526
@qikipedia
Countries are more likely to go to war when their national football team is doing well.
527
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It is possible to be literally allergic to the cold.
528
@qikipedia
Word of the day: ESQUISSE - a first, rough sketch of an idea that you will flesh out later
529
@qikipedia
If your heart starts beating faster, the heart of your dog will start beating faster too. The longer you have had the dog, the stronger this effect will be.
530
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Word of the Day: MISOKINESIA — having strong negative feelings, thoughts, or physical reactions when seeing other people fidgeting or engaging in small repetitive movements like leg shaking or finger tapping.
531
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The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm. JOHN D. MACDONALD
532
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In World War II New Zealand designed and built a tank after studying a picture of one on an American postcard. It was a tractor covered in corrugated iron, with a mattress where the gunner was supposed to lie. It never made it to combat.
533
@qikipedia
Before reluctantly deciding on the word ‘viewer’, the 1935 BBC Sub-Committee on Words considered many terms for their "users of television apparatus", including auralooker, glancer, looker-in, seer, sighter, teleobservist, viewer-in, visionnaire, vizzior, and witnesser.
535
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Introverted Chinese millennials have been known to call themselves jingfen, or ‘spiritually Finnish’.
536
@qikipedia
In 2013, an Ohio man was confirmed as legally dead, despite him appearing in court to overturn the decision.
537
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Naming a cow can increase the milk yield by 500 pints a year.
Image: Martin Vorel (CC0)
538
@qikipedia
Assuming each vampire feeds once a month, it would take two and a half years years for the whole human population to become vampires.
539
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Deadly nightshade aka ‘Belladonna’ (beautiful lady) is so named because its juice was used as an eyedrop in Renaissance Italy to make a woman’s pupils dilate seductively.
Image: Flobbadob, CC-BY-SA 4.0
540
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Your BOUDOIR was originally your room for sulking.
541
@qikipedia
Michelangelo hated painting the Sistine Chapel so much he wrote a poem about it.
It begins:
"I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison)..."
542
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Word of the day: GLÉO-DREÁM (Old English) - the joy brought by listening to music
543
@qikipedia
In general, your favourite songs are the songs you were listening to when you were 13.
544
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Consuming memes helps people deal with pandemic-related stress.
545
@qikipedia
You likely overestimate how interesting you are to talk to, but underestimate how good you are at dancing.
546
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"A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman." TERRY PRATCHETT
547
@qikipedia
The word "Arctic" is from the Greek for bear, "Arctos", making it the "bear-place".
The Antarctic is the anti-Arctic, the "no-bears-place".
548
@qikipedia
Being infected with a parasite from cat poop makes you more likely to start a company.
549
@qikipedia
During her father's presidency (1901-1909), Alice Roosevelt smoked cigarettes in public, rode in cars with men, and kept a pet snake.
When Theodore Roosevelt was asked about her, his reply was: "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice... I cannot possibly do both."
550
@qikipedia
According to a 1985 paper, everything takes 2.71 times as long as you think it will.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves