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There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. KURT VONNEGUT
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When they sleep in a flock, some birds form a row. Those in the middle sleep with both hemispheres of the brain at the same time, and those at the edges go into deep sleep with only one hemisphere each — leaving one’s right eye and another’s left eye to watch out for predators.
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Word of the day: BELLY-SLAVE (16th century) - someone always thinking about their next meal
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Wikipedia has a list of ‘Lamest Edit Wars’ that includes such disputes as ‘Is Limp Bizkit a nu metal/rapcore or rapcore/nu metal band?’, ‘Is it Star Trek into or Into Darkness?’, and ‘Should we say that economist Guy Standing is sitting in his photo?’. bit.ly/39qXtcu
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Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? - HENRY WARD BEECHER
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Last month, a girl in Rhode Island left cookies out for Santa, found them half-eaten, and sent a sample of the food to the authorities for a DNA test. They said they were able to find a partial match ‘to a 1947 case centered around 34th Street in New York City’.
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In 2007, a Bosnian couple cheated on each other - with each other.
They had spent time in a chat room bonding about their marital woes. When they met in person, they found out the person they had been complaining to was their spouse.
They got divorced.
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British people spend about 200 million pounds a year feeding birds.
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In the 18th century slang, the word ‘wap’ meant ‘sex’.
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Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless. BILL WATTERSON
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The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachian Mountains in the USA, and the Atlas Mountains in North Africa were once all part of the same mountain range.
(Image: Pedro Correia & J. Brendan Murphy; CC BY.)
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It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
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Word of the Day: GUBU - acronym coined in Ireland in 1982 to describe political scandals, standing for Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented.
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For 3 months in 1530, Michelangelo was in hiding from the pope in a room under the Medici Chapel of the Basilica di San Lorenzo. He covered the walls in graffiti which were not discovered until 1976.
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The chocolatey filling between the wafers in a KitKat is made out of recycled KitKats.
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By 2100, dead Facebook users will outnumber the living.
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"There's no problem so awful that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse!" BILL WATTERSON
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Word of the day: NEMOPHILIOUS - fond of frequenting the woods
(Image: Matthew Dillon; CC BY.)
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In Catalonia, there is a Christmas tradition of ‘feeding’ a hollowed-out log for several days and then beating it until it ‘defecates’ presents. The log is called ‘Caga Tió’, literally ‘Shit Log’.
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There is an object hurtling through the Milky Way known as The Accident – it is neither star nor planet, but a very old, cold brown dwarf.
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Word of the Day: TORTITUDE — a difficult character that tortoiseshell cats are rumoured to have. (📷: James Petts.)
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PLEONASM is the term for redundant expressions - like "ATM machine", "hot water heater", or "free gift".
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CYMROPHOBIA is fear of the Welsh.
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Although English is listed as an official language in almost a third of the countries in the world, the UK isn’t one of them.
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In Maori myths, trickster Maui tried to make people immortal by entering the vagina of the goddess of death and leaving through her mouth when she slept. His friends laughed at him and woke up the goddess, who crushed him with vaginal teeth, and thus brought mortality to people.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves