1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (13 page)

The USA is the 9th-fattest nation

in the world. Eight of the top ten

are Pacific island nations, led by

Nauru, Micronesia and the Cook Islands.

The 1 million inhabitants of the

Chinese city of Zhuji make 8 billion

pairs of socks a year:

35% of total worldwide

sock production.

In Italy, 13

is not an unlucky number,

but 17 is.

Kailash Singh of India stopped

washing after his wedding 38 years ago,

hoping it would help him to have a son.

To date, he has seven daughters.

Schimpf-los
is a 24-hour German hotline

that allows customers to

release pent-up aggression by

swearing at telephone operators.

Chamois can

balance on a ledge

less than two inches wide.

Three-quarters of the French

take their annual holiday

in France.

The huge gong

that was struck before Rank films

was made of papier mâché.

To ‘baffle’ someone

once meant to subject them

to public disgrace

by hanging their picture

upside down.

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

is the only major composer

to have mastered

the bassoon.

The Wars of the Roses

weren’t called that.

Sir Walter Scott invented the name

four centuries after the conflict.

A
walleteer

is an indispensable word

for someone who has a wallet.

Before becoming an artist,

Magritte was a professional

wallpaper designer.

The playwright

Tennessee Williams (1911–83)

choked to death

on a bottle cap.

If the mass in a one-kilogram bag of sugar

could be converted into energy,

it would be enough to drive a car

non-stop for 100,000 years.

There were no recorded boxing matches

anywhere in the world

between the fall of the Roman Empire

and 1681.

Only three

of the original 60 clauses

of Magna Carta

are still in force.

The soldiers of Edward III

dressed up as swans for banquets.

The king himself came

as a pheasant.

The EU

spends over a billion Euros a year

on translation.

A third of the 250 Americans

who catch leprosy every year

get it from

armadillos.

90% of the bullets

bought by the Ministry of Defence

are used for training purposes.

The number of ten-year-olds

in Britain who hold

legal shotgun licences

is 26.

More than a third

of the world’s smokers

are Chinese.

A lethal dose of caffeine

is about 50 double espressos.

Red Bull

was originally called

Red Water Buffalo.

President Obama’s secret-service nickname

is ‘Renegade’. Ronald Reagan’s nickname

was ‘Rawhide’, Bill Clinton’s was ‘Eagle’

and George W. Bush was known as

‘Trailblazer’.

MI5 used to own special kettles

that it kept specifically for

steaming open envelopes.

Sitting in a 15-minute meeting

uses more energy

than Usain Bolt expends

over three 100-metre sprints.

Almost any domestic cat

can run faster than

Usain Bolt.

Over a distance of about a mile,

a carrier pigeon

is faster than a fax machine.

Modern homing pigeons

find it more convenient to

follow motorways and ring roads

and turn left and right at junctions

rather than using their

in-built navigational abilities.

Brazil nuts are so radioactive

that a pocketful will set off the alarm

at a nuclear power station.

The
Oxford English Dictionary

takes 9,000 words to describe

the 45 different meanings

of ‘at’.

A male rhinoceros beetle

can lift 850 times

its own body weight.

Alan Turing,

the father of computer science,

chained his mug to a radiator

to stop anyone else at work from using it.

The proud owner

of the first silicone breast implant

was a dog called Esmeralda.

There are only

two beret factories

left in France.

In 1367, King Charles V of France

explicitly banned the wearing

of shoes shaped like penises.

In 2008, pet hamsters

were banned in Vietnam.

Monty Python’s
Life of Brian

was marketed in Sweden as

‘The film that’s so funny,

it was banned in Norway.’

The banning of the fez

in Turkey in 1925

led to riots, executions

and a thriving fez-smuggling trade.

The Turkish

for ‘ski’ is

kayak
.

Dalek

is Croatian for

‘far-away thing’.

Smegma

is Latin for

‘detergent’.

The Afrikaans

for ‘astrology’ is

sterrewiggelary
.

Theoretically the Pope can resign

but, since he is the Supreme Pontiff,

there is no one qualified

to accept his resignation.

Vatican City

is the only place in the world

where cash machines

offer instructions in Latin.

Since the Second World War,

only 20 babies born in the UK

have been called Adolf.

The ‘G-spot’ was nearly called

the
Whipple Tickle
–

after Professor Beverley Whipple,

who coined the expression

that we know today.

Cow’s hooves

are used to make

the foam in fire extinguishers.

The first potatoes

introduced to Britain

were used to make desserts.

In 1976,

one person in the USA

was killed by an outbreak of swine flu,

but the vaccine introduced to combat it

killed 25.

There are 1,000 times

as many bacteria

in your gut

as there are stars

in the Milky Way.

Bacteria

are about as different

from viruses as

metronomes are

from giraffes.

Most antibiotics

are made from bacteria.

Bacteria

can get viruses.

Viruses
can get viruses.

A new one recently discovered

in a French cooling tower

was found to be infected

by another, smaller one.

Scallops

have up to 100 eyes.

The praying mantis

has only one ear,

which is located

between its legs.

Until the 19th century

the English word

for actors was

‘hypocrites’.

The Japanese

for ‘handbag’ is

handubagu
.

In 1947, the Duke of Windsor

bought the Duchess of Windsor

a black patent leather

Hermès wheelbarrow.

In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb

bought his wife Stonehenge.

She didn’t like it,

so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.

Since 1815, Belgium has paid

the Duke of Wellington’s family

more than $46 million

as a reward for winning

the battle of Waterloo.

The First World War

officially ended on

3rd October 2010.

Wars kill more civilians

than soldiers: in a war,

the safest place to be

is usually in the army.

The world’s worst maritime disaster

was the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff

by a Soviet submarine in 1945,

with the loss of 9,343 lives.

35 years after leaving school,

the majority of people

can still identify

90% of their classmates.

The speed of the wind

has fallen

by 60%

in the last

30 years.

Half of all the species

in the world live in

the rainforest canopy.

The human brain

is more complex

than an exploding star

or the US economy.

Every day,

plants convert

sunlight into energy

equivalent to six times

the entire power consumption of

human civilisation.

For a million years,

the human population of the Earth

was less than 26,000.

The last two speakers

of the Mexican language Zoque

are both in their seventies

and refuse to speak to one another.

More than one in five Americans

believes that the world will

end in their lifetime.

Thomas Edison’s last breath

is held in a vial

at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.

99% of all the species

that have ever lived

are now extinct.