1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (12 page)

Spiders are extremely carnivorous.

10,000 spiders sealed in a room

will eventually result in

one enormously fat spider.

Americans eat 500 million pounds

of peanut butter a year,

enough to coat the floor

of the Grand Canyon.

Every month in the Netherlands,

133 billion insects are killed

colliding into cars.

Once a year, on 22nd August,

Prince Hans-Adam II,

the ruler of Liechtenstein,

invites the whole country

to a party at his house.

In online dating sites

you are more likely to come across

a teacher or lecturer

than someone from any other profession.

Since 1959, it has been legal

to marry a dead person in France,

providing you can prove the wedding

was already planned.

Warmduscher

is German for ‘wimp’:

a person so pathetic

he only takes hot showers.

A survey of

a working-class area of London in 1915

found only 12 houses with baths.

Nine of them were being used

for storage.

One third of patent applications

in America in 1905 were

related in some way to the bicycle.

Every year, a thousand letters

arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.

In 2009, a retired policeman called

Geraint Woolford was admitted to

Abergale Hospital in north Wales

and ended up next to another retired

policeman called Geraint Woolford.

The men weren’t related, had never met

and were the only two people in the UK

called Geraint Woolford.

Geraint is the only word spoken

in England and Wales that rhymes with

‘pint’ – though in Scotland you might hear

‘behint’ (Scots for ‘behind’).

There are two rhymes in English

for purple:
curple
, a strap passing

under a horse’s tail, and
hirple
,

to walk along dragging

one leg behind the other.

The African giant pouched rat

can smell tuberculosis 50 times faster

than a laboratory scientist

can identify it.

Electrons move

along an electricity cable

about as fast as

honey flows.

80% of people

who die from anorexia

are aged at least 45.

A red blood cell

can make a complete circuit

of your body in 20 seconds.

If your stomach acid

got on to your skin

it would burn

a hole in it.

A pumping human heart

can squirt blood

a distance of

30 feet.

When we blush,

our stomach lining goes red too.

Christopher Columbus

suffered from arthritis in his wrist

as a result of a bacterial infection

caught from a parrot.

John Wayne

once won Lassie the Dog

in a game of poker.

The founder of match.com,

Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend

to a man she met on

match.com.

At Ronnie Barker’s memorial service

in Westminster Abbey in 2006,

four candles were carried

instead of the usual two.

Despite playing the Fonz

for ten years in the sitcom
Happy Days
,

Henry Winkler never learned

to ride a motorcycle.

The maize needed

to fill a single Range Rover’s

petrol tank with biofuel

would feed a person

for a whole year.

J. R. R. Tolkien

typed the 1,200-page manuscript of

The Lord of the Rings
trilogy

with two fingers.

Quantophrenia

is an obsessive reliance

on statistics.

The first published crossword

was called a word-cross.

The hand jive was invented

at the Cat’s Whiskers club in Soho.

The premises were so small and cramped

that there was only enough room

for people to dance with their hands.

Feeding curry to a sheep

reduces the amount of

methane in its farts

by up to 40%.

More than half the trash

collected on the summit of Ben Nevis

is banana peel.

You could listen to a radio on the Moon

but it’s virtually impossible

aboard a submarine.

Radio waves travel

much more easily through space

than through water.

Areas of the Moon include

the Ocean of Storms,

the Marsh of Decay

and the Lake of Death.

By law, buskers in Dublin

must have a repertoire of

at least 20 songs.

The opposite of plankton is
nekton
–

creatures that move through water

at will, rather than merely drifting.

Fish, dolphins and humans are nekton.

When John Hetherington

ventured out in public

wearing the first top hat,

it was considered so shocking that

children screamed, women fainted

and a small boy broke his arm

in the chaos.

In October 2008,

inflation in Zimbabwe

reached 231,000,000%.

The average car in Britain is parked

for 96% of the time.

Casanova

was a librarian.

India has almost 155,000 post offices:

more than any country in the world

and almost twice as many as China.

Chess, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders

were all invented in ancient India.

Snakes and Ladders was called

Moksha Patam
– ‘the path to liberation’.

South-east England

has a lower annual rainfall

than Jerusalem or Beirut.

50 to 100 people kill themselves

on the London Underground each year,

but official records state that

only three babies

have ever been born there,

in 1924, 2008 and 2009.

Women make

25% of the films in Iran,

compared to

4% in the US.

By 2025, there will be more

English speakers in China

than in the rest of the world put together

A new skyscraper

is built in China every five days.

By 2016, there will be four times as many

as in the whole of the US.

The electrical energy

that powers each cell in our bodies

works out at 30 million volts per metre,

the equivalent voltage

of a bolt of lightning.

The Netherlands

exports more soy sauce

than Japan.

Tokyo

has three times as many

Michelin-starred restaurants

as Paris.

Bricklehampton

is the longest place name in the UK

with no repeated letters.

A vulture can safely swallow

enough botulinum toxin

to kill 300,000 guinea pigs.

More than seven times

as many people in the UK

visit museums and galleries every year

as attend Premier League football games.

Manchester United

is the most hated brand in Britain

and the 7th most hated in the world.

Angola has the world’s best record

at football penalty shoot-outs.

They have never lost one.

Ants nod to each other

as they pass.

The Swiss

own more guns per head

than the Iraqis.

Saudi women

have won the right to vote,

but not the right

to drive to the polling station.

In Norway, ‘Odd’ and ‘Even’

are common male first names.

You can even (oddly)

have ‘Odd-Even’.

Richard the Lionheart’s

younger brother, John,

was nicknamed ‘Dollheart’.

A
smellsmock
is a priest

who indulges in extra-curricular

activities with his flock.

Japanese sheep go

‘meh’.

Gymnophoria

is the sense that someone is

mentally undressing you.

A
gynotikilobomassophile

is one who loves to

nibble women’s earlobes.

The Afrikaans

for an elephant’s trunk is

slurp
.

Brenda

means ‘inside’

in Albanian.

Baghdad means

‘God’s gift’

in Persian.

The first man to use the word

‘bored’

was Lord Byron in 1823.

The world’s oldest living thing

is a patch of Mediterranean sea-grass

between Spain and Cyprus.

It is estimated to be 200,000 years old.

The word

Twinings

in the tea company’s

original 300-year-old typeface

is the oldest continuously used

commercial logo in existence.

Every time he made a cup of coffee,

Beethoven counted out exactly 60 beans

to make sure it was always

exactly the same strength.

A female chimpanzee

in a fit of passion has the

strength of six men.

Higgs bosons,

assuming they exist at all,

exist for approximately

one zeptosecond –

a thousandth of a billionth

of a billionth of a second.

The Hundred Years War

lasted for

116 years.

There are more pigs in China

than in the next

43 pork-producing countries combined.

Some pigs suffer from

mysophobia,

the fear of mud.

Tyrosemiophile
n.

One who collects

cheese labels.

Ultracrepidarian
n.

Someone who doesn’t know

what they’re talking about.

Zemblanity
n.

Bad luck occurring

just as expected:

the opposite of serendipity.

Zinzulation
n.

The sound made

by power saws.

The seven years’ preparation

for the 2008 Beijing Olympics

reduced unemployment in the city to zero

and increased the average income by 89.9%.

Many of the doves

released at the opening ceremony

of the 1988 Seoul Olympics

were accidentally roasted alive

when the Olympic flame was lit.

More than 50% of Team GB’s medals

in the 2012 London Olympics were won

in sports where the athlete is

sitting down or kneeling.

At the 2012 London Olympics,

which lasted for 17 days, the athletes were

provided with 150,000 free condoms –

approximately 15 each.

British troops in India

during the Second World War were issued

with the memorable advice:

‘Defeat the Axis,

Use Prophylaxis’.

In 1951, more than 200 British MPs

were voted in by over 50%

of their electorate.

In 2001, none were.

99% of all the words in the

Oxford English Dictionary

do not derive from Old English,

but 60% of the most

commonly used words do.

Francach
is an Irish word

that means both ‘rat’ and ‘Frenchman’.

Argentine scientists have discovered

that giving hamsters Viagra

helps them recover from jet lag

up to 50% faster.

To
dringle

is to waste time

in a lazy manner.

The UK is the fattest nation

in the European Union

and the 28th-fattest in the world.