The Final Countdown

It wasn't supposed to be like this. I had planned a parade complete with souvenir programme, a payload of digital fireworks and had even hired a few talking heads to digest the year in fact. Instead, the year is drawing to a close and I don't even have time to cast a casual eye over my first full year of fact-finding. Instead, I've been scrabbling for titbits inside crackers and under the tree, as the festive season finally rolled around. My knees are weak, my eyes are heavy - but I'm on the home straight. Here's the final fact burst of 2008:

Barmy health-conscious kids' TV show Lazy Town is made in Iceland.

23% of Hawaiians are vegetarian.

My new boss doesn't believe in the institution of marriage.

Sugar doesn't make children hyperactive (unless it's mixed with amphetamines - just a disclaimer)

Mert O'Donaghue was the first player to record a 147 break in a competitive snooker game. He is also famous for nothing else.

Breathing from your diaphragm helps you to project your VOICE.

Andy-Scott Lee, who I had previously thought famous only for losing on Pop Idol and being Lisa "Number 23? That's shit!" Scott-Lee's brother, was in forgotten boyband 3SL.

This bizarre selection took me to Christmas Eve, where the facts inevitably got briefly festive:

"All I Want For Christmas Is You" is Mariah Carey's biggest-selling single ever.

Conkers are horse chestnuts, rather than regular chestnuts.

That pretty much wraps up the festive section. Hardly 'A Christmas Carol', was it?

Cheesecake is a term for an attractive woman.

Rose wine is made by peeling the skin from red grapes (and then, y'know, mashing it up and that)

Armadillos (including the Holiday Armadillo) are the only animal other than humans to suffer from leprosy.

Menthe pastille is the same thing as Creme de Menthe (by this point, the drinks cabinet was emptying nicely)

Nestle is based in Croydon (they're welcome to each other).

And so to my final fact of this tumultuous year, which started with Geraint Jones waxing lyrical about time zones and has featured a mixed race man winning a U.S. election, the death of Woolworths, a prank phonecall suffering a ludicrously disproportionate backlash, and of course, the occasional mention of the total economic annihilation of the world as we know it.

The clothes shop Morgan, currently teetering on the brink of administration, is based in France.

See you in 2009.

Four Festive Facts

As my first year of learning draws to a close, Christmas is drawing into view - and I'm experiencing the driest days of the whole experience. If I'm not on ten-hour Christmas lunches, I'm in Woolworths, meandering through the post-apocalyptic chaos in search of cheap tinsel; if I'm not there, I'm wrapping presents with all the panache and dexterity of a panda in boxing gloves. There's barely time for breathing, let alone fact-finding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the nuggets I've found have had a festive feel, just like bloody everything at this time of year. (My worst experience this holiday season has been buying a 'festive' Krispy Kreme doughnut, whose sprinkles were red and green, instead of multi-coloured, and considerably fewer than average. Merry Christmas.)

We start with the festive singalong. Listening to the radio at Christmas feels a bit like being in the Soviet Union, hearing the same dozen broadly enthusiastic songs over and over again. Each of them has a different effect on the listener; Mariah Carey's works at first, but starts to grate before you've bought the turkey - Wizzard works the other way round. Slade is just plain annoying, whilst Wham is probably the most inoffensive. Fairytale of New York is an opinion-splitter (certainly in Knowledge Towers) but was always my family's favourite, particularly the line about "the boys from the NYPD choir... singing Galway Bay". Well, at the risk of breaking my dad's heart, I regret to inform you that there's no such thing as the NYPD choir. They made it up. Also, Dad, I've heard Shane McGowan likes a drink.

On to presents. Perhaps the most famous of all the rubbish gifts is the chunky, ill-fitting sweater. If you should be fortunate to receive one, preferably adorned with snowflakes and/or reindeer, find out if it was made from Merino wool. I'd always thought Merino was a place, possibly in Italy; it is in fact a breed of sheep. Does that make you feel better? I didn't think so.

Next up, it's Christmas past. Everyone knows that pagans held a midwinter festival that resembles Christmas, but something I didn't know before was that the Romans had their own version, the simply titled Saturnalia. Gifts were exchanged and no doubt all sorts of debauchery took place with Frankie Howerd looking on sheepishly. One of the key themes of Saturnalia was that slaves became masters for the festivities, and probably took liberties they would come to deeply regret in the ensuing 12 months. This tradition is still going strong today, when your office boss offers to buy the drinks at the team do, and then pretends they've left their wallet at home, and you all have to split it, which is really a piss-take when they earn 10 grand more than you and the entire bill is £30. Ahem.

And finally, after Christmas is all over (I'm aware this was hardly a comprehensive guide to Christmas, but I can only work with what I've got) you have January, with it's sleet, dark and credit card bills. Fear not, however, for Santa has had a word with the banks, and interest rates have been slashed - even going as low as "between 0 and 0.25%" in America. Which demonstrates that, when you're in a hole as big as they are, you can actually set interest rates at a variable rate. So spend away - it's like free money*

*Quest For Knowledge does not accept responsibility for debts incurred over the festive period. QFK would like to state that low interest rates are in no way like free money.

Quick Quiz

In the last three days I've learnt about where things come from - not babies, which everyone knows comes from birds, when bees try to have sex with them (as is my understanding), but - well, why should I have to spell it out for you? This blog is a two-way street you know. I'll give you the three things, and the three places they call home - and then you can work it out for yourselves, while I have a nicecuppatea.

A. 10% of the world's freshwater.
B. Minder's George Cole.
C. Sour-faced yet consistently accurate Strictly judge, Craig Revel-Horwood.

And the places:

1. Australia
2. Greenland
3. Tooting, South-West London


The answers are as follows:

A-2: The Greenland ice sheet contains 10% of the world's fresh water (i.e. not sea water). The day it melts away and you can walk across Greenland, you'll also be able to swim from London to Paris - its disappearance would raise worldwide sea levels by 7 metres.

B-3: George Cole comes from Tooting, joining other T-Town alumni Darren Bent, Matt Willis, the singer from Then Jericho, and of course my good (if not very famous) self.

C-1: Craig Revel-Horwood grew up in Australia. He gives his time there a 6/10.

Digging For Gold

One thing I have definitely learnt (the rest is becoming a blur) is that I get most of my facts from a variety of places - but not that big a variety. The source of the last fortnight's worth of gold demonstrates this aptly, squashed as it is into one blog entry, as life has unexpectedly and obtrusively called me repeatedly away from my computer - to the extent where I'm typing this up at work between tedious and awkward social engagements. I'm spending so much time having to talk to other people that I'm actually learning things from conversations - of the 13 facts I've picked up, an unprecedented 4 come from real, human conversations. They are:

Hull has it's own internet service provider - Karoo, who sponsor Hull City's home shirts.

Sprouts are sweeter if they were picked after the first frost of winter.

Epistaxis is the medical term for a nosebleed.

Doobies are spliffs made entirely from weed. And paper, obviously.


Returning to more familiar ground, I have purloined a steady four facts from my source of preference, the great global web of unimportant information that is the Internet. The internet is in fact a hive of credible and worthy information if you're prepared to dig deep enough. It will therefore not surprise you to learn that I obtained all of the facts below from either Wikipedia or BBC News.

The Care Bears were created for a range of greetings cards.

Milan and Boca Juniors have won more international club trophies than any other teams.

The first mention of a red carpet being rolled out for a VIP is in the Ancient Greek tale of Agamemnon. The motif was then revived in the early twentieth century.

111 was the original emergency number, but it was changed to 999 as 111 calls can be made accidentally - by telegraph wires knocking together.

When I'm not fact-checking or asleep, you'll usually find me searching desparately for something worth watching on TV. Occasionally (usually during QI) I may even learn something. When all else fails, I turn to the red button, the fat key to a world of trivia. In a nicely symmetrical way, these four facts have all entered my consciousness, in one way or another, via the goggle-box:

Michael McIntyre lives in Muswell Hill (may this fact also serve as a lesson to myself and others to write down all interesting facts you discover, lest you forget them and have to crib a barely notable piece of information from a repeat of Live at the Apollo).

The parliament on the Isle of Man is the oldest in the world.

Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote 'Itsy Witsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' for Timmy Mallett. O yeah!

'Chocolate leg' is the Dutch expression for a footballer's weaker foot (in my case the right. And the left)

So of the last 13 facts, only 1 has not come from the worlds of cyberspace, television, and talking. I'd love to say I found it carved in an Egyptian cave, or found and decoded an old WW2 code message, but the truth is, it was in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film too depressing to be watched at any time but which had to be returned to the DVD rental service:

W is the least used letter in the French alphabet.

In English, the least used is Z - with X and J just behind. I will now close this latest entry by attempting to redress this imbalance. Zjxzxjxjxjjjjjzzzzxxjjjxzzzzjjxjzzjxxjzjjjxjzjzjzjzjzzjzjzjzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzjjjjjjjjjjjzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzjjjjjjjjxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

That ought to do it...