by John Lloyd
over 11 cents
to make each 5-cent coin.
‘Hey Jingo!’
is a conjuror’s call
for something to appear –
the opposite of
‘Hey Presto!’
which calls for it
to be gone.
Between 1917 and 1940,
the cure for patients with
syphilis
was to give them
malaria.
Gatwick,
the name of the UK’s
2nd-largest airport,
means ‘the farm where goats are kept’.
During the 2010 World Cup,
100 bar staff at the pub chain
Clover Taverns
changed their names to
Wayne Rooney.
The company has since gone bankrupt.
In 2007, Robert Stewart of Ayr
was put on the Sex Offenders Register
for having sex with a bicycle.
In 1993, Karl Watkins
of Redditch, Worcestershire,
was jailed for having sex
with pavements.
There is at least ten times
as much crime on TV
as there is in the real world.
Starbucks offers
87,000
different drinks combinations.
Britons eat 97%
of the world’s baked beans.
The last private resident
of 10 Downing Street
was called Mr Chicken.
Almost half of all Americans today
are classified as ‘living in poverty’ or
‘barely scraping by’.
46.4% pay no income tax.
The US has more lawyers per capita
than any country in the world
and twice as many prisoners
as lawyers.
The US has only 5%
of the world’s population,
but almost 25%
of its prison population.
Since smoking was banned in 2004,
the main currency in US prisons
is mackerel.
Prisoners waiting to be executed on
Death Row in America
are given a physical beforehand,
to ensure they are fit enough to die.
In his last week on Earth,
Troy Davis, who was executed
in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011,
was put on ‘death watch’
to stop him taking his own life.
The Death House
at the State Prison
in Huntsville, Texas,
offers wheelchair access.
An estimated 150,000 people
die in the UK every year
because only 7% of Britons
know how to give first aid.
When a Navajo baby
laughs aloud for the first time,
the family throws a party.
The person who made the baby laugh
provides the food.
The air breathed by a single person
in an 80-year lifetime weighs more
than a fully laden Boeing 747.
1968
was the only year of the 20th century
in which no member
of the British armed services
was killed on active service.
The London Underground
has made more money from
its famous map
than it ever has from running trains.
In 2010, the Italian government
had a fleet of 629,000 official cars:
ten times as many
as the US government.
Since its discovery in 1930,
Pluto has travelled
only a third of its way
round the Sun.
Walter Schirra
is the only one
of the first six Americans in space
not to have one of the Tracy brothers
in Thunderbirds
named after him.
Sucking a king’s nipples
was a gesture of submission
in ancient Ireland.
In Vanuatu pidgin,
Prince Charles is known as
nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin
and a helicopter is a
mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.
In 1995,
the number of TV programmes in Britain
watched by over 15 million people
was 225.
By 2004, this had fallen to six.
In Romany, the word for television
is dínilo’s dikkaméngro or
‘fool’s looking-box’.
In the film industry, a ‘mickey’
is a gentle camera move forwards.
It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’
(a ‘little creep’).
Bacteria and amoebas
are far more different
from each other
than amoebas
are from people.
Two-thirds of all the people in the world
who have ever lived to be 65
are still alive today.
There are 10,000 times
as many photographs
on Facebook
as there are in the
US Library of Congress.
Eight of the Earth’s 88
naturally occurring chemical elements
were discovered
in the same mine in Sweden.
The Malay word
for water is
‘air’.
Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’)
is German for the weight put on
from eating too much
when feeling sorry for yourself.
The Finnish word for pedant,
pilkunnussija,
translates literally as
‘comma fucker’.
When he died in 1891, John Davey,
a schoolmaster of Zennor, Cornwall,
was the only person in the world
that spoke Cornish.
He had kept the language alive
by talking to his cat.
The first Olympian
disqualified for banned substances
was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall of Sweden.
In the 1968 Mexico Games,
he had two beers
to calm his nerves
before the pistol shooting.
The first recorded incidence of air rage
involved a passenger in First Class
who shat on the food trolley
after being refused another drink.
More than a third
of the world’s 43,794 airports
are in the USA.
The world’s largest cattle station,
Anna Creek Station in South Australia,
is larger than the state of Israel.
All ten species
of the most venomous snakes in the world
live in Australia.
Powerful acids
in snakes’ stomachs
mean they will explode
if given Alka-Seltzer.
The cost of fighting
a libel action in the UK
is 140 times greater
than the European average.
After the battle of Waterloo,
the Marquis of Anglesey
had his leg amputated.
It was buried
with full military honours
in a nearby garden.
Folk healers in the Andes
diagnose patients with guinea pigs,
which apparently squeak
when close to the source of the problem.
In 2003, six monkeys were funded
by the Arts Council of England
to see how long it would take them
to type the works of Shakespeare.
After six months, they ha
d failed
to produce a single word of English,
broken the computer
and used the keyboard as a lavatory.
In 2001, seven Chilean poets held a reading
in the baboon enclosure of Santiago Zoo
to demonstrate that baboons
are more receptive to poetry
than the average Chilean.
By 2020, the number of men
of marriageable age in China
will outnumber the women
by 30 million.
Leo Tolstoy’s wife
wrote out the drafts of
War and Peace for him,
in longhand,
six times.
Zeus had five wives.
One of them was his aunt,
another was his elder sister
and a 3rd one he ate.
In 1672, an angry mob of Dutchmen
killed and ate their prime minister.
Half of the world’s
black pepper
is produced
in Vietnam.
Feeding canaries
red peppers
turns them
orange.
The name
Canary Islands
comes from the Latin for
‘Isle of Dogs’.
Cat originally meant ‘dog’.
The word comes from
the Latin catulus,
a small dog or puppy.
White rhinos
and black rhinos
are the same
colour.
Highways
in the western USA
are based on the
migratory routes
of bison.
The Alpine salamander’s pregnancy
can last for over three years.
Dragonflies
flap their wings
in a figure-of-eight motion.
In Bali, dragonflies are eaten with
coconut milk, ginger, garlic, shallots –
or just plain-grilled and crispy.
Salvador Dalí
was terrified of grasshoppers.
As a schoolboy, he threw such violent fits
of hysteria that his teacher forbade them
to be mentioned in class.
Kali is the Hindu goddess of
death, violence, sexuality
and
motherly love.
The name Mali
means ‘hippopotamus’
in Bamanankan,
the main language
of the country.
The Nigerian navy has four warships
whose names all mean ‘hippopotamus’
but in different local languages:
NNS Erinomi (hippo in Yoruba), NNS
Enyimiri (hippo in Igbo), NNS Dorina
(hippo in Hausa) and NNS Otobo (hippo in
Idoma, Ijaw, Igbani and Kalabari).
Over the years, the Royal Navy’s fleet
has included HMS Seagull, HMS Keith,
HMS Tortoise, HMS Wensleydale and
HMS Cockchafer.
A baby cockroach is called a ‘nymph’.
When Escoffier was head chef at the
Carlton Hotel in London, he got his
English clientele to eat frogs’ legs by
slipping them on to the menu as
Nymphs of the Dawn.
As a young man in London in 1914,
Ho Chi Minh
worked for Escoffier
as a trainee pastry chef.
The South American revolutionary
Simón Bolívar
was, at various times, president of
Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru
and Venezuela.
Venezuela
is Spanish for
‘Little Venice’.
In 17th-century Venice,
women’s high-heeled shoes
could be more than
12 inches tall.
Beckets n.
The little loops for a belt
on a pair of trousers
or a raincoat.
Callypygian adj.
Having
beautiful buttocks.
Misophonia n.
Irrational rage and terror
caused by the sound
of people eating.
Sciapodous adj.
Having feet
large enough
to be used as umbrellas.
The composer Arnold Schoenberg was
superstitious about the number 13.
As 7+6=13 he feared he would die aged 76.
And he did: on Friday 13th July,
at 13 minutes to midnight.
William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus,
lived to be 84 – the same number of years
that Uranus takes to orbit the Sun.
Asked by a priest, ‘Do you forgive your
enemies?’ the dying Spanish general
Ramón Blanco y Erenas (1833–1906)
answered, ‘No. I don’t have any enemies.
I’ve had them all shot.’
In 2007, a Bosnian called Amir Vehabovic
faked his own death to see
how many people would go to his funeral.
Only his mother turned up.
Baby koalas are weaned on their
mother’s excrement. It is consumed
directly from their mother’s bottom
in the form of ‘soup’.
In Antigua, lizard soup in considered
an effective cure for asthma –
provided the patient
isn’t told what’s in it.
The world’s largest known crocodile
and the world’s smallest man
are from the same island
in the Philippines.
The Aztecs sacrificed
1% of their population every year,
or about 250,000 people.
They also sacrificed eagles, jaguars,
butterflies and hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds
have 2,000 meals a day
and hibernate every night.
Seahorses
are the only fish with a neck
and the only family of animals
where the male
gives birth.
Crocodiles have no lips
and can hold their
breath for an hour.
The Cornish for ‘breath’
is anal.
Whenever the king of Swaziland
rises from his seat,
he must be greeted
with cheers and gasps
of astonished admiration.
In 1875, the king of Fiji
brought back measles
from a state visit to Australia
and wiped out
a quarter of his own people.
Queen Elizabeth I often drank
two pints of strong beer
for breakfast.
After weekend house parties at
Sandringham, King Edward VII
insisted on weighing his guests
to make sure they had eaten well.
Lithuanian men
are 200 times more likely
to kill themselves
than Jamaican men are.
Nigeria makes
more movies every year
than the US.
Only three members of the United
Nations have failed to ratify the
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:
South Sudan, Somalia and the USA.
Only three places in the world
have ever changed from
driving on the right
to driving on the left:
East Timor (1975), Okinawa (1978)
and Samoa (2009).
Iceland was once called ‘Butterland’
because the grass was so rich
it seemed to drip butter.
After Switzerland, the world’s
largest per capita gold reserves
are held by Lebanon.
There are more than 35 places
called Lebanon in the USA and at least
38 Springfields. The Simpsons is based in
Springfield, Oregon.
This was kept quiet so viewers
would think it was
their own local Springfield.
