1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off Read online

  over 11 cents

  to make each 5-cent coin.

  ‘Hey Jingo!’

  is a conjuror’s call

  for something to appear –

  the opposite of

  ‘Hey Presto!’

  which calls for it

  to be gone.

  Between 1917 and 1940,

  the cure for patients with

  syphilis

  was to give them

  malaria.

  Gatwick,

  the name of the UK’s

  2nd-largest airport,

  means ‘the farm where goats are kept’.

  During the 2010 World Cup,

  100 bar staff at the pub chain

  Clover Taverns

  changed their names to

  Wayne Rooney.

  The company has since gone bankrupt.

  In 2007, Robert Stewart of Ayr

  was put on the Sex Offenders Register

  for having sex with a bicycle.

  In 1993, Karl Watkins

  of Redditch, Worcestershire,

  was jailed for having sex

  with pavements.

  There is at least ten times

  as much crime on TV

  as there is in the real world.

  Starbucks offers

  87,000

  different drinks combinations.

  Britons eat 97%

  of the world’s baked beans.

  The last private resident

  of 10 Downing Street

  was called Mr Chicken.

  Almost half of all Americans today

  are classified as ‘living in poverty’ or

  ‘barely scraping by’.

  46.4% pay no income tax.

  The US has more lawyers per capita

  than any country in the world

  and twice as many prisoners

  as lawyers.

  The US has only 5%

  of the world’s population,

  but almost 25%

  of its prison population.

  Since smoking was banned in 2004,

  the main currency in US prisons

  is mackerel.

  Prisoners waiting to be executed on

  Death Row in America

  are given a physical beforehand,

  to ensure they are fit enough to die.

  In his last week on Earth,

  Troy Davis, who was executed

  in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011,

  was put on ‘death watch’

  to stop him taking his own life.

  The Death House

  at the State Prison

  in Huntsville, Texas,

  offers wheelchair access.

  An estimated 150,000 people

  die in the UK every year

  because only 7% of Britons

  know how to give first aid.

  When a Navajo baby

  laughs aloud for the first time,

  the family throws a party.

  The person who made the baby laugh

  provides the food.

  The air breathed by a single person

  in an 80-year lifetime weighs more

  than a fully laden Boeing 747.

  1968

  was the only year of the 20th century

  in which no member

  of the British armed services

  was killed on active service.

  The London Underground

  has made more money from

  its famous map

  than it ever has from running trains.

  In 2010, the Italian government

  had a fleet of 629,000 official cars:

  ten times as many

  as the US government.

  Since its discovery in 1930,

  Pluto has travelled

  only a third of its way

  round the Sun.

  Walter Schirra

  is the only one

  of the first six Americans in space

  not to have one of the Tracy brothers

  in Thunderbirds

  named after him.

  Sucking a king’s nipples

  was a gesture of submission

  in ancient Ireland.

  In Vanuatu pidgin,

  Prince Charles is known as

  nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin

  and a helicopter is a

  mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.

  In 1995,

  the number of TV programmes in Britain

  watched by over 15 million people

  was 225.

  By 2004, this had fallen to six.

  In Romany, the word for television

  is dínilo’s dikkaméngro or

  ‘fool’s looking-box’.

  In the film industry, a ‘mickey’

  is a gentle camera move forwards.

  It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’

  (a ‘little creep’).

  Bacteria and amoebas

  are far more different

  from each other

  than amoebas

  are from people.

  Two-thirds of all the people in the world

  who have ever lived to be 65

  are still alive today.

  There are 10,000 times

  as many photographs

  on Facebook

  as there are in the

  US Library of Congress.

  Eight of the Earth’s 88

  naturally occurring chemical elements

  were discovered

  in the same mine in Sweden.

  The Malay word

  for water is

  ‘air’.

  Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’)

  is German for the weight put on

  from eating too much

  when feeling sorry for yourself.

  The Finnish word for pedant,

  pilkunnussija,

  translates literally as

  ‘comma fucker’.

  When he died in 1891, John Davey,

  a schoolmaster of Zennor, Cornwall,

  was the only person in the world

  that spoke Cornish.

  He had kept the language alive

  by talking to his cat.

  The first Olympian

  disqualified for banned substances

  was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall of Sweden.

  In the 1968 Mexico Games,

  he had two beers

  to calm his nerves

  before the pistol shooting.

  The first recorded incidence of air rage

  involved a passenger in First Class

  who shat on the food trolley

  after being refused another drink.

  More than a third

  of the world’s 43,794 airports

  are in the USA.

  The world’s largest cattle station,

  Anna Creek Station in South Australia,

  is larger than the state of Israel.

  All ten species

  of the most venomous snakes in the world

  live in Australia.

  Powerful acids

  in snakes’ stomachs

  mean they will explode

  if given Alka-Seltzer.

  The cost of fighting

  a libel action in the UK

  is 140 times greater

  than the European average.

  After the battle of Waterloo,

  the Marquis of Anglesey

  had his leg amputated.

  It was buried

  with full military honours

  in a nearby garden.

  Folk healers in the Andes

  diagnose patients with guinea pigs,

  which apparently squeak

  when close to the source of the problem.

  In 2003, six monkeys were funded

  by the Arts Council of England

  to see how long it would take them

  to type the works of Shakespeare.

  After six months, they ha
d failed

  to produce a single word of English,

  broken the computer

  and used the keyboard as a lavatory.

  In 2001, seven Chilean poets held a reading

  in the baboon enclosure of Santiago Zoo

  to demonstrate that baboons

  are more receptive to poetry

  than the average Chilean.

  By 2020, the number of men

  of marriageable age in China

  will outnumber the women

  by 30 million.

  Leo Tolstoy’s wife

  wrote out the drafts of

  War and Peace for him,

  in longhand,

  six times.

  Zeus had five wives.

  One of them was his aunt,

  another was his elder sister

  and a 3rd one he ate.

  In 1672, an angry mob of Dutchmen

  killed and ate their prime minister.

  Half of the world’s

  black pepper

  is produced

  in Vietnam.

  Feeding canaries

  red peppers

  turns them

  orange.

  The name

  Canary Islands

  comes from the Latin for

  ‘Isle of Dogs’.

  Cat originally meant ‘dog’.

  The word comes from

  the Latin catulus,

  a small dog or puppy.

  White rhinos

  and black rhinos

  are the same

  colour.

  Highways

  in the western USA

  are based on the

  migratory routes

  of bison.

  The Alpine salamander’s pregnancy

  can last for over three years.

  Dragonflies

  flap their wings

  in a figure-of-eight motion.

  In Bali, dragonflies are eaten with

  coconut milk, ginger, garlic, shallots –

  or just plain-grilled and crispy.

  Salvador Dalí

  was terrified of grasshoppers.

  As a schoolboy, he threw such violent fits

  of hysteria that his teacher forbade them

  to be mentioned in class.

  Kali is the Hindu goddess of

  death, violence, sexuality

  and

  motherly love.

  The name Mali

  means ‘hippopotamus’

  in Bamanankan,

  the main language

  of the country.

  The Nigerian navy has four warships

  whose names all mean ‘hippopotamus’

  but in different local languages:

  NNS Erinomi (hippo in Yoruba), NNS

  Enyimiri (hippo in Igbo), NNS Dorina

  (hippo in Hausa) and NNS Otobo (hippo in

  Idoma, Ijaw, Igbani and Kalabari).

  Over the years, the Royal Navy’s fleet

  has included HMS Seagull, HMS Keith,

  HMS Tortoise, HMS Wensleydale and

  HMS Cockchafer.

  A baby cockroach is called a ‘nymph’.

  When Escoffier was head chef at the

  Carlton Hotel in London, he got his

  English clientele to eat frogs’ legs by

  slipping them on to the menu as

  Nymphs of the Dawn.

  As a young man in London in 1914,

  Ho Chi Minh

  worked for Escoffier

  as a trainee pastry chef.

  The South American revolutionary

  Simón Bolívar

  was, at various times, president of

  Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru

  and Venezuela.

  Venezuela

  is Spanish for

  ‘Little Venice’.

  In 17th-century Venice,

  women’s high-heeled shoes

  could be more than

  12 inches tall.

  Beckets n.

  The little loops for a belt

  on a pair of trousers

  or a raincoat.

  Callypygian adj.

  Having

  beautiful buttocks.

  Misophonia n.

  Irrational rage and terror

  caused by the sound

  of people eating.

  Sciapodous adj.

  Having feet

  large enough

  to be used as umbrellas.

  The composer Arnold Schoenberg was

  superstitious about the number 13.

  As 7+6=13 he feared he would die aged 76.

  And he did: on Friday 13th July,

  at 13 minutes to midnight.

  William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus,

  lived to be 84 – the same number of years

  that Uranus takes to orbit the Sun.

  Asked by a priest, ‘Do you forgive your

  enemies?’ the dying Spanish general

  Ramón Blanco y Erenas (1833–1906)

  answered, ‘No. I don’t have any enemies.

  I’ve had them all shot.’

  In 2007, a Bosnian called Amir Vehabovic

  faked his own death to see

  how many people would go to his funeral.

  Only his mother turned up.

  Baby koalas are weaned on their

  mother’s excrement. It is consumed

  directly from their mother’s bottom

  in the form of ‘soup’.

  In Antigua, lizard soup in considered

  an effective cure for asthma –

  provided the patient

  isn’t told what’s in it.

  The world’s largest known crocodile

  and the world’s smallest man

  are from the same island

  in the Philippines.

  The Aztecs sacrificed

  1% of their population every year,

  or about 250,000 people.

  They also sacrificed eagles, jaguars,

  butterflies and hummingbirds.

  Hummingbirds

  have 2,000 meals a day

  and hibernate every night.

  Seahorses

  are the only fish with a neck

  and the only family of animals

  where the male

  gives birth.

  Crocodiles have no lips

  and can hold their

  breath for an hour.

  The Cornish for ‘breath’

  is anal.

  Whenever the king of Swaziland

  rises from his seat,

  he must be greeted

  with cheers and gasps

  of astonished admiration.

  In 1875, the king of Fiji

  brought back measles

  from a state visit to Australia

  and wiped out

  a quarter of his own people.

  Queen Elizabeth I often drank

  two pints of strong beer

  for breakfast.

  After weekend house parties at

  Sandringham, King Edward VII

  insisted on weighing his guests

  to make sure they had eaten well.

  Lithuanian men

  are 200 times more likely

  to kill themselves

  than Jamaican men are.

  Nigeria makes

  more movies every year

  than the US.

  Only three members of the United

  Nations have failed to ratify the

  UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

  South Sudan, Somalia and the USA.

  Only three places in the world

  have ever changed from

  driving on the right

  to driving on the left:

  East Timor (1975), Okinawa (1978)

  and Samoa (2009).

  Iceland was once called ‘Butterland’

  because the grass was so rich

  it seemed to drip butter.


  After Switzerland, the world’s

  largest per capita gold reserves

  are held by Lebanon.

  There are more than 35 places

  called Lebanon in the USA and at least

  38 Springfields. The Simpsons is based in

  Springfield, Oregon.

  This was kept quiet so viewers

  would think it was

  their own local Springfield.