976
@qikipedia
Cat owners are sometimes called "Dosenöffner" - can openers - in German.
977
@qikipedia
In gay slang, a "friend of Dorothy" is a gay man.
During the 1980s, the US military conducted a massive investigation to find out who Dorothy was.
978
@qikipedia
Living amongst dying houseplants makes you more stressed than having none at all.
979
@qikipedia
Word of the day: THINKO - a careless error in thinking, a mental typo
980
@qikipedia
Kanbari nyūdō is a Japanese spirit that lurks around toilets on New Year’s Eve and tries to lick you.
981
@qikipedia
Roughly once a year, in the Montenegrin village of Dinoša, water gushes naturally from the trunk of a mulberry tree. (Image: Argus News CC BY-SA 4.0)
982
@qikipedia
Word of the Day: INFRACANINOPHILE — someone who loves underdogs.
983
@qikipedia
In 1879, ‘Punch’ predicted video calls: In this cartoon, parents ‘set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire’.
984
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According to a 1655 book, a Silesian village was once terrorised by an incredibly smelly vampire, who vomited fire, threw dung at people, came into houses at night and made sounds like a hog. The villagers believed it was the spirit of a deceased man called Johannes Cuntius.
985
@qikipedia
Because your vocal folds need a humid environment to be elastic enough to produce certain sounds correctly, tonal languages — like Mandarin Chinese — are much more common in humid regions of Earth.
986
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In 2013, the Ig Nobel Probability Prize went to a group of researchers who discovered that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and that once a cow stands up, you can’t predict how soon that cow will lie down again. (@improbresearch)
987
@qikipedia
After the French Revolution, saints' days were replaced with days honoring important items in rural French life.
June 21 was the day to honor the onion.
988
@qikipedia
The average traffic speed in modern-day Central London is about the same speed as it was when the streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages.
989
@qikipedia
One third of US divorce filings in 2011 contained the word "Facebook".
990
@qikipedia
"There is no cause for concern. We're way past that now. If you're not at least feeling mild terror then you haven't been paying attention." JOSEPH FINK and JEFFREY CRANOR
991
@qikipedia
Word of the day: FLÂNEUR - a person who strolls through the city, people-watching
992
@qikipedia
Approximately 99% of rooms contain a spider.
993
@qikipedia
An APATHEIST doesn't care if God exists or not.
The word is a portmanteau of "apathy" and "theism".
994
@qikipedia
BEDTIME PROCRASTINATION is the psychological phenomenon when a person stays up too late in order to have feel like they have some time to themselves.
995
@qikipedia
Word of the Day: CUÑADISMO (Spanish slang) — literally: ‘brother-in-law-ism’; speaking on topics you know little about as if you were an expert and smarter than everyone else.
996
@qikipedia
In 1997, a container ship ran aground off the Isles of Scilly, and a container carrying a million plastic bags drifted ashore. Its doors burst open, and the foreshore became awash with the bags bearing the words ‘Help protect the environment’.
997
@qikipedia
Titivillus, ‘the patron demon of scribes’, was said to be sent by the devil to tempt monks into making errors in their manuscripts. For fifty years, the Oxford English Dictionary listed an incorrect page reference for a footnote on the earliest mention of Titivillus.
998
@qikipedia
The earliest recorded use of the term ‘Wild West’, to mean the American frontier, was by Charlotte Brontë.
999
@qikipedia
In Ancient Greece, there was at least one man named Shitty, one man named Milk-Scum, and one man named Named.
1000
@qikipedia
The pumpkin toadlet is so small that its vestibular system doesn't function well.
This means it is very bad at jumping.
(Video from Essner et al 2022; used with permission.)
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves