Fascinating Facts and Trivia

Fascinating stuff from the QI book '2,024 QI Facts to stop you in your tracks' via Daily Mail


A glass of calvados(apple brandy) contains seven apples.


The word for inside of the elbow is 'chelidon'


The Queen takes a monogrammed kettle with her on all foreign trips.


The thermostat knobs in most hotel bedrooms don't work because they're rigged to save electricity.


Mentioning guacamole in your dating profile gets you 144 per cent more responses.


Yellow tennis balls(which look better on colour tv) were the idea of David Attenborough when he was Controller of BBC2-they used to be white.


And finally-Elephants can hear better when having one foot off the ground.

The Great White Shark (Carcharodon Carcharias), female sharks are on avereage 4 feet longer than males.
According to reports the nicknamed 'Deep Blue' and possibly the largest great white shark recorded is female and estimated at 20ft long, she is 50 years old and as wide as a hippo!!

A monkey in cockney rhyming slang is worth £500 but it's origin comes from India where their money a 500 rupee note had a picture of a monkey on it and soldiers returning from there seemed to adopt it as slang. Other money slang, is a oner or a oncer (£1) one pound, fiver(lady godiva) five pounds, a tenner(ten pounds) a score(apple core)-twenty pounds, a pony 50 pounds(but a pony & trap is another word for crap!), a bag of sand=a grand or a thousand pounds. A monkey as above. Money was also known in cockney circles as Sovs(sovereigns, a small gold coin)

Hopefully this will be useful to you too. I'm a true cockney(born within the sound of Bow Bells, London) but some of these words are alien to me-cos I don't talk like what cockneys used to talk like. Eastenders' Danny Dyer confuses everyone with his sayings and slang such as "get in the 'addock) haddock and bloater=motor i.e get in the car, although jam-jar also means the same-confusing eh?
https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04...ckney.html

When it was first produced in 1849,the bowler hat was used as a riding helmet.

When first launched as a brand in 1964,Nike was initially called Blue Ribbon Sports.

Sarcasm is banned in North Korea-really? no doubt fearless leader doesn't like being told he has a stupid haircut and IS an idiot.

The main nut holding a helicopter rotor to its shaft is called "The Jesus Nut" hence the common joke among pilots being "Jesus,if that nut came off..."

We send 50,000 boomerangs to Australia a year-with no comebacks

The heatproof sleeve on the outside of disposable coffee cup is called a 'Zarf'

The Ministry of Defence's official Book of Abbreviations is 373 pages long.

That funny groove on your lip is called the philtrum.

A million plastic bottles ate bought every minute (which explains why we are 'drowning in plastic'

A few more fascinating facts:

According to her last wishes, actress Elizabeth Taylor arrived late for her own funeral.

Babies born in October are more likely to live to 100 than babies born in March.

Australia is slightly wider than the Moon.

Holding hands causes heart rates, breathing and brainwaves to synchronise.

On the planet Venus a day is longer than a year.
A year on Venus (that is the length of time it takes to to complete one whole orbit around the sun) is 224.7 Earth days, but it takes 243 Earth days to rotate on it's axis just once.