1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (10 page)

Malo kingi
is a jellyfish

named after Robert King,

an American tourist

who died in Australia

after being stung by one.

The man after whom

Parkinson’s disease is named

was once arrested for plotting

to assassinate George III

with a poisoned dart.

The man after whom

Tourette’s Syndrome is named

was shot in the head

by one of his patients.

Spix’s macaw

is named after

the first man to shoot one.

Until 1857, it was legal for

British husbands to sell their wives.

The going rate was
£
3,000

(
£
23,000 in today’s money).

The most common reaction

from men confronted by

TV Licensing Enforcement Officers is,

‘I thought my wife

was dealing with it.’

King Herod’s first wife

was called Doris.

Thomas Edison

proposed to his second wife

in Morse code.

The first escalator was for fun,

rather than for practical purposes.

It was installed at Coney Island

in New York and ridden by 75,000 people

in its first two weeks.

Attendants bearing brandy and

smelling salts stood at the top of the first

escalator in Harrods, to revive shoppers

who became light-headed on the ride.

At least one person a week in the UK

changes their middle name

to ‘Danger’ by deed poll.

If all the British Empire’s dead of the

First World War were to march

four abreast down Whitehall, it would

take them almost four days and nights

to pass the Cenotaph.

At the age of 19, J. S. Bach

walked 420 miles to see

a performance by the composer

Buxtehude.

To
chork

is to make a noise like feet

walking in waterlogged shoes.

J’ai des rossignols

(‘I’ve got nightingales’)

is French for

unexplained noises

coming from a car.

250,000 birds were killed

by the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill in 1989.

About the same number die

from crashing into window glass

in the US every day.

Only half the passengers and crew

who reached America on the
Mayflower

in November 1621

survived until the following spring.

Two-thirds of the world’s caviar

is eaten aboard

the
QE2
.

There are 35,112 golf courses

in the world,

half of them in the USA.

All the world’s golf courses put together

cover more land area

than the Bahamas.

The land around the Iron Curtain

lay untouched for decades. In 1989,

it was turned into a nature reserve

1,400 kilometres long, but less than

200 metres wide.

Victorian guidebooks advised women

to put pins in their mouths

to avoid being kissed in the dark

when trains went through tunnels.

Beekeeping is illegal under the

New York City Health Code,

because bees are

‘naturally inclined to do harm’.

Herring talk out of their arses,

communicating by firing bubbles from

their backsides that sound like

high-pitched raspberries.

The filament of the first

commercial light bulb,

patented by Thomas Edison in 1880,

was made of bamboo.

The tall chef ’s hat or
toque blanche

traditionally had a hundred pleats

to represent the number of ways

an egg could be cooked.

It was once suggested that

New York should be called Brimaquonx,

combining the names

of all the city’s boroughs –

Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan,

Queens and Bronx –

into one.

Tibet has a smaller GDP than Malta,

but is 4,000 times its size.

Hamesucken

is the crime of assaulting someone

in their own home.

Hapax legomenon

describes a word or phrase

that has only been used once.

Haptodysphoria

is the feeling you get from

running your nails

down a blackboard.

Hydrophobophobia

is the fear of

hydrophobia.

Women buy

85% of the world’s Valentine cards and

96% of all the candles

in America.

Einstein

gave his $32,000 Nobel Prize money to

his first wife, Mileva,

as part of their divorce settlement.

The best-selling work of fiction

of the 15th century was

The Tale of the Two Lovers,

an erotic novel by the man who later

became Pope Pius II.

Tiramisu

means ‘pick me up’

in Italian.

The names of the English rivers

Amber, Avon, Axe, Esk, Exe, Ouse,

Humber, Irwell, Thames and Tyne

all mean ‘river’ or ‘water’

in various ancient languages.

There are no rivers

in Saudi Arabia.

The Onyx River

is the only river in Antarctica.

It flows for just 60 days a year

in high summer.

The river with the largest

discharge volume

in Albania is the Seman.

About 100 miles north of the Seman

is the small town of

Puke.

The gold medals at London 2012

were the largest and heaviest

ever awarded at a Summer Olympics,

but are only 1.34% gold.

In 1979, the Uruguayan footballer

Daniel Allende transferred

from Central Español to Rentistas

for a fee of 550 beefsteaks,

to be paid in instalments

of 25 steaks a week.

In 1937, Gillingham FC

sold one of their players to Aston Villa for

three second-hand turnstiles,

two goalkeepers’ sweaters, three cans of

weed-killer and an old typewriter.

Typewriters used to be known as

‘literary pianos’.

The raw materials needed to make a

desktop computer, including

530 lb of fossil fuels,

50 lb of chemicals and

3,330 lb of water,

weigh two tons:

about the same as a rhinoceros.

Exocet
is French for

‘flying fish’.

Ancient Scandinavians

believed that the Aurora Borealis was

the result of huge shoals of herring

reflecting light into the sky.

The word ‘döner’

in
döner kebab

is Turkish for

‘rotating’.

Woodrow Wilson

kept a flock of sheep

on the White House lawn.

He sold the wool and gave the money

to the Red Cross.

Bill Clinton

was mauled by a sheep

at the age of eight and didn’t learn

to ride a bicycle till he was 22.

Before signing the trade embargo

against Cuba, John F. Kennedy

got his press secretary to buy him

1,000 Cuban cigars.

Ronald Reagan’s pet name for

Nancy Reagan was

‘Mommy Poo Pants’.

After George W. Bush

was re-elected president in 2004,

the number of calls from US citizens

to the Canadian Immigration authorities

jumped from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.

One of the main contributors

to the original
Oxford English Dictionary

cut off his penis in a fit of madness.

The longest palindrome in the

Oxford English Dictionary
is ‘tattarrattat’.

James Joyce used it in
Ulysses:

‘I knew his tattarrattat at the door.’

The longest palindrome written by one

poet about another is W. H. Auden’s:

‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang

emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name:

Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’

James Joyce

married a woman called Nora Barnacle.

She once said to him,

‘Why don’t you write books

people can read?’

During rehearsals for
Peter Pan
,

J. M. Barrie ordered Brussels sprouts

every day for lunch, but never ate them.

When asked why, he said:

‘I cannot resist ordering them.

The words are so lovely to say.’

Botanists

cannot tell the difference

between broccoli and cauliflower.

Rhubarb

is a vegetable.

Some species of scorpion

survive on one meal

a year.

The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul

has only 5% of the country’s population

but provides 70% of its fashion models.

The trap-jaw ant

has the fastest bite in the world:

its jaws close 2,300 times faster

than a blink of an eye.

The statue of Winston Churchill

in Parliament Square is electrified

to stop pigeons perching

on its head.

In Bolivia,

the Quechua word for ‘baby’ is

guagua
–

pronounced ‘wah wah’.

A baby echidna

is called

a ‘puggle’.

Baby puffins

are called

‘pufflings’.

Baby hedgehogs

are called

‘hoglets’.

In 19th-century Britain,

‘mock-turtle’ soup was often

made from cow foetuses.

Dogs can smell where electric current

has been and human fingerprints

that are a week old.

Lord Byron’s mail often contained

locks of hair from adoring female fans.

Some of the clippings he sent them

in return actually came from

his pet Newfoundland dog,

Boatswain.

As soon as Lord Byron left England

for the last time in 1816, his creditors

entered his home and repossessed

everything he owned, right down to his

tame squirrel.

In 1899, Dr Horace Emmett

announced that the secret

of eternal youth was injections

of ground-up squirrel testicles.

He died later the same year.

Squirrels

can remember the hiding places

of up to 10,000 nuts.

More than 10,000 seashells

had to be crushed to make

the purple dye to colour

a single Roman toga.

The Latin verb

manicare

means

‘to come in the morning’.

In the novel that the film
Pinocchio

was based on, Jiminy Cricket

was brutally murdered and

Pinocchio had his feet burned off and

was hanged by villagers.

Donald Duck’s

voice started out

as an attempt to do

an impression

of a lamb.

Red Bull

is illegal in Norway, Denmark,

Uruguay and Iceland.

Sitting Bull

was originally called

Jumping Badger.

When Fidel Castro

seized power in Cuba,

he ordered all Monopoly sets

to be destroyed.

The human body grows fastest

during its few first weeks in the womb.

If it were to keep growing

at the same rate for 50 years,

it would be bigger than

Mount Everest.

To produce beef

takes 16,000 times its own weight

in water.

The Turkish for ‘cannibal’

is
yamyam
.

On 30th June 1998, England lost to

Argentina in a World Cup penalty

shoot-out. On that day, and for two days

afterwards, the number of heart attacks

in England increased by 25%.