1026
@qikipedia
Word of the Day: FIMBLE-FAMBLE — a weak excuse.
1027
@qikipedia
Silver medalists, take heart: on average, athletes that win silver medals at the Olympics live longer than their gold medal-winning counterparts.
1028
@qikipedia
People spend 46.9% of the day daydreaming.
1029
@qikipedia
For Christmas 1936, Salvador Dalí sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed-wire strings. Harpo sent back a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.
1030
@qikipedia
Hoping for more Olympic drama? The 1924 Olympic fencing competition featured two real duels over scoring disputes.
1031
@qikipedia
The ideal time to make a joke about something horrible is 36 days later.
1032
@qikipedia
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has specifically ruled that Jeff Bezos is not an astronaut.
1033
@qikipedia
"If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there." MARK TWAIN
1034
@qikipedia
At the 1936 Summer Olympics, Japanese pole vaulters Sueo Oe and Shuhei Nishida tied.
Rather than accepting a tie break, the two cut their medals in half and spliced them together to make a "friendship medal".
1035
@qikipedia
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lithuania could not afford to send its basketball team to the 1992 Olympics.
The Grateful Dead offered to sponsor the team if they played in tie-dyed uniforms. They wore these shirts on the podium when taking home bronze.
🖼️: Greg Speirs.
1036
@qikipedia
Many of the doves released at the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening ceremony were accidentally roasted alive when the Olympic flame was lit.
1037
@qikipedia
‘Jus de chaussette’ is a French phrase for disgusting coffee that literally means ‘sock juice’.
1038
@qikipedia
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
1039
@qikipedia
Charles Dickens wrote to a friend that his annoying house guest Hans Christian Andersen ‘speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.’
1040
@qikipedia
Word of the Day: CLINCHPOOP — someone lacking in ‘gentlemanly breeding’, a boor.
1041
@qikipedia
If all the Birds Eye waffles sold in a year were stacked up, they would be 474 times higher than Mount Everest.
1042
@qikipedia
Dogs will ignore their owners if they know they are lying.
1043
@qikipedia
Pierre de Courbertin's original plan was to add a new Olympic ring for each completed Olympiad. If he’d had his way, the Olympic symbol would now feature 28 rings.
1044
@qikipedia
The custom of relaying the Olympic torch has no ancient precedent: it was invented as a stunt for the Berlin Games in 1936.
1045
@qikipedia
SITE OF THE DAY: The Martin Luther Insult Generator, ergofabulous.org/luther/
1046
@qikipedia
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’.
1047
@qikipedia
At around age 23, the average person falls off what the researcher Jennifer Aaker calls ‘the humour cliff’: we start to laugh and smile less and less. The average 4-year-old laughs and smiles 300 times a day, the average 40-year-old — 300 times every 75 days.
1048
@qikipedia
Speaking about the parrot’s ability to mimic human speech, Aristotle wrote that the bird ‘becomes even more outrageous after drinking wine’.
1049
@qikipedia
During their concerts in 2004, Muse’s Matthew Bellamy destroyed 140 guitars and set a Guinness World Record for the most guitars smashed on tour.
1050
@qikipedia
Streaming a movie on a gaming console can use 45 times more power than a normal streaming device - gaming consoles aren’t good at using the minimum required energy for the task at hand.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves