1001
@qikipedia
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works...
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." DOUGLAS ADAMS
1002
@qikipedia
Word of the day: PANPHOBIA - irrational fear of absolutely everything
1003
@qikipedia
London foxes appear to be domesticating themselves.
1004
@qikipedia
Medieval surgeons used spider webs to close wounds.
1005
@qikipedia
On his deathbed, surgeon Joseph Henry Green was checking his pulse, and his last word was ‘Stopped’.
1006
@qikipedia
When divorcing Aaron Burr, his second wife hired Alexander Hamilton Jr. as her divorce attorney.
1007
@qikipedia
"Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear." OSCAR WILDE
1008
@qikipedia
Word of the day: ANTISOCORDIST - an opponent of people behaving stupidly
1009
@qikipedia
At the 1928 Olympics, rower Henry Pearce stopped mid-race to let a family of ducks safely cross his lane.
He still won the heat.
1010
@qikipedia
In 1908, the Russian shooting team arrived the Olympics twelve days late.
The Russian team had made sure to arrive a few days before the event was scheduled, but Russia still used the Julian calendar. The UK had switched to the Gregorian calendar 150 years earlier.
1011
@qikipedia
In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
TERRY PRATCHETT
(Image: Kotofeij K. Bajun)
1012
@qikipedia
Two-thirds of the universe’s predicted quantity of lithium is missing and no-one knows where it is. This is known as the ‘cosmological lithium problem’.
(Image: W. Oelen)
1013
@qikipedia
All the universe’s hydrogen and most of its helium were produced in the first 20 minutes after the Big Bang.
1014
@qikipedia
In 1984, Tim Macartney-Snape climbed Everest, but his mate Michael Dillon said 'you've only done the top part, technically', so he went back and started from sea level to prove a point.
1015
@qikipedia
The Dutch for drinking beer with a spirit chaser is ‘kopstoot’, meaning ‘head butt’.
1016
@qikipedia
The frequency of a pig’s grunts reveal its personality.
1017
@qikipedia
Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He had not finished colouring the second one. GORE VIDAL
1018
@qikipedia
In 1959, a Harvard researcher tried to teach three octopuses — Albert, Bertram and Charles — to pull a lever to get food. Albert and Bertram were cooperative, but Charles constantly squirted the researcher with water and prematurely terminated the study by breaking the lever.
1019
@qikipedia
The suggested terms for a person who has received two doses of a coronavirus vaccine include ‘recidivac’, ‘boxer’ (=one who has two jabs), ‘doppio’ (=a double espresso shot), ‘binoculated’, and ‘a complete prick’. (h/t @dontattempt)
1020
@qikipedia
The pobblebonk frog is so called because when it croaks it sounds like it’s saying the word ‘pobblebonk’ (Image: Will Brown)
1021
@qikipedia
The 1900 Paris Olympics featured an underwater swimming event in the Seine: The contestants got a point for every second spent underwater and two points for every metre they swam underwater. The event was discontinued due to ‘the lack of spectator appeal’.
1022
@qikipedia
In 1802, US businessman Timothy Dexter wrote a book, ‘A Pickle for the Knowing Ones’, containing no punctuation marks. When readers complained, he released a second edition with 11 lines of punctuation at the end for readers to distribute as they saw fit.
1023
@qikipedia
WEBSITE OF THE DAY: This one lets you calculate journey times and costs of travel in the Roman Empire orbis.stanford.edu (h/t @jessicamdalt)
1024
@qikipedia
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? - HENRY WARD BEECHER
1025
@qikipedia
The winner of the first modern Olympic Marathon stopped at a tavern mid-race for a glass of wine.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves