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"We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world." NEIL GAIMAN
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Salvador Dalí bought a castle for his wife. He would only visit if she sent him written permission.
503
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In New Zealand, the Christchurch city council has declined to renew the contract of their official city wizard.
504
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Word of the day: RAGGABRASH - someone who is absolutely, completely disorganised
505
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You can in fact be WHELMED.
The term predates OVERWHELMED, and means overcome, engulfed, or submerged.
506
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To ‘poon’ means to put something under the leg of a table to stop it wobbling.
507
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HYPNIC JERK - the sensation that jolts you awake as you’re about to nod off.
508
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Under evolutionary pressure from poaching, more and more elephants in Mozambique are born without tusks.
509
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In 2016, a Florida man threw an alligator through a restaurant's drive-through window.
He was charged with "assault with a deadly weapon".
510
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British shoe sizes are measured in barleycorns, a unit based on the length of a grain of barley (an inch was ‘3 barly cornes dry and rounde’).
Image: Alexander Klepnev
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Some ancient insects have been found preserved in amber halfway through a fart. [Image: G. Poinar]
512
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Bolivia has a 5,000 man strong navy. What Bolivia does not have is a coastline.
513
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At room temperature, the inside of a cucumber can be up to 20 degrees cooler than the outside air.
514
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There’s a soil bacterium that can ingest chemically unstable gold molecules, transform them into stable metal and excrete miniature pure gold nuggets.
515
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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.
516
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Britons spend more than twice as much on bird food than the rest of Europe combined. As a result our great tits are developing longer beaks.
517
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She's one of the greatest athletes of all time, and you've probably never heard of her.
518
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The author of "Jaws" regrets writing the book. He feels it made people too afraid of sharks; he spent much of the rest of his life as an activist for shark conservation.
(Image: Tambako The Jaguar; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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‘Soy sauce’ is a tautology. The word ‘soy’ comes from the Japanese ‘shōyu’ meaning ‘soy sauce’.
520
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The sponge crab makes itself a hat from poisonous sponges.
The crab spends up to five hours shaping their new hat juuuuust right.
(Image: Seascapeza; CC BY-SA.)
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During WWII, Max von Laue and James Franck’s Nobel prize medals were dissolved in acid and sat on a shelf in a Danish lab to hide them from the Nazis. Later the gold was recovered and the medals were recast.
522
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During World War 1, the Germans suspended sausage making in order to increase the supply of cows’ intestines used to line the hydrogen chambers in zeppelins. A single zeppelin required the innards of quarter of a million cows.
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An early form of the ‘round robin’ letter was used by British Navy sailors petitioning their commanding officers– signatures were arranged in a circle around the demands to prevent the ring-leader being identified.
Image: The National Archives
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Word of the day: DETERIORISM - the belief that the worst is yet to come
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Due to early bacteria, it's possible that 650 million years ago the oceans were pink.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves