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In 1964 Swedish art critics praised the debut of 'Pierre Brassau', whose paintings were later revealed to be the work of a chimpanzee.
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In 2006, a robot taste-taster confirmed humans taste like bacon.
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The political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ date back to the physical layout of the French National Assembly during the early stage of the Revolution in 1789: supporters of the king were ranged to the right of the presiding officer and their revolutionary opponents to the left.
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James Joyce believed he would recognise his wife Nora’s fart anywhere and would ‘pick hers out in a roomful of farting women’.
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A bear named Hank the Tank had been accused of breaking into 28 homes in California since July.
He has recently been partially exonerated by DNA evidence. There are, in fact, no fewer than three different bears breaking into homes.
(Image: Tim Lumley; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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The Hawaiian language has 139 words for rain.
(Image: W.carter)
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In the 16th century, England was struck by a mysterious ‘sweating disease’ that killed thousands, and then disappeared after 70 years.
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In Microsoft’s internal documentation, the digital Office assistant Clippy was referred to as ‘tfc’. To anyone who asked, it was ‘the friendly character’, but it actually stood for ‘the fucking clown’.
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Mice find being near bananas stressful.
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While adultery is generally illegal in Japan, it is legal as long as it's done for business purposes.
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The world’s largest single-celled organism is Valonia ventricosa, a sea-algae that can get to 5 centimetres in diameter.
662
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The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will have been forgotten. THE NEW YORK TIMES in 1925 on crosswords
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Hoping for more Olympic drama? The 1924 Olympic fencing competition featured two real duels over scoring disputes.
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After a bad mescaline trip, Jean-Paul Sartre started seeing three or four crabs around him all the time. He would talk to them in the morning (‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’) and during the day (‘We’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet’).
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After a rabbi discovered in 2004 that New York City's tap water contains tiny crustaceans called copepods, the city's tap water is no longer considered kosher.
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By changing its colour and shape, the mimic octopus can impersonate more than 15 different species. It's not always obvious; one disguise was described by scientists as looking like ‘a furry turkey with human legs’.
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In general, people think you are both smarter and more likable than you think they think.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. ALDOUS HUXLEY
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There’s a village in Montenegro that holds both the World Championships of Laziness (lying on a mattress for the longest time), and a slow bicycle race where the winner is the last to finish.
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If all the Birds Eye waffles sold in a year were stacked up, they would be 474 times higher than Mount Everest.
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“Pasta con le sarde a mare” is a Sicilian dish consisting of pasta with no sardines in it - literally “pasta with sardines [that are] in the sea”
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The word ‘rhubarb’ comes from two Greek words ‘rheon’ and ‘barbaron’. ‘Barbaron’ means ‘foreign’, and ‘rheon’ means ‘rhubarb’, so ‘rhubarb’ is a ‘foreign rhubarb’.
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A study has shown that birds that live in colder places have smaller beaks. McGill University’s blog published an article about the study with the headline ‘Peckers Get Smaller Where It Gets Colder’.
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It is possible to be literally allergic to the cold.
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In September, a bar-tailed godwit flew 8,100 miles for 239 hours without rest from Alaska to New Zealand and set the world record for the longest continual flight by any land bird by distance. [📷: Onioram CC by SA 4.0]
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves