QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Although the Code allows for burning the flag ‘in a dignified way’, it also warns sternly against (and lays down the legal penalties for) anyone who ‘knowingly mutilates, defaces,physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon’ the flag for other, possibly nefarious reasons. However, in 1990 the Supreme Court ruled that this was a restriction of ‘freedom of speech’ and thus violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution. So, even though the US Flag Code says you mustn’t, you can legally burn the US flag in America for any reason you like.

  The US Flag Code is a comprehensive document. Among other things, it sets out in precise detail how to fold the flag, showing where all of the twelve folds must be made and the symbolic reasons for each fold. It also makes it clear that the flag is not to be embroidered on to cushions or handkerchiefs;not to be ‘used as a covering for a ceiling’ or as ‘a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything’; or to be used in advertising; or to form part of a ‘costume or athletic uniform’.

  Contrary to myth, the flag does not have to be burned if it ever touches the ground, and it’s perfectly OK to clean it if it gets a bit grubby, rather than rushing straight to the burning option.

  The anxious concern of Americans for the well-being of their flag strikes many foreigners as faintly comical or even fetishistic. But in the USA, where the President serves as both head of state and head of the government, there is no symbolic figurehead (such as a ceremonial monarch) to unite the nation. For many Americans, the flag plays that role, providing a non-partisan rallying point for all patriotic citizens,irrespective of their political differences.

  That explains why the US Flag Code insists that the Stars and Stripes ‘is itself considered a living thing’.

  In which country is the Dutch city of Groningen?

  The Netherlands.

  Groningen is definitely not in Holland and, even if it were, Holland isn’t a country.

  The city of Groningen is capital of the northern Dutch province of Groningen. It is one of twelve provinces into which the Netherlands is divided. ‘Holland’ refers only to the two western provinces, North Holland and South Holland, which together represent an eighth of the country’s total land mass. To call the Netherlands ‘Holland’ is like calling the UK ‘England’ or ‘the Home Counties’.

  The reason Holland is commonly used in this way is that it punches above its weight in the Netherlands – both in terms of population (40 per cent), and economic and political power (the three largest cities in the Netherlands – Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague – are all in Holland). In the sixteenth century, when the Dutch navy ruled the waves, most Dutch ships came from these three ports, so any Dutchmen found abroad usually came ‘from Holland’.

  ‘Holland’ is from Middle Dutch holtland (‘wooded land’). The origin of ‘Dutch’ is more complicated. Its original meaning was ‘of the people’: the word ‘Dutch’ is a corruption of the ancient Indo-European root teuta ‘people’, from which we also get ‘Teutonic’. In Old High German this became duit-isc (‘people-ish’ or ‘the language of the people’) and was used about Germanic languages generally.

  The Old English variant of duit-isc (‘people-ish’) was þeodisc (pronounced ‘thay-odd-ish’). It originally meant ‘English’ and then, in about the ninth century, came to mean ‘German’. As þeodisc evolved into ‘Dutch’ it continued to mean ‘German’ right up until the early sixteenth century. At that point English rivalry (and frequent war) with the Hollanders or ‘Low Dutch’ meant the word ‘Dutch’ was exclusively applied to them, usually as part of a term of abuse. Examples from the time include ‘Dutch courage’ (bravery brought on by alcohol) and ‘Dutch widow’ (a prostitute).

  For this reason, even as late as 1934, Dutch government officials were advised to avoid using the expression ‘the Dutch’ in international communications, in favour of the officially sanctioned ‘of the Netherlands’.

  Confusingly, but entirely logically, the Dutch word for Germans is duitsch.

  Groningen, the Netherlands’s eighth largest city, is the Dutch equivalent of Manchester: a lively university town full of bars. Students make up more than a quarter of its 185,000 population. As Groningen is the only city of any size in the northern Netherlands, locals simply refer to it as ‘Stad’, which means ‘city’. Until Groningen’s sugar beet factory closed recently, it gave the city a distinct sweet smell during the summer.

  ROB BRYDON The photo of Groningen that you showed looked like Guildford, didn’t it.

  ALAN Are you suggesting we have more in common with our European neighbours than otherwise?

  ROB I’m suggesting the world is becoming homogenised and indistinct and I for one think that’s a bad thing.

  STEPHEN Hear hear hear, quite right, quite right. Very good.

  JIMMY CARR I think we all think like that, we’re all the same.

  What language is the Spanish national anthem sung in?

  It isn’t.

  Despite having one of the oldest tunes of any national anthem, La Marcha Real is the only one with no words. They were dropped in 1975 on the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain for forty years. In 2007 the Spanish Olympic Committee, inspired by a performance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ by visiting Liverpool football fans, held a competition to find new words for the national tune. The winner,called – believe it or not – ¡Viva España! was dropped after just five days. Several Spanish regions (many of which have their own anthems) denounced the words as ‘too nationalistic’.

  Long live Spain! (it went)

  We sing together, with different voices,

  and only one heart.

  This seems pretty bland compared to France’s bloodthirsty ‘La Marseillaise’:

  Do you hear in the countryside

  The roar of those ferocious soldiers?

  They come right here into your midst

  To slit the throats of your sons and wives!

  Or the long-since hushed-up sixth verse of ‘God Save the Queen’

  Lord grant that Marshal Wade

  May by thy mighty aid

  Victory bring

  May he sedition hush

  And like a torrent rush

  Rebellious Scots to crush

  God save the King

  The oldest (and perhaps the oddest) national anthem of all belongs to the Dutch and dates from 1574. Here it is in its entirety:

  William of Nassau, scion

  Of a Dutch and ancient line,

  Dedicate undying

  Faith to this land of mine.

  A prince I am, undaunted,

  Of Orange, ever free,

  To the King of Spain I’ve granted

  A lifelong loyalty.

  The Dutch seem to have no problem singing about being loyal subjects of Spain, despite not having been so for more than 350 years. Maybe the Spanish should sing the Dutch anthem instead?

  Which city has the most Michelin stars in the world?

  Not Paris, but Tokyo.

  In the 2010 Michelin Guide, Tokyo has eleven 3-star restaurants to Paris’s ten. The Japanese capital also has more Michelin stars altogether than any other city in the world –261 across 197 restaurants – three times more than Paris.

  At least some of this is do with scale: Tokyo is a much larger city with 160,000 restaurants. Paris has only 40,000. And France still tops the country listings, with twenty-five 3-star restaurants to Japan’s eighteen. (The UK currently has four.)

  Though two of Tokyo’s eleven 3-starred restaurants are French, most of the 197 starred restaurants in the city specialise in classical Japanese cuisine, including three fugu houses, where the deadly poisonous puffer fish is rendered edible by specially trained chefs. The raw ingredients for this (and for all the sushi and sashimi) come from Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market, which handles 2,000 tons of fish a day. The Japanese are obsessed with good food – about half the output of Japanese television is food-relat
ed.

  In 1889, two brothers from Clermont-Ferrand, André and Édouard Michelin, founded the Michelin Tyre Company. In 1891 they patented the world’s first removable pneumatic tyre. The company is still based in the Auvergne and is the world’s second largest tyre manufacturer, with over 109,000 employees and revenues of £12.3 billion.

  André published the first Michelin guide in 1900, when there were just 300 cars in France. The guide was intended to stimulate road travel (more cars meant more tyres) and was given away free to motorists to encourage them to explore France by road. As well as listing hotels and restaurants, the first guides had practical tips on how to change tyres and where to find mechanics.

  Michelin stars started in 1926. One star is ‘a very good restaurant in its category’; two means ‘excellent cooking, worth a detour’; three means ‘exceptional cuisine, worth a special trip’. Just seventy-five Michelin inspectors cover all of Europe and many fewer the rest of the world. They eat out on 240 days in a year, file over 1,000 reports, and must order the maximum number of courses and always clear their plates. To remain anonymous they never return to the same place for several years, and never reveal what they do – even to their parents.

  The Michelin man is over a century old. His name is ‘Bibendum’. His inspiration was a stack of tyres that reminded Édouard Michelin of a human torso. In the first poster featuring him, in 1898, he drained a champagne glass full of nails and glass, making the point that ‘Michelin tyres drink up obstacles’. His name comes from the strapline on the poster: ‘Nunc est bibendum’ (‘Time to drink!’).

  He isn’t tyre-coloured because tyres weren’t dark grey until 1912, when carbon black was added to preserve them. They were originally grey-white or beige. The Michelin man is not as racy as he was – he gave up cigars in 1929 after a TB epidemic – but he remains much loved. In 2000 he was voted the best-ever corporate logo, just ahead of the symbol for the London Underground.

  STEPHEN Which city has the most Michelin stars?

  REGINALD D. HUNTER I know for a fact it ain’t London. And I’m not just trying to offend London … I’m trying to offend the UK in general.

  STEPHEN Ha ha.

  REG But I feel like any country that can produce Marmite, they started later than everybody else in trying to make food taste good.

  STEPHEN This from a country that has spray-on cheese.

  Where was football invented?

  Not in England, but in China.

  The Chinese played football for over 2,000 years before the English claimed it. Cuju or tsu’ chu – literally ‘kick-ball’ – began as a military training exercise but was soon popular all over China. It used a leather ball (stuffed with fur or feathers) and two teams trying to score goals at opposite ends without using their hands. According to some accounts, each goal was a hole cut into a sheet of silk hung between bamboo posts. Cuju was first recorded in the fifth century BC and was at its peak during the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1279), when cuju players became the world’s first professional footballers. The sport eventually fell into oblivion during the Ming period (AD 1368–1644).

  In twelfth-century Japan cuju was adapted into a new game called kemari. Essentially a formal version of ‘keepy-uppy’, it was played in a square with trees at the corners. The eight players, in pairs, had to keep the ball in the air as long as possible, bouncing it off the trees. There was an umpire who gave extra points for particularly stylish play.

  There are also claims of a game even older than cuju, called marngrook (‘game ball’), played by the Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia. Involving over fifty players, the aim was to prevent the ball (made of possum-skin) from touching the ground. The long punts and high catches of Australian Rules football may owe something to marngrook.

  In medieval England football involved so many players, so few rules and so much violence that it was regularly banned: no fewer than thirty royal and local laws were enacted against it between 1314 and 1667. This didn’t reduce its popularity among all classes – even the young Henry VIII shelled out 4 shillings for a pair of leather football boots (worth about £100 today).

  Modern football started in England in 1863, when rugby football and association football (or ‘soccer’ for short) diverged and England’s Football Association was founded. The world’s oldest football club is Sheffield FC, founded six years earlier (in 1857) as an amateur club.

  Although the 1863 rules of the English game provided the template for today’s international sport, it took a long time to shake off its violent origins. In the nineteenth century you could shoulder-barge players even if they didn’t have the ball,and if a goalkeeper caught the ball, he could be shoved over the line to score.

  One of the rules proposed in 1863 allowed players to approach the man with the ball and ‘to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or to wrest the ball from him’. This was eventually dropped, despite the objections of Blackheath FC who argued that, without it, ‘you will do away with the courage and pluck of the game, and it will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice’.

  How prescient that has proved to be.

  Who was the first Olympian to score a ‘perfect 10’?

  It wasn’t Nadia Comăneci at the Montreal Games in 1976 – in fact, at the time of the first ‘perfect 10’, she wasn’t even born.

  In 1924 in Paris, a French gymnast named Albert Sequin (1891–1979) won the individual Gold in a vaulting event called the Men’s Sidehorse, which has only been contested at one other Olympiad (St Louis in 1904). His score was listed as 10.000, which makes him the first to score a perfect 10.

  The 1924 Olympics was Albert Sequin’s only Games, but he made the most of it: also picking up silver medals for the Men’s Team All-Around – and for the Men’s Rope-Climbing, which hasn’t appeared at the Olympics since 1932.

  Rope-climbing Olympians began by sitting on the floor, with the lower end of an 8-metre (26-foot) rope dangling between their outstretched legs. Only their hands and arms could be used in climbing: the use of feet and legs was banned,even in the initial push-off. The key to success was the momentum gained by an explosive, upper-body surge from the floor. In some forms of the competition, the climbers were required to keep their bodies L-shaped – that is, with their legs sticking out horizontally – throughout the climb.

  At the top of the rope was a ‘tambourine’, a flat plate covered with soot. Back on the ground, the competitor would show his stained fingers to prove that he had touched the tambourine. In 1904 the rope-climbing Gold went to the legendary American George Eyser who won six Olympic medals that year, despite his wooden leg.

  Nadia Comăneci, the first female Olympian to score a perfect 10, did so at the age of fourteen in 1976. The youngest female gold medallist was Marjorie Gestring of the USA, who took a diving Gold in 1936, aged thirteen.

  Sports that are no longer part of the Games include live Pigeon-shooting: nearly 300 birds were killed during the event at the 1900 Paris Olympiad. However, Pistol Duelling at the 1906 Athens Games produced no fatalities: competitors shot at mannequins dressed in frock coats with bull’s-eyes on their throats. The Diving Plunge (St Louis, 1904) – which tested how far athletes could travel in the water without actually swimming – and the Long Jump for Horses (Paris, 1900) are other modern non-runners. In 2008 the official Beijing Olympic website announced the introduction of Olympic Poodle-Clipping – but this turned out to be an April Fool’s joke, included in the agenda by accident after first being printed by the Daily Telegraph.

  Perhaps the most unusual Olympic record-breaker of all time was Japanese runner Shizo Kanakuri. In 1912 he began the marathon at the Stockholm Games but, being exhausted after his eighteen-day journey to Sweden, stopped for a rest after 30 kilometres (nearly 19 miles) and asked at a local house for a glass of water. Having drunk it, he fell asleep on the sofa and woke up the next morning. In 1967, aged seventy-six, he was invited to return to the city and complete his run. His finishing time w
as therefore 54 years, 8 months,6 days, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.

  Why did sportsmen start going into huddles?

  It had nothing to do with team-building.

  The huddle was invented at Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington DC, as a way of hiding hand signals from other deaf teams.

  In American football, the ‘line of scrimmage’ is an imaginary line across the pitch where the two sides face each other before commencing the next part of the game, or ‘play’. Until the 1890s, the signal caller on each team shouted out his team’s strategy for the next play. Nothing was hidden from the opposite team’s defence.

  When the forerunner of Gallaudet College (founded in 1864) started playing American football with an all-deaf team, their quarterback, Paul Hubbard, used American Sign Language (ASL) to call a play at the line of scrimmage. His team therefore had a distinct advantage when they played non-deaf colleges, but other deaf schools could easily read his intentions. So in 1894 Hubbard began concealing his signals by gathering his attacking players into a cluster before each play.

  This worked brilliantly and became a regular habit. In 1896 the huddle started showing up on other college campuses and it is now considered an essential part of the game.

  Gallaudet was the first University for deaf people, set up by Edward Milner Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787–1851), the man who brought sign language to America. Because Thomas Gallaudet (who wasn’t deaf himself) based American Sign Language (ASL) on the French sign language that he had learned in Paris, American and French sign languages share 60 per cent of the same gestures.