1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (11 page)

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 Kakoma, 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 1954
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 on film

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 people.

The average Briton

suffers from 9,672 minor injuries

over the course of a 78-year lifespan.

The National Health Service

is the world’s 4th-largest employer

after the US Defense Department,

the Chinese Red Army

and Walmart.

The NHS has halved superbug deaths

and saved 10,000 lives

in the last four years simply

by getting doctors and nurses

to wash their hands.

If everyone in the world

washed their hands properly,

a million lives

could be saved a year.

Mundungus
n.

The stench of tobacco.

Quaquaversal
adj.

Going off in all directions.

Pixilated
adj.

Slightly mad or confused,

having been led astray by pixies.

Rasceta
n.

The creases

on the inside of the wrist.

The first commercial chewing gum

appeared in 1871, after Thomas Adams

had failed to make car tyres from

the same ingredients.

The first chewing gum made by

William Wrigley Jr (in 1892)

was given away free

with his baking powder.

Lilt, the soft drink with the

‘totally tropical taste’,

is completely unknown in the Caribbean.

Before the Queen puts her shoes on,

a member of the royal household

wears them first

to make sure they are comfortable.