551
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During WWII, a Great Dane named Juliana was awarded a medal by Blue Cross for her heroism in disarming a German incendiary device.
She urinated on the bomb.
552
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Word of the day: APOPHENIA, n. the tendency to see patterns in unrelated things (apo- ‘from’ + phainein ‘to show’).
553
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In Microsoft’s internal documentation, the digital Office assistant Clippy was referred to as ‘tfc’. To anyone who asked, it was ‘the friendly character’, but it actually stood for ‘the fucking clown’.
554
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In his dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined ‘rant’ as ‘a high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought’.
555
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Word of the day: PRECRASTINATION - doing something too quickly or too early to get it out of the way
556
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In the thirteenth century, Cistercian monks developed a numeral system that allowed them to write any number between 1 and 9999 with a single glyph.
(Images: Meteoorkip and Chunes33; CC BY-SA.)
557
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Most kangaroos are left-handed.
558
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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.
559
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Word of the day: SMYSTER (19th century Scots) - to smile to yourself while daydreaming
560
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The Michelin of Michelin starred restaurants is the same Michelin that makes tyres.
They started producing the guide - and reviewing restaurants - in order to encourage people to drive more.
561
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The word ‘Nationalsozialist’ was shortened by Hitler’s opponents to ‘Nazi’, partly because ‘Natzi’ or ‘Nazi’ was a short form of the name ‘Ignatz’ (Ignatius) and had already been used in regional slang to describe a foolish or clumsy person.
562
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In 1895 Marvin R. Clark wrote a translation of cat-speak called ‘Pussy and Her Language’.
563
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Although English is the most predominant language in New Zealand, it is not an official language of the country. The two official languages are Maori and New Zealand Sign Language.
564
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In the 1950s, the French government’s pro-sobriety campaign featured posters saying ‘No More Than a Litre of Wine a Day’.
565
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In general, people think you are both smarter and more likable than you think they think.
566
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A 100-year-old tree absorbs 4.2 tonnes of CO2. Over the course of its life, a great whale on average captures 33 tonnes of CO2.
567
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A popular textbook on statistical mechanics begins as follows:
568
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According to a recent Russian law, it’s only ‘champagne’ if it is produced in Russia. Otherwise — and even if it comes from the Champagne region of France — it’s just ‘sparkling wine’.
569
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If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.
EMERSON M. PUGH
570
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In 1992, St. Liborius Church in St. Louis, Missouri closed due to lack of parishioners.
It is now an indoor skatepark.
(Image: Sk8 Liborious; image used with permission.)
571
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Bhartṛhari’s Paradox asks: if something is unnameable, but you’ve named it ‘unnameable’, can an unnameable thing exist?
572
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Most of the bacteria found during a recent study of the microbiome of the London Underground were previously unknown to science.
573
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Until the founding of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, vegetarians were usually known as Pythagoreans.
574
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Antarctica has just had its coldest winter on record. Between April and September the average temperature was - 61 degrees Celsius.
575
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"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god... [if] you provide [cats] with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods." CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves