1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off
Page 10
James Joyce
married a woman called Nora Barnacle.
She once said to him,
‘Why don’t you write books
people can read?’
During rehearsals for Peter Pan,
J. M. Barrie ordered Brussels sprouts
every day for lunch, but never ate them.
When asked why, he said:
‘I cannot resist ordering them.
The words are so lovely to say.’
Botanists
cannot tell the difference
between broccoli and cauliflower.
Rhubarb
is a vegetable.
Some species of scorpion
survive on one meal
a year.
The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul
has only 5% of the country’s population
but provides 70% of its fashion models.
The trap-jaw ant
has the fastest bite in the world:
its jaws close 2,300 times faster
than a blink of an eye.
The statue of Winston Churchill
in Parliament Square is electrified
to stop pigeons perching
on its head.
In Bolivia,
the Quechua word for ‘baby’ is
guagua –
pronounced ‘wah wah’.
A baby echidna
is called
a ‘puggle’.
Baby puffins
are called
‘pufflings’.
Baby hedgehogs
are called
‘hoglets’.
In 19th-century Britain,
‘mock-turtle’ soup was often
made from cow foetuses.
Dogs can smell where electric current
has been and human fingerprints
that are a week old.
Lord Byron’s mail often contained
locks of hair from adoring female fans.
Some of the clippings he sent them
in return actually came from
his pet Newfoundland dog,
Boatswain.
As soon as Lord Byron left England
for the last time in 1816, his creditors
entered his home and repossessed
everything he owned, right down to his
tame squirrel.
In 1899, Dr Horace Emmett
announced that the secret
of eternal youth was injections
of ground-up squirrel testicles.
He died later the same year.
Squirrels
can remember the hiding places
of up to 10,000 nuts.
More than 10,000 seashells
had to be crushed to make
the purple dye to colour
a single Roman toga.
The Latin verb
manicare
means
‘to come in the morning’.
In the novel that the film Pinocchio
was based on, Jiminy Cricket
was brutally murdered and
Pinocchio had his feet burned off and
was hanged by villagers.
Donald Duck’s
voice started out
as an attempt to do
an impression
of a lamb.
Red Bull
is illegal in Norway, Denmark,
Uruguay and Iceland.
Sitting Bull
was originally called
Jumping Badger.
When Fidel Castro
seized power in Cuba,
he ordered all Monopoly sets
to be destroyed.
The human body grows fastest
during its few first weeks in the womb.
If it were to keep growing
at the same rate for 50 years,
it would be bigger than
Mount Everest.
To produce beef
takes 16,000 times its own weight
in water.
The Turkish for ‘cannibal’
is yamyam.
On 30th June 1998, England lost to
Argentina in a World Cup penalty
shoot-out. On that day, and for two days
afterwards, the number of heart attacks
in England increased by 25%.
The first violence of the French Revolution
took place at a luxury wallpaper factory.
In 1811, crimes punishable by death
in Britain included sheep stealing,
impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner,
‘strong evidence of malice’ in children
aged 7–14, living with gypsies for a month
and stealing cheese.
In 2011,
cheese was the
most stolen food
in the world.
Buzz Aldrin’s
mother’s maiden name
was Moon.
Fritinancy
is the buzzing of insects.
Most bees buzz in the key of A,
unless they are tired,
when they buzz in the key of E.
British moths include
the Uncertain, the Confused, the Magpie,
the Lackey, the Drinker, the Streak,
the Ruddy Highflyer, the Buff Arches,
the Figure of Eighty, the Anomalous, the
Dark Dagger, the Lettuce Shark,
the Isabelline Tiger, the Waved Tabby
and the Mother Shipton.
The cake
for the Queen Mother’s wedding
in 1923 weighed
half a ton.
The three
most searched-for individuals
in the Nobel Peace Prize
nomination database are
Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin
and Adolf Hitler.
A corpocracy
is a society ruled by corporations;
a coprocracy is one ruled by shits.
The first mobile phones
cost £2,000 each and
had a battery life of
about 20 minutes.
The world’s first weather map,
published in The Times on 1st April 1875,
gave the weather for
the previous day.
During the First World War,
explosions from the battle of the Somme
could be heard on Hampstead Heath.
Handschuhschneeballwerfer is German slang
for ‘coward’. It means someone who
wears gloves to throw snowballs.
Two French kings were killed by tennis:
King Louis X (1289–1316) caught a
fatal chill after one game and
Charles VIII (1470–98) never recovered
from a coma after another one. He had
banged his head on the door lintel
on the way into the match.
Humans kill
at least 100 million sharks a year,
or about 11,000 an hour.
Female aphids give birth
to other live female aphids that are
already pregnant with yet more
female aphids.
A flock of snipe
is known as a ‘wisp’.
The bee hummingbird
is the world’s smallest bird.
It weighs about as much
as a tea bag.
John Ainsworth Horrocks (1818–46),
who introduced camels to Australia,
was also accidentally shot by one.
He died of gangrene a month later,
but had the camel executed first.
The Czech general Jan Zizka ordered
his skin to be turned into a war drum
after his death. It was beaten at times of
national emergency, such as the outbreak
of the Thirty Years War in 1618.
George Kako
ma, the composer of
Uganda’s national anthem, sued his
government for lost royalties in 1962.
He won the case and was paid 2,000
Ugandan shillings, equivalent to 50p.
A ‘jackstraw’ is a 16th-century word for a
person of no substance or worth.
A boar produces 200 ml of semen
each time it ejaculates,
compared to
a man’s 3 ml.
King George III’s urine
was blue.
The most times a person
has been stung by bees
without dying is 2,443.
A ‘conscientious objector’
was originally one who
refused to have their children inoculated.
Skiing
was introduced to Switzerland
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
in 1893.
Nelson Mandela
was not removed from
the US terror watch list
until 2008.
The polar explorers
Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton
both explored
in Burberry.
Two-thirds
of the world’s population
has never seen snow.
The French for candyfloss is
barbe à papa
(dad’s beard).
The Hebrew for candyfloss is
searot savta
(grandma’s hair).
The Afrikaans for candyfloss is
spookasem
(ghost breath).
Moer-my gesig is Afrikaans for
‘a face you want to punch’.
Before he became prime minister of
Australia in 1983, Bob Hawke got into
the 1955 Guinness Book of Records
for drinking two and a half pints of beer
in 11 seconds.
11 of the 12 men
to have walked on the Moon
were in the Boy Scouts.
In 1937, comic acrobat Joseph Späh
survived the Hindenburg airship disaster
by jumping out of the window.
The French for
‘window-shopping’
is faire du leche-vitrines or
‘window-licking’.
France has 36,782 mayors,
five of whom are mayors of villages
that ceased to exist 92 years ago.
In 1992, the rules governing what the
French may legally christen their children
were relaxed. The following year,
the most popular name for baby boys
was ‘Kevin’.
The French philosopher Voltaire’s
explanation for why the fossils of
seashells are found on mountaintops was
that they had been left there by ancient
picnickers with a taste for seafood.
The French mathematician Descartes
had a theory that monkeys and apes
were able to talk – but kept quiet
in case they were asked to do any work.
Work
is three times more dangerous
than war.
A single human male
produces enough sperm in a fortnight
to impregnate every fertile woman
on the planet.
None of the best-known
English swear words
are of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Under the provisions of the
1912 Scottish Protection of Animals Act,
the Loch Ness monster
is a protected species.
Before they were famous,
Clive James and Sylvester Stallone
had jobs cleaning out lion cages.
Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson
grew up believing their grandmothers
were their mothers and their mothers
were their sisters.
Olivia Newton-John
was president of
the Isle of Man Basking Shark Society.
John Cleese, Michael Caine and Marc Bolan
all bought Rolls-Royces
before they could drive.
The last words of Henry Royce,
co-founder of Rolls-Royce, were:
‘I wish I’d spent more time
in the office.’
When The Office first aired in 2007,
it had the second-lowest audience
appreciation score on the BBC
after Women’s Bowls.
When Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour
began in 1946, it had a male host.
Early items included
‘Cooking with Whale Meat’ and
‘I Married a Lion-tamer’.
‘Broadcasting’ comes from farming –
it originally meant scattering
seeds across a field.
Scolding and eavesdropping
were illegal in England
until 1967.
Abortion was illegal in the UK
for only 164 years,
between 1803 and 1967.
To avoid being caught breaking the law
by a speed camera,
you would have
to be travelling at
28,000 miles per hour.
In 1999, a gang of thieves
was forced to do community service
along a road in Rotherham.
The next spring the daffodils
coming into bloom spelt out the words
‘shag’ and ‘bollocks’.
A williwaw
is a sudden gust of wind
coming off a high plateau.
Mollynogging
is an old Lincolnshire word
for hanging out
with loose women.
Areodjarekput
is an Inuit word meaning
‘to exchange wives
for a few days only’.
A special bastard
is someone born out of wedlock
whose parents later married.
Although they didn’t meet
until they were teenagers,
Prince Albert and Queen Victoria
were born in the same year
and delivered by the same midwife.
The average human being
gets through 900 skins in a lifetime.
The air in an average-sized room
weighs about 100 pounds.
The US navy
has more aircraft carriers
than all the other navies
of the world combined.
An animal the size of an elephant
could evolve to an animal the size of
a sheep in 100,000 generations,
but for an animal the size of a sheep
to evolve to the size of an elephant
would take 1.6 million generations.
After a meal,
a Burmese python’s heart
grows by 40%.
Squid travel faster
when they jump through the air
than they do under water.
Lava can flow
as fast as
a sprinting greyhound.
If melted down for scrap,
a bronze medal from London 2012
would be worth less than £3.
In 2008, archaeologists in Cyprus
found a 7th-century curse
inscribed on a lead tablet that said,
‘May your penis hurt when you make love.’
Nobody knows who made the curse,
or why.
The Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century
treatise on witchcraft, warned that
witches stole men’s penises
and kept them in birds’ nests.
The average person in the UK
talks about the weather
44 times a month to
18 other p
eople.
The average Briton
suffers from 9,672 minor injuries
over the course of a 78-year lifespan.
The National Health Service