of roses.
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It could be worse. In late 2016 a man tried to scatter his opera-loving friend’s ashes at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Other members of the audience, however, assumed he was a terrorist who was trying to spread anthrax. He apologised profusely, saying it had been ‘a sweet gesture to a dying friend that went completely and utterly wrong in ways that I could never have imagined’.
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The ‘and’ rate in this article is 3.5 per cent, not counting the ‘and’ † in this footnote. Sorry, Paul.
† Or this one.
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Ben Jacobs has donated those broken glasses to Washington DC’s Newseum, a seven-storey museum dedicated to news – past and breaking. Other exhibits include: the abandoned car left at Dulles Airport by the 9/11 terrorists; a large standing section of the Berlin Wall; and Lady Gaga’s meat dress.
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Temer wasn’t the only politician to report a haunting this year. The Canadian ambassador to Ireland said he suspected the official Canadian residence in Dublin to be plagued by the ghost of an executed Irish nationalist. He claimed he’d heard dragging chains, heavy breathing and unusual bangs.
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There was more bad news for Crystal Palace this year as their mascot, Kayla the Eagle, was banned from attending matches due to fears that she might catch bird flu.
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In the lead-up to the EU referendum, the official ‘Labour In’ battle bus was the one formerly used on tour by S Club 7, while Nigel Farage campaigned for Brexit aboard a double decker that Torvill and Dean rode in a victory parade in 1984.
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If, in their victorious 2016/17 season, Chelsea FC had lost all their players with EU nationalities, they’d have played three-a-side for most of their games, and would have scored a total of only 13 goals, rather than the 108 they actually achieved.
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One act had a safety net: after their final show, the Ringling high-wire act immediately flew to Morocco, where they were finalists in Arabs Got Talent.
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Xenophon comes from the Ancient Greek words ‘xenos’, meaning ‘foreigner’ and ‘phone’ meaning ‘voice’.
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Canavan’s barrister was quoted as saying that as much as 50 per cent of the population of Australia is technically ineligible to run for parliament.
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One of the people who disagreed with Alex Jones’s lawyer was Alex Jones himself. The same night his lawyer claimed he was actually a ‘performance artist’, Jones himself released a video saying, ‘They’ve got articles out today that say I’m fake, all of this other crap. Total bull … I 110 per cent believe what I stand for.’
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Theresa comes from the Greek for ‘to harvest’ – which is appropriate, given May’s love of running through fields of wheat.
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Passion plays are dramatic presentations of Jesus’s suffering, but Jesus isn’t actually the thing that people most associate with Easter. In a YouGov poll, the son of God was beaten into fourth place by Easter eggs, bank holidays and hot cross buns.
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This is a Monopoly-esque board game released in 1989. The museum director said it was ‘vile; it’s got a huge Donald Trump picture on the front, it’s got Donald Trump pictures on the money and on the cards – everywhere. We tried to play it the other day and it’s impossibly dull.’
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Fidget spinners are actually satanic. So claims a Paraguayan pastor, who says the spinning action forces children to make the ‘horns’ gesture, which is often referred to as the ‘sign of the devil’.
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Carrie Fisher once choked on a Brussels sprout on set while filming The Blues Brothers. Dan Aykroyd saved her life with the Heimlich manoeuvre, then proposed marriage a few minutes later.
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There is, of course, no such thing as a fish.
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The new fortune writer, James Wong, revealed that some years ago, a man who was sharing a meal with his wife before a business trip opened a fortune cookie to find the prediction: ‘Romance is in the air for your next trip’. The couple eventually divorced, blaming the cookie.
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Actually it wasn’t technically a hologram, but a ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, a 19th-century magic trick that projects an image on to a transparent surface. It’s not a true hologram because the image it creates is 2D, whereas holograms are 3D.
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The Gambian farms coordinator is one of Jammeh’s friends, the excellently named Colonel Seedy Baldeh.
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There’s a dedicated website in Australia that sends envelopes filled with glitter to an MP of your choice for $8.95. In 2015 Liberal MP Craig Lundy received one and called emergency services, fearing it was a dangerous substance. Six fire engines, six police cars and one hazardous materials response van were sent to his office to deal with the glitter.
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He later got a job working as a commercial manager for AFC Totton of the Evo-Stik Southern League, Division One South and West.
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Things later got a bit more serious for Hutchins when he was arrested by the FBI on charges of creating malware software designed to harvest bank details. As at school, Hutchins denied all charges.
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Serious riders have been known to give their hobby horses names and tuck them up under a blanket at night.
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It was reported that lots of the would-be New Zealanders were super-rich survivalists, who were buying properties there in case of a nuclear war or revolt against capitalism. In the week after Donald Trump’s election, applications from the USA to New Zealand rose to 17 times their usual rate.
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In September, Spicer appeared at the Emmys, where he said that the show would have ‘the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period.’ As it happens, he was wrong again. The programme was watched by 11.4 million people, the joint-lowest audience figures on record.
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At these prices, if the average British new-build property was transported to space, it would cost £41 million.
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NASA is worried that none of its 11 suits will last the 15 walks planned between now and 2024, and it cannot make new ones quickly enough.
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Grégoire Trudeau’s surname used to be hyphenated but she removed the hyphen in 2016; no one knows why.
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The six countries vying over islands in the South China Sea are partly fighting for access to its flammable ice. Scientists have long known about combustible ice, which can be ignited because it contains methane, and some people see it as the fossil fuel of the future. Now Chinese scientists have worked out how to extract the gas from deposits in the South China Sea.
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The firefighting jet pack arrived at roughly the same time as Dubai’s police launched their first self-driving robot cop car. It can read number plates and scan the faces of passengers to check whether they are wanted criminals. The only drawback is that its top speed is 15mph.
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One of Kenyatta’s election promises was to cut civil serv
ants’ salaries. Half the government’s income goes on paying government employee wages even though they number just 2 per cent of population. MPs in Kenya earn 76 times the average GDP per capita. If British MPs were paid at this rate, they’d be on more than £2.5 million each per year.
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The substance allegedly used to kill Kim Jong-nam was first synthesised in the 1950s by British scientists who were trying to make an insect repellent. It’s 100 times more toxic than the chemical weapon sarin, with the consistency of honey; one droplet of it on your skin is easily enough to kill you.
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Burger King also made a TV advert that featured the words ‘OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?’, designed to set off Google Home devices. If you were watching the ad and had a Google Home box in the room, the device would immediately start reading the Wikipedia entry for the Whopper burger. Predictably, many complained that this was intrusive.
The Book of the Year Page 31
