That Ain't Right

< "Kowalski, why the hell were you illegally parked ?"

"I was handing out tickets..."

"In a strip club?"


The first month of questing comes to a close today, with a piece of red-hot info that made me tremble with the kind of silent-majority outrage I thought only cabbies and Mail readers experienced:


Traffic wardens are allowed to park in disabled parking bays, and also on double yellow lines.

This comes from a story in London Lite, everyone's third favourite London-based free paper, which explains how a Teddington-based traffic warden decided to try and boost their presumably rock-bottom local popularity by pulling up on double yellows outside a school in order to hand out tickets to parents, quite possibly whilst parking with their handbrake and flicking a lit fag into the playground, and also maybe even while being called Kowalski. A local resident by the frankly ludicrous name of Des Rock busted his punk ass to the council, but they claimed that wardens are in fact allowed to park on double yellow lines and in disabled spaces as long as they're giving out parking tickets, which loosely translates as "listen, my wardens get results, and they can park on yo' momma if it keeps the money comin' in".

So next time a stern, slightly patronising warden is looming over you, wanting to know what exactly was so important that you dared to park on a red route ten minutes too early, just remember that they can get away with parking in spaces designated for people who struggle to move around independently, so that they can charge other people for parking in places they shouldn't park, and see if you can withhold the howl of injustice that surges upward from your weary heart. But I'm going to close on a lighter note for the little people in this world, fighting against the oppressive squares who occasionally check that we're parking where we're supposed to. We had our car parked on our street for a whole week without a valid permit. How'd you like that, traffic pigs? Woo hah! Stick it to the Man!


P.S. We had a valid permit indoors. We'll pay any fine. Please don't send Kowalski round.

Brass Monkeys

< The original brass monkey

This is, if memory serves, the closest I have come to the midnight deadline, so it's going to be quick today. My fact came from work, from one of the lovely people I support in my role as a Tenant Support Officer. He informed me that the phrase "freezing brass monkeys", meaning very cold indeed, the phrase in full being approximately "cold enough to freeze the balls off brass monkeys". In a new, exciting chapter for Quest For Knowledge, I'm going to verify this fact as I write (time's tight this evening). So, what I learned was:

The phrase "freezing brass monkeys" is a naval term, referring to wintry conditions where icy seawater came on board the ship and froze around cannonballs, which when put in a pyramid next to the cannons, which were stored on brass trays, known as brass monkeys.



Technically the original phrase was "cold enough to freeze the balls of brass monkeys" but got changed over time to the slightly saltier, testicle-referencing phrase that builders still use within earshot of small children to this day. That's how he told it anyway. Let's see if he's right...



The answer, predictably enough is maybe. Wikipedia says not, plenty of other sites stick to the cannonball theory, although they generally claim that the contracting of the, ahem, balls caused them to fall, which would revert the phrase back to "cold enough to freeze the balls off brass monkeys". The main alternative explanation is, disappointingly, that it comes from actual brass monkeys (small trinkets popular all over Asia), particular the 'three wise monkeys', a trio of shiny chimps who represent see no evil, hear no evil and speak on evil by placing their hands over the relevant body parts.



Anyway, of the three key parts to his yarn (the tray being called a brass monkey, the cannonballs being frozen, and the actual wording of the phrase) only one looks like it's right, but personally I believe it - it seems logical enough. The same fella also, however, claimed that tea has more caffeine in it than coffee, which isn't true - don't worry I resisted the urge to correct him on the spot, though I may be forced to bring it up at a later date before my teeth start to itch.

A Third In Engineering & 10,000 Episodes of Countdown

< "Go to bed before I set the clown on you"

I watched an episode of Room 101 last night which featured the comedian Mark Steel, who further cemented his reputation as a bloody good bloke by attempting to consign Bono, Ben Elton and oppressive school teachers to oblivion. The first two made it in, and as Meat Loaf so rightly said, two out of three ain't bad. During his argument against teachers, he informed the nation that he had been expelled from school at 15, which I thought was a great example of how little academic success really means. Sadly, it was last night and I'd already done that stupid Lego thing. Coincidentally, I found the following out just moments ago, on a football website, no less:

Carol Vorderman left university with a third in Engineering. She achieved a third in every year of her degree course at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.



Now I know it's not quite the same as leaving school at 15, but I think it demonstrates that academic ability doesn't necessarily make you intelligent, nor does a lack of it make you less so. I don't think anyone could argue that Vorderman's not clever (though in recent years the Botox does seem to have stunted her arithmetical powers), yet she only achieved the same degree level as her former co-host, Richard Whiteley. Much as we all loved Whiteley (I particularly liked his attempt to make up a fresh quip about starting the letters game every single time) he certainly wasn't the sharpest tool in the box - that time when he got the numbers and nobody else did drew a reaction akin to the wonky-eyed kid catching the ball in a school cricket match. When Diamond Des Lynam rolled in and started suavely rolling out correct answers twice a week, it was all a bit embarrassing.



Anyway, Countdown is a game that tests your mental capacity to such a terrifying extent that only pensioners with a half-century of Telegraph crosswords and autistic 9-year-old boys seem capable of playing it properly, and two schmos without a 2:2 between them managed to make a success of it, so good for them. Vorderman earns £5 million a year from the show (all of it immediately blown on plastic surgery) while Whiteley, sadly now revealing the great Countdown Conundrum in the sky, has spent more minutes on our screens than anyone else in the history of television - with the notable exception of the girl on the Test Card who, though now mostly sidelined by 24-hour telly, has clocked up a staggering 70,000 hours. Incidentally, the lairy-looking little clown toy is called Bubbles and is still owned by the girl, Carole Hersee.

Bricks of Joy

< A Lego model I made, aged 8. Not really - mine was way better

The quest reached new levels of laziness today, as I didn't even have to search for anything on Google: a rather funky pixellated logo at the top informed me that the humble Lego brick was patented 50 years ago today, which admittedly sounds about right, and fails my criteria by not being constantly true, and not being all that interesting. This on the other hand, is:

Lego bricks made from January 28, 1958 are still compatible with those made now.

Lego bricks are the coolest toys in the world. I'm a Lego traditionalist though, and have to look away with misty eyes when I chance upon some garish new Lego set painted all the colours of the rainbow. The idea is they're supposed to be reusable: when they've got 'Hogwarts' written on them, it's hard to build a credible miniature hospital with them. You can't beat the original 2x4 brick: it's durability (they never break, although I did bend one once while sleepwalking into a bookcase, which was most concerting), it's versatility, it's total and unexplained lack of green bricks. the fact that nothing on Earth hurts more than stepping on a Lego brick without any shoes on.

I've been delving a little into the history of Lego, and have discovered that it was set up about 25 years before they patented Lego bricks (must've been a lean period), and also watched a frankly brilliant guide to how those pesky bricks are made. I've been forced to abandon my search for more information, however, as the endless corporate jargon on the Lego website about their 'vision and ethics' (vision - more bricks; ethics - bricks good!) is starting to sour my childhood memories of building things that vaguely resembled the new Scottish Parliament. The final straw is a claim on Wikipedia that asked children to not refer to Lego bricks as "Legos" but instead as "Lego bricks or toys" to "protect and preserve their brand". Basically to make sure that they can launch breakfast cereals, cars and computers (all, naturally, made out of Lego) at some point in the future. Besides, when have you ever heard anyone ever call them Legos? I bet any kids who ever made that faux pas are still finding bricks about their person to this day.

Bolters

< The Knack: "We're gonna slow things down now"

I got out of bed unfeasibly early this morning to watch the Australian Open men's tennis final, which pitched world No.3, and example of how good Andy Murray would be if he wasn't British, Serbian Novak Djokovic, against the unseeded and unheralded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the French world No.38 who dispatched Murray in the first round. As well as being a fairly entertaining match between two of the least glamorous names you'll find in any sport, it also taught me another new word, which applies to Tsonga and his shock run to the final:

A 'bolter' is a term applied to unseeded tennis players who reach the latter stages of the Australian Open tennis tournament.

This tournament has a history of unfancied players getting through to the latter stages; in recent years Marcos Baghdatis, Rainer Scheuttler, Thomas Johansson and other people you've never heard of have forced their way through to the final, with Johansson actually winning the trophy. It's an Australian tennis-related phrase, but technically would apply to any lowly player making a breakthrough to the latter stages of a knockout tournament. The greatest bolter of all has to be Goran Ivanisevic, who won Wimbledon in 2001 despite being about 40, having one change of kit and seeming to be on the brink of insanity. The moment he won is up there with It's A Wonderful Life in terms of embarrassing, unexpected tear jerking. Other honourable mentions include Millwall reaching the FA Cup Final a few years ago (I lived in Cardiff at the time and can still remember walking past rows of 4x4s that had ferried the Man Utd fans down, while Millwall fans arrived on what appeared to be freight trains) and cheeky churchgoer Shaun Murphy winning the World Snooker Championship (although surprisingly, he has proved to be quite good).

It's great that unknown players cause upsets often enough to have their own nickname; on this occasion Tsonga became another bolter that fell short, losing in four sets. One article I read claims that the Aussie Open bolters fall into 2 categories - those that go on to greater success, and those that never produce a run like it again. The writer makes an odd analogy to The Knack, the U.S. band who managed to come up with My Sharona, but never troubled the charts again. I wonder if when they play gigs now, whether they have to just play My Sharona 12 times in a row, and if they attempt to "play a new one" they get bottled out of the venue. Anyway, when the tennis was over, we went to buy walking shoes (it's always wild at Knowledge Towers) and My Sharona came on the radio. What does that mean? Should I become a professional tennis player, or start an AOR combo? Hard to know which would be more disastrous.

Gef The Talking Mongoose

- Gef: "Come on guys, where's your sense of humour?"

Went to a photo exhibition today called 'Seeing Is Believing', which purported to be a feast of supernatural imagery, but was instead mostly a load of old toot; the front part of it was photographs 'inspired' by the paranormal, which is really missing the point. The back part was better though - it featured lots of (annoyingly small) pictures from the archive of Harry Price, a 20th century 'psychical researcher' who went and investigated odd activity all over Britain, including the hauntings at Borley Rectory and the amusingly named Crawley Poltergeist. The trouble was that there was hardly any information on the places, or what Price found out while he was there, and there were a few things that I really needed to know more about, chiefly an image of Gef, a talking mongoose who lived with a family on the Isle of Man. That's right, a talking mongoose. On the Isle of Man.

Anyway, some rudimentary research has uncovered a few things about ol' Gef: he appeared in the home of the Irving family in 1931, and shortly after, or so they claim, began giving them sass-mouth. Gef began by aping James Irving's phrases, but soon found his own voice - he claimed to be from New Delhi, and liked to sing popular songs and 'joke around' with the Irvings. On one occasion (and I have seen this written in about four different articles) the little trickster 'took things too far' by pretending to be poisoned. You'd have thought he'd gone too far when he scurried into their living room and started singing 'Danny Boy', but apparently not. There are a few theories behind who this enigmatic mongoose really was: a poltergeist, a mongoose who couldn't in fact talk, or MADE UP (one of those is mine). But the fact I have learnt is this: Gef the talking mongoose is an example of a cryptid, and...

A cryptid is an animal that does not really exist.

That's a slightly loose definition - an animal can still be a cryptid if it is later proved to actually exist, or if it has a feature that does not exist in other members of its species (in Gef's case, his fine glossy coat... and his ability to speak English). Some other examples of cryptids include dragons, unicorns, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the beasts of Bodmin and Exmoor, and the okapi, a real animal which was thought until the early 1900s to not exist. A bit like the female brain then. Anyway, the Irvings got tired of having to listen to a cryptid creature doing stand up in their front room every night, and moved out in 1937. Gef is believed to have gone out in a blaze of glory a few years later, having been gunned down by a farmer who'd had to listen to a shrill rendition of 'In The Mood' one to many times. It appears he was knocking around in the States until recently - and was even accpting e-mails here. I sent Gef a request for one of his crazy tales of mongoose life, but the e-mail address doesn't work any more. Looks like our Gef, like the littlest Hobo, just keeps movin' on...

A Quantum of Questing

< Brosnan: "Oh boy"

I generally think I'm pretty good with words, so I was surprised to realise today that I didn't know what 'quantum' meant. It's a word you hear a fair bit - Quantum Leap, quantum physics, and the in-no-way-pretentious title of the new Bond film: Quantum of Solace. A BBC article politely enquired whether I knew what it actually meant, and to be honest, I didn't (it sounds a bit like a Googlewhack) and was happy enough not knowing, as being able to understand lame titles like Never Say Never Again and The World Is Not Enough only ever led to teeth-clenching annoyance - for me anyway. I'm not a Bond fan, I've tried, I just think they're rubbish films, but I do appreciate that there are differences in quality, and while I'm not sure who was the best Bond, I know who the worst was - stand up, Brosnan, you smug bronzed twat.

Brosnan brings the odour of cheese and cheap cologne wafting onto the screen whenever he pops up (see The Thomas Crown Affair) but some of his Bond films veer towards parody - the crap accents, the worse CGI and the unforgivable one-liners; I remember when he guffawed to poor Denise Richards in one of the films (they all merge into one really) that "I thought Christmas only came once a yuhr". Her character was called Christmas you see. And clearly, she'd just come. I could barely keep my popcorn down. Anyway, I was mildly excited about Daniel Craig stepping in as a new, slicker, subtler Bond in Casino Royale, but sadly, that was a bag of old cock too, with Bond moving from the sleazy to the deeply sinister - they upped the violence but didn't change Bond's reaction to it; thus I witnessed the blond Bond literally beat a hotel porter to death before coolly muttering something along the lines of "I didn't order room service" with a wry smile. Genuinely unsettling. The follow-up, which will doubtless lull me into believing it might be half-decent, before being as rotten as that hotel porter by the time the last film finally finished, is entitled 'Quantum of Solace'. And so the BBC website was asking in mocking times, what does quantum mean? Well, it means this:

The word 'quantum' means a quantity or amount, a specified portion, or anything that can be counted and measured. It is also used in physics to describe a unit of energy, and also the smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently.

The phrase 'Quantum of Solace' is derived from an Ian Fleming short story (not sure if the film is too), and apparently is equivalent to saying 'a crumb of comfort'. For example, "I went to see another dire James Bond film, and the only quantum of solace was that we went to Nando's afterwards". Interestingly, a 'quantum leap', as in the TV series, is actually the smallest movement possible, involving tiny particles moving tiny distances. For example, Pierce Brosnan becoming sexually aroused.

Student Moans

< Welcome to a world of failure and rejection, you poor fucks

My offering today is a bit different to usual because it didn't come from the internet, but instead an actual conversation with a real person! I know, it's wild, but it gets results. It's this:

My work colleague Julie studied English and Theology at University.

Tenuous I know, but I did learn it today, and it's of particular interest because I do the exact same job as her, and I studied English and Philosophy, which is pretty similar. I should point out that my job has nothing to do with either English literature or Philosophy - I work for a Housing Association. Another odd thing is that she said 'ENGLISH... and theology' as she didn't want to make it sound like the pointless degree it clearly was, whereas I've become accustomed to saying 'English and PHILOSOPHY', to make it sound even more pointless than it was, which was very pointless indeed. The reason for this is simple: the world of work (some would call it the real world) is not kind to the humanities graduate; even as a student, every summer would be spent toiling in dusty warehouses being ridiculed by the permanent members of staff, perhaps envious that I didn't have to spend the rest of my useful life working there. Any mention of being a student would lead to a hoot of derision, followed by "We've got a clever one 'ere Dave" or "What's the capital of France?" and then I'd have to pretend not to know, just so I could escape to my lunch break.

After I graduated, I started working as a care assistant, where I learnt to accentuate the negative about my studies. Noticing my tender age, poor people skills and all-round bad attitude, the other workers picked up that I had just graduated, and would ask what I studied. I told them, English and Philosophy. Their not unreasonable response was invariably "Why are you working here then?" to which the spoken answer would be "I fancied a challenge" or "I'm keeping my options open" rather than the real reason, "I am a failure as a human being". I found, however, that if I said I studied Philosophy and English, then people didn't ask why I worked there. What else was I going to do with a Philosophy degree? It may as well have been called English and Arsewiping. I'm still glad I chose Philosophy though, it was an interesting course and maybe I wouldn't have started this project if it hadn't renewed my desire to ponder the unimportant at great length. Sure, I could have done Medicine, and been on 60 grand a year by now, but... sorry, I've just been overcome by a sudden urge to study Medicine.

I've got to go anyway, I've got to stick a light chicken supper in the microwave, do some dusting and then head off to watch Avenged Sevenfold lay waste to Brixton Academy. Middle class metal!

4.5 Stone of Useless Flab & Gillian McKeith

- McKeith couldn't wait to get in from filming to polish off that plate of doughnuts



One thing I 'learnt' today from a baseless, wholly speculative headline in the Guardian was that fruit might not be all that good for you. I tried to skip over it, but was stopped in my tracks by an arty caption that claimed that drinking a smoothie is as bad as drinking ordinary Coke! A statement that ridiculous had to be investigated, and I was soon angrily reading the mitherings of some so-called expert, who claimed, perhaps not entirely incorrectly, that the sugars in fruit are released slowly, but when it's liquidised it's sugar content enters the bloodstream quicker, causing a rise in blood sugar similar to that obtained by gluggin' down a can of sweet fizz. Hence, smoothies are as bad for you as Coke. What said expert fails to bring into the equation is the relatively high level of nutritional goodness in fruit, compared to sugary coloured water, which to me appears to contain precious little in the way of goodness.

It's not even the inaccuracy of the statement that gets to me, really - it's the scaremongering tone of the whole thing. Fruit might not be good for you? It's fruit! What are we supposed to eat? Twigs? I'm currently (ahem) attempting to lose a little weight, and am eating balanced meals, made with less fattening ingredients than I was eating before, and I'm losing weight and not going hungry. Yet some people have gone so far beyond this that they're advising us to cut down on fruit (sorry, I really can't get over it). To be honest, anything encouraging nutritional awareness, whatever it's intentions, instantly brings to mind the sour-faced nutrition Nazi, Gillian McKeith, who I watched yesterday on TV, forcing women to show the nation their posteriors, in order to make a series of wanky voiceover puns about how fat their arses were, with a sinister tremble in their voice that suggests that she'd quite like all those fat fucks to be rounded up and shot. She just doesn't understand the concept of eating for pleasure, and going without having an arse like a shrivelled walnut as a compromise. On that You Are What You Eat programme she was forever stealing people's chips and replacing them with something she'd found in a swamp, and then couldn't understand why they started sobbing uncontrollably. The programme she swanned into last night involved a fat and a skinny person swapping diets; I've written in to ask if McKeith will take part in a special version with my good self, where I force feed her Krispy Kremes until she explodes.

Anyway, all this talk of healthy eating oppression and it's Machavellian overlord (even her voice makes me want to shove whole danish pastries into my mouth, and wash them down with butter) made me want to look into what my actual weight should be, according to the Body Mass Index (BMI), which tells you your ideal weight based on your height (pretty basic - do your age and gender not matter) - now I'm 5'11" and last time I looked, weigh 15st 11lb, which I knew was overweight but have now discovered is actually obese (I thank you). Anyway after a few calculations which, handily enough, looked a bit like actual work, I discovered:

My ideal weight, according to the BMI index, is approximately 11 stone. As of January 2007, I am 4.5 stone overweight.

Jesus. Must be all that fruit.

Money Down The Drain & The Channel Tunnel

You couldn't avoid the share scare stories today, with predicted crashes and whispers of another Black Monday popping up everywhere. It all feels a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and also like we've heard it all before. I wanted to explore the ins and outs of the stock market process in some detail, but to be honest, I don't understand it at all, or find it all that interesting, and the whole thing is pretty depressing to boot. So, to something completely different - the Channel Tunnel. Well, it brightens the mood, doesn't it? Come on, we built a tunnel to France! We can make those shares be worth a bit more money, surely? I started looking into the Channel Tunnel (not literally) when my colleague said it took him 3 hours to drive from Twickenham to Gillingham in Kent, a distance of 45 miles. Not bad for rush hour, I thought, and proceeded to look up where exactly Gillingham is, out of an uncontrollable need to look at maps, and a burning desire to avoid working.

As I gazed upon a Multimap representation of Kent, I noticed an A-road winding along the coast and out across the sea to Calais. After a couple of seconds of confusion, I realised it was in fact the rail tunnel coloured in wrong, but it made me wonder whether there ever was, or still is, a plan to build a road under the Channel. Well, it appears only I am stupid enough to think that it might work, but I did learn a few things to do with the tunnel, most interestingly this:

England has a land border with France; it lies in the middle of the Channel Tunnel, and is marked by a steel band around the circumference of the tunnel.

Also: there are three channel tunnels - two rail tunnels and a service tunnel; and the largest undersea cavern in the world is on the UK side of the tunnel(s), to allow trains to cross into the other tunnel when maintenance is being carried out, or if someone has assembled a large pile of cardboard boxes, in the tunnel ahead. If this is getting a bit Megastructures for you (it is the number 1 all-time Megastructure, but if it's a little technical for you...), there's fun to be had in the early ideas for a cross-channel connection. The first came in 1802, when it was suggested that a tunnel be built for horse-drawn carriages, lit by oil lamps, with a rest stop on a sandbank. Really. Other crackpot ideas include using said sandbank (the Varne Bank) to build a bridge over the channel, and laying a floating steel tube across the water (this is not just a Blue Peter idea - the Sydney Harbour Tunnel is an example of this kind of tunnel).

Anyway, nothing came of these proposals, for they were shit. In the end, the tunnel was completed in 1994, with the two service tunnels being drilled from each end meeting in 1991, a historic moment achieved by the most French and English sounding people in their respective nations, tunnel diggers Jerome Cozette and Graham Fagg. It's been going for thirteen years, but has never made any money, due to it's massive cost. It's parent company, Eurotunnel, are still in debt, and in the first ten years of the company's existence, it's shares lost 90% of their value. Oh god, not shares again! I'd started to forget. I earn £1500 a month and it's not gonna buy a loaf of bread. I'm going for a walk in the woods...

Do You Wanna Get High?

- 1 Canada Square: Size isn't everything

Today's entry was inspired by a notice I saw at my work encouraging our elderly residents to wander about getting in people's way in a variety of exciting locations; the Tate Modern (odds of hearing the phrase 'what a load of rubbish' during that day trip - pretty decent), Brighton Beach and The London Eye, which is promoted to sceptical seniors by claiming to offer the chance to 'get high' on the Eye, by viewing London from it's highest point. Hang on, I thought. The London Eye's the tallest structure in London? I was torn between Canary Wharf and that gangly bloke that works in the call centre, but thought it entirely possible, given the revelations of these first few weeks, that a giant ferris wheel may indeed be the biggest thing in this fair city. But it's not - it is indeed One Canada Square, otherwise known as the Canary Wharf building (the one with the triangle bit on top), which stands at 235m tall. The London Eye is pretty big (135m), and is the third biggest structure in the capital, but is in fact only #18 on the list of the biggest buildings and structures. Matey from Customer Services sadly didn't feature; technically he's an organism, but still only managed second in that list behind Peter Crouch.


I then started thinking about how few skyscrapers London actually has (a good thing, in my view) - good old Wikipedia claims that skyscraper building in London has been restricted for many years, in an attempt to protect the city-wide views of landmarks like the Tower of London, which is a fantastic-looking building, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which quite frankly always gives me the creeps as I once had a dream about looking up at it before being surrounded by zombies (or was that 28 Days Later? Whatever, knock it down, it makes me feel weird). So, when compared to other major cities, how does One Canada Square measure up as a tallest building? Well:


One Canada Square, the tallest building in London and indeed in the UK, is only the 190th tallest building in the world.



The list is largely dominated by Far East countries (the tallest of all is in Taiwan) and the U.S., although Dubai has a few (possibly fuelling it's giddy top-2 placement in the League of Wasteroos), and I'm strangely proud of the stout nature of our tallest building; this is a nation that repeatedly goes on pointless wars, has invaded numerous other countries and seems to constantly desire to be seen as the daddy of the entire world, yet we've never bothered trying to build enormous buildings, perhaps the architectural equivalent of popping a pair of socks down your pants. This will change in the near future as several new, shiny buildings will dwarf the Wharf (five taller buildings have already been approved), so it makes this fact even more valid that it's not constant. It's one worth revisiting to see if we can avoid the temptation within us all to cover up that creepy cathedral.

One more thing: the tallest accessible structure outside of London is the gleaming white pile of taxpayers' money that is Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth. I've seen it up close. It looks good. Just not £35 million good. Second, and technically the highest you can get outside London (Spinnaker, rather smartly for an observation tower, does not allow access to it's very summit) is Beetham Tower, a hotel/apartment complex in Manchester, with Blackpool Tower coming in 4th, and at 158 metres, trumping the London Eye even for the title of biggest fairground attraction in this glorious nation.

Not a Lot of People Know This

- Caine: "'70 not out'? You having a BLAHDY laugh?"

Today was the hardest yet in my attempt to learn something new every day. I spent an hour reading about urban legends in search of an interesting fact, only to discover that 99% of urban legends are made up, which really isn't much of a revelation. I also stumbled upon a website where a group of people are actually learning something new every day as well, which, rather than filling me with a sense of belonging, instead made me feel even more deflated. The first effort that I stumbled upon was that 'vending machines kill more people than sharks'.

Now I'm no academic, and most of my research is, rather shamefully, done via Google, but even the briefest delve into the subject showed me that there really is no information to back this claim up. I'm aware that I have probably already learnt a couple of things that are totally untrue, but that's part of the ongoing plan; the idea is that, as new information gets thin on the ground (which, to be fair, appears to already be happening) I will go back over what I've learned, and contact some 'experts' with the view to proving/disproving my learnings thus far. To be honest, I don't think that other lot are taking it all that seriously.

Anyway, following this disappointment I was left basically staring into the endless white nothingness of the Google search page, trying to think what I could possibly type that would bring a dazzling revelation before my eyes. I tried 'tell me something I don't know' but that led me into a maze of world-weary scientific articles and then attempted, um, 'not a lot of people know that'. Then I began to wonder. Did Michael Caine ever actually say that? It then occurred to me that Caine has a baffling number of other questionable quotes, which I have grouped thus: ones I think he said (at least approximately) - 'you're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!' and 'hold on lads, I've got an idea'; and ones I don't think he said - 'my name is Michael Caine' and 'stop throwing those bloody spears at me'.

Going on the theory that the majority of famous quotes appear to have never been said by the person they are attributed to, I decided that it probably wasn't true. And, lo and behold, I was right:

The phrase 'not a lot of people know that' was coined by Peter Sellers when he impersonated Michael Caine during an appearance on Parkinson.

From here on, the plot thickens somewhat. Now, my original question was whether Michael Caine said it, and the answer is... sort of. He did say 'not many people know that' in Educating Rita, but apparently as an in-joke; The Sun online (I feel dirty) claim that it features in Alfie as 'and not many people know this', but I have actually seen Alfie and don't remember it appearing (the only line I can remember: 'Ere, she's in beautiful condition').

In addition, I can remember buying a trivia book purportedly 'written' by Michael Caine, entitled 'Not Many People Know That', for 10p at a bring-and-buy sale. I remember thinking that on paper, this book was a winner, filled as it was with things that not a lot of people knew. However, I was dubious as to Caine's involvement, as the fact that he may have once said 'not a lot of people know that' in a film didn't really demonstrate expertees in unearthing little-known trivia. How wrong I was. The Sellers quote is based on the fact that Caine does indeed have a thirst for fact, and would often quote verbatim from the Guinness Book of Records. Whatever, he still didn't write that book. Michael Caine's other contributions to the world of literature include 'And Not Many People Know This Either!' (yes it's a spin-off) and a series of biographies, entitled 'What's It All About?', 'Raising Caine', '70 Not Out' and, er, 'Michael Caine: the Autobiography'. So in summary, Caine has had FOUR biographies, and not one of them is entitled either 'Not a Lot of People Know That' OR 'My Name is Michael Caine'. He needs to sack his ghost writer.

So, quite a web of intrigue around a single quote. The Sellers theory is by no means a certainty, but as of now it's the one I personally believe, as it is mentioned in the most places, and the quote is also attributed to Peter Sellers in the form of an answer phone message. As for whether he uttered those other Caineisms: 'doors' - yes; 'idea' - nearly; 'my name' - yes, although I can't find where, apart from in the Madness song, um, 'Michael Caine'; and finally 'spears' - nope. Now that's research. And one more thing to round off an entry so time-consuming and labyrinthine I feel like I might actually turn into Michael Caine myself:

Michael Caine's name isn't Michael Caine.

Vinland

- Columbus: Did this man give you syphilis?

Question: Who was the first European to discover the Americas? Christopher Columbus? Afraid not. John Cabot? Do me a favour. Today I have found out an astonishing fact, it's worldview-altering effects bettered only by my earlier discovery that the fat one from Blue has OCD. The answer is, glibly glossing over debates over the definition of what is and isn't European: The Vikings! That's right:

The Vikings sailed to and settled in North America.

I came across this information while 'researching' an entirely different discovery: that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe. As this article demonstrates, however, this is an argument about as watertight as a Kevin Keegan back four. It basically speculates that syphilis probably came from the New World (i.e. places that have been inhabited for millennia but that we had only just started indiscriminately pillaging) and that Chris Columbus returned to Italy from the Caribbean at around the same time that syphilis gripped the city of Naples (Naples is always gripped by something, it seems), suggesting that ol' Chris had in fact been on a very different kind of voyage. Anyway, the train of thought is that syphilis might have come from the New World, and Columbus went there, so it's all his fault. As the academic in the article astutely claims, 'it's a grainy photograph'. As said image apparently concerns the origins of STDs, let's keep it that way.

Anyway, it was while I was browsing a few other Columbo-facts (incuding that the nation of Colombia is named after him [should've worked that out before], that he never set foot in the USA, and that Latin Americans are getting a bit tired of having to celebrate some bloke from Genoa who pretty much destroyed their indigenous way of life) that I discovered that he was among the first Europeans to reach the Americas, after the Vikings. Wait a minute. Vikings? I thought all they did was invade Gateshead, drink mead and write Beowulf. But no, they did indeed settle permanently in Greenland, as well as having settlements on the Eastern Seaboard, generally thought to be either in New England or Newfoundland, Canada.

The historical name for the Viking community is Vinland, thought to mean either: 1. wine-land (bit obvious), 2. a misspelling of Finland (bit tenuous) or 3. pasture-land (third time lucky, eh historians). If you wish to further your studies of Vinland, land of wine and air guitar, here is a quite rubbish Viking map (what staggers me is the enormous difference in accuracy between Europe and North America). Vinland has also been given a natty green flag, which suggests that the Vikings may have been partial to a cream tea or two. And finally - the Vinland flag was devised not by Viking historians, but instead (wait for it) the rock band Type O Negative. You couldn't make it up.

The League of Wasteroos

I’ll be honest, it’s a proper rush job today, I’m using the last dregs of the working week to give you a fresh dose of fact, as after this I’m journeying into Central London, and may be too full of meat and Pepsi to make it back to Knowledge Towers by midnight. Anyway today I did a geography quiz that I found in the Independent, and can smugly report that I learnt precious little from it – my nerdy knowledge of world facts knows no bounds. However there was one current bit of info that’s new to me, and it is as follows:

The United Arab Emirates is the world’s biggest producer of carbon emissions per capita.

Now a very brief trawl through the internet has failed to confirm this, with Wikipedia pushing the millionaire’s playground, with it’s in-no-way wasteful artificial golf courses and boat-shaped hotels into a lowly second, instead offering up Qatar as the biggest wasteroos. This list is pretty subjective though, with the mega-polluting, over-developed meganations of Aruba, Luxembourg and Trinidad & Tobago also appearing in the Top Ten. Judging things per capita (i.e. divided by the total population) is not really a fair reflection; looking at the total emissions list sees big bad China, despite protestations from the West, continuing to pump enough filth into the air to take second place on the list. The number one? America. Maybe that’s why China ain’t listening…

The Most Depressing Place on Earth & Noel Edmonds' Wedding

- Edmonds: Wonder if 'wonderful Mary' got a 'quarter-mill' out of him...

It was a weird day in the news today; the big story is of course the plane from Beijing tumbling out of the sky and skidding across Heathrow Airport, fortunately and incredibly without anyone getting seriously hurt. This is weird because here at Knowledge Towers we were planning a holiday, and opted to go up to Scotland rather than get on a plane, but as I work under the Heathrow flightpath I see a lot of planes coming in to land, and thought just yesterday that avoiding planes for a. ecological reasons or b. fear was pretty pointless; these planes come in at about 3 a minute so not getting on one would, regrettably, be a drop syphoned from the carbon ocean. Also, the way they glide serenely over suburban London makes you wonder how you could ever worry about them not making it down, I thought to myself, and 24 hours later, another one made it down in a manner of speaking, but I say if the wheels fall off, it's a crash. So that's a bit... weird.

The other piece of news was also remarkable, in that it was perhaps the most wondrous thing I've ever heard; Robbie Williams' last album sold so badly that unwanted copies are being sent to China, to be melted down... and used to make roads! Oh how I longed for this day etc. But anyway, while I may have given a contrary impression in these first two paragraphs, I don't want to just keep recycling the news. The Quest for Knowledge involves digging a little deeper, my friend, and today I stopped at nothing; I bought the Daily Mirror (38p - knowledge don't come cheap), saw they were giving away a DVD in Somerfield, got off the bus TWO STOPS further than normal, and picked up a copy of 'Events that Shook the World - Chernobyl'.

Admittedly, I haven't bothered to watch it yet, but it did come with a souvenir front page from the day the story broke, which is chiefly noteable for two smaller features - firstly Noel Edmonds, looking 'slightly different' and telling all and sundry 'Why I'm Marrying Wonderful Helen' - disappointly, I've discovered this marriage lasted all the way to 2004 - and secondly, a picture of Cliff Thorburn, which is a bit like having Rick Astley on the front page, so loudly does it scream 'eighties' - honestly, when was the last time a snooker player was on the front cover of a paper? Anyway, on the back of the page there's a nifty fact sheet all about the Chernobyl disaster filled with unbelievable stuff, in particular this piece of information, which certainly curtailed my chuckling over Edmonds smouldering away on the other side:

The reactors that were not destroyed in the Chernobyl disaster (namely Reactors 1, 2 and 3; 4 was the one that exploded) continued to operate until 2000.

The reason for this is down to power supply shortages in the Ukraine; basically, there was no other choice. When you consider that all four reactors have now been covered in concrete, and are having a special airtight shell built over them to prevent even a particle from escaping, it demonstrates how desperate the situation must have been for them to keep running it. The whole Chernobyl incident is fascinating to me, mainly because it's such a disastrous collision of problems from the past and worries we thought were in the future. The explosion happened on April 26 1986, but no-one in the West had any idea until Sweden starting picking up high radiation levels the next day; the USSR basically tried to hush up a nuclear explosion. They then had to pick up the pieces, trying to recover an impossibly dangerous situation using outmoded techniques and equipment (several firefighters died after being sent into the reactor without adequate protection) and the nearest town, Pripyat, was hurriedly evacuated, with families having to leave their possessions behind.

It's still empty today, and despite being oddly fascinating to me (it's on my 'to visit' list - just below Disneyland) is surely the most awful, depressing place on Earth. A lot more of Europe could stand as Pripyat does now, empty, silent and doused in lethal radiation, had a second, 'chain reaction' explosion occurred at Chernobyl. The fact that the rescue operation managed to avert this disaster despite a total absence of modern technology, and in the process save Europe from a nuclear holocaust is a miracle even greater than a plane landing safely without any wheels.

Some Good News

Today I learnt about a common trend that runs through two fundamental areas in our society: employment and crime. The odd thing is that I read about it in two separate articles tucked inside a free paper. And here, I think, is the reason why:

Unemployment in the UK and crime in Greater London both dropped to record lows in January 2008; Overall crime in the London area fell to it's lowest level for nine years, whilst the number of people claiming unemployment benefits fell to it's lowest level for 32 years.

Not much else I want to say really; I could go into details, but the media don't often feel the need to expand on bad news, so I don't feel inclined to expand on good news. What annoys me is that this is not on the front page - the article on crime is on Page 6, below toot like Britney Spears buying a pregnancy test and Al-Qaeda trying to kill the prime minister (Ok, that is quite interesting, but ultimately fictional). The article about benefits claimants is in the 'briefs' section, which when you consider the Mail puts 'THEY'RE COMING FOR OUR JOBS' on the cover of their paper every fucking day, shows a pretty uneven playing field in British journalism. So I've picked out the good news from the lies and scaremongering, preserving it forever, so we can all see that for all the gloom and mistrust we're fed every day, things seem to be looking up. As for the housing market? Let's just leave it at the good news.

The Scottish Play

- Callow: If you're so cool, try saying 'Candyman' three times in the mirror...

I'm continuing my epic journey to reclaim enlightenment from the jaws of death tonight while I'm waiting for a cottage pie to cook. Since you ask, it's looking a bit watery. Anyway it's a quick jaunt tonight (ain't it always? no time for learnin' in this 9-to-5 game), relaying some information passed on to me by my good friend and fellow raconteur, Simon Callow, um, through the TV screen. It regards Macbeth, or as nobby thesps call it, 'The Scottish Play', due to it being unlucky to say it's name, because y'know, it's cursed and that. Anyway, Callow, still just about fighting a two-horse race with John Sessions for the biggest luvvie twat in the universe, nonchalantly dismissed any notion of Macfear, claiming instead that it got it's unlucky tag not from ghosts, untimely deaths or anything of that ilk, but this:

Macbeth is the shortest Shakespeare play, and was often used as a back-up if another production was unsuccessful or had to be replaced at short notice. As a result it was often under-rehearsed or performed by theatres under pressure, leading to a higher chance of mistakes being made with the lines, set etc.

The longest fact yet! Toot toot. Anyway a quick browse on the Bible of useless information (need I name names) informs me that Callow has struck open a rich vein of curse-doubting; other suggestions for Macbeth's bad rep include it being put on due to it's popularity at unsuccessful theatres, and inevitably being the last play ever shown there; and finally as it requires fewer actors than other Shakespeare plays, it is often kept as a reserve in case actors go walkabout. Kind of the same as what Simon said, but just thought I'd better expand on his original quote and add a bit of depth and detail, before bloody Sessions gets wind of it and brings out an audio book. Anyway, time to see if my dinner's dried itself out. Same time tomorrow.

Fear Facebook

I'm pushing close to the deadline tonight so I'll get straight on with it. I read a fascinating article by Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian today, about the politics of the founders of every call centre's life force, Facebook. Now, I don't have a Facebook account, not because I ever wondered about it's politics, but because to me it always looked a bit, well, shit. It took over from MySpace before I even had time to get a MySpace going; and where MySpace seemed to be focussed on blogging, music and video, Facebook seems to revolve around blurry pictures of pissed-up twats in nightclubs and imaginary drinks. This article, however, produced one of those great moments when the nature and purpose of something so familiar is suddenly shown in a very different and unsettling light. It can be enjoyed in full here, but the most startling part for me was a rigorous run-through of Facebook's privacy policy, which you have to accept to be allowed into their gay little club. It turns out that:

Personal information that you put on Facebook is not guaranteed to be kept secure from unauthorised persons, and is in fact routinely passed on to other organisations, including U.S. government agencies.

Having just posted a hazy, possibly libellous statement on this here blog, and after reading the article about Facebook's shady, all-powerful neo-con backers, I'd like to remind you that just because I'm saying I learned it, doesn't mean I'm saying it's true. Facebook might genuinely be all about helping people to make new friends and improve their lives. It's not, but it might be. Some other surprises for you Facebookers out there: they will send you e-mails about your account even if you ask them not to; they'll look at your acccount, as well as any other stuff you put online in order to send you suitable adverts, whether you want them or not; they will tell you what your Facebook friends have been buying online, in order to try and make you do the same. It appears to basically exist to generate a pool of identifiable brand targets, a 60-million strong anonymous powerless product demographic. Fuck that. Try your local library instead; you won't make any friends, but you won't end up in Guantanamo Bay either.

Names For Things That Don't Have Names

- Aglets and lunnules in action

When I was an adolescent fact-finder back in the early 90s, my favourite book which I took everywhere was an American book called The Book of Lists (yes, I was that kind of kid) which dismantled the old maxim that you can't judge a book by it's cover. It was literally a book full of lists, on all sorts of obscure topics; the windiest place in America (it's not Chicago! delight in the irony), the worst film ever made (they did quantify this, but it escapes me how) etc. I didn't care that the book was American and all the information was out-of-date by ten years; I took it everywhere with me.

Imagine my delight then when I discovered that the good book is still going strong and is available for just £5.99; imagine my joy when I found that a lot of the lists are available online - a penny short of six quid is a touch steep to evoke childhood innocence in a world of fear. The first list I stumbled upon today concerned 'names for things you never knew had names' which was one of my favourites back in the day - I used to endlessly annoy mum and dad by asking them if they knew what the plastic bits on the ends of their shoelaces were called, before informing them before they could draw breath that they were called 'aglets'. This has resurfaced on the 2008 list, but I didn't need reminding. The trouble is that I remember reading and re-reading this list but can't remember which words were and weren't on the original list, so I can't count any of them as learning, even though I feel like I've learnt them because I literally can't wait for her to come in the room so I can tell her that the # key on a telephone is called an 'octothorpe' and is named after a runner, for God's sake. Anyway, I've dipped into a similar list that doesn't ring any bells and have discovered the following:

The pale, crescent-shaped mark at the base of a human fingernail is called a lunnule.

I guess the part of me that isn't pitifully enthralled by this information recognises that really it's not called a lunnule, because nobody calls it that. It's called 'that pale bit on my fingernail', much the same way as aglets are really known as 'those plasticy bits on my shoelaces'. These words are pretty much obsolete, but maybe that's why I find them so interesting. Maybe if I tell enough people the true names for these everyday items, they will once again return to common usage, purely through my own endeavours. Then again, that's how I got banned from Trowbridge town centre in the first place.

Figwit

Our favourite show here at the house of learning right now is 'Flight of the Conchords', the HBO series about 'New Zealand's 4th best novelty folk act' trying to make it big in New York. Anyway as we were watching it in the early hours I had a look into the histories of the two Conchords, Bret McKenzie (left of the picture) and Jemaine Clement, so here's one that will probably mainly appeal to Conchords fans. And seeing as the only three people that have read this blog thus far are all 'into it' (little in-joke for my fanbase), I think this'll be a popular choice:

Bret McKenzie, one half of Flight of the Conchords, appeared twice in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Not only that but he actually gained notoriety from his brief appearance in the first film. He lurks on the edge of the clearing at Rivendell as Frodo begrudgingly agrees to carry the ring to a 99% certain slow and grisly demise, and caught the eye of viewers in his three-second turn as 'an elusive, brooding elf'. His popularity grew to such an extent that devotees began setting up fansites and even gave him a name - Figwit, which stands for 'Frodo is great - who is that?'. Sadly nobody has seen fit to post McKenzie's first moment of celluloid fame on YouTube, but you can see him in action here, in Return of the King. Beware, Conchords fans - this will make you feel a bit odd.

The two lines he utters were given to him by Peter Jackson in respond to the Figwit furore, a singular notoriety that Bret seems to have escaped with the brilliant Conchords series; it'd be a shame for someone as talented as he is to be remembered for 3 seconds in a film. For you or I, however, it would be a stellar achievement, so well done him. Tomorrow: Gavin from the Brittas Empire's exhilarating turn in Patch Adams...

Captain Kirk and Streets Awash with Filth

Today I'm cursing my own stupid rules, as I found an unbelievable story about the Italian city of Naples, where corruption and outdated technology mean they've got nowhere to put their rubbish, and it's basically just piling up, all over the city, and has been ever since 21 December. It got me thinking about how thin the line between civilisation and anarchy really is; no-one collects your rubbish for 3 weeks and suddenly protestors are having fist-fights with police, disease is rife and people seem to be throwing stuff out for the sake of it, judging by the pictures. It reminds me of a few years ago in this country, when there was the vague possibility of a fuel shortage, so everyone went out and filled their car up, ostensibly to protect against the slim chance of a full-on drought, but in reality doing no more than filling their tanks up with precious petrol and worsening the problem. But anyway, as I stated in my rules that a fact has to be constant, and as I'd like to think that the good people of Naples will get their streets clear of festering rubbish at some stage, I had to look elsewhere.

Now I'm not proud of this, but in my desperation to get a fact down before dinner, I actually typed the word 'facts' into Google. Don't look at me like that. It yielded quite a few rumours and half-truths, but I was getting nowhere fast, until I stumbled upon this:

In the TV Series Star Trek, Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty".

Now I realise upon pondering this a little more, it's not really that surprising; Kirk rarely got "beamed" by Scotty alone (contrary to malicious industry rumours) and there are lots of phrases that define a character which they never said, but are rather an amalgam of their most popular utterances: Sherlock Holmes' "elementary, my dear Watson"; Humphrey Bogart's "play it again, Sam" and for the more highbrow readers out there, Frank Spencer's "oooh, Betty". Yet each time one of these phrases is debunked, it's still a shock to the system, like another very tiny flake of paint falling from the great facade that is my understanding of the world around me. I also find it fascinating because it says something about our culture, good and bad; it's bad that we as an audience are so ignorant as to accept a phrase as being so commonplace it becomes a catchphrase for the speaker, when in fact they never said it. It's also good in a way because it demonstrates a sort of collective quality control; we have created soundbites that sum up famous figures, real and imagined, much better than they or their creators ever managed to.

There are more examples here, just be sure to close the window as soon as you're finished reading, lest you be sucked headlong into a maelstrom of racist propaganda. They eat swans you know! To close this particular entry I'll leave you with another never-uttered phrase: Victor Meldrew never, ever said "I don't believe it".

Ok, not really, he said it pretty much every episode, but I had you going...

Aston Villa's Famous Fan

<<>

Right, it's late, I'm tired, so here goes:

Tom Hanks is an Aston Villa fan.

This was hot goss in all the free papers today, with Hanks donning a Villa scarf for the premiere of Charlie Wilson's War in Leicester Square. Hanks claims he supports the Midlands club because he 'likes the team', which is really just another way of saying he supports them. This quote, from 2005, expounds a little bit more on Hanks' clearly deep and immovable love for the Villa, while also putting a rather hefty damp flannel over claims that he came out as a fan last night. When pressed on who his favourite player was, he cited Gabriel Agbonlahor, because 'he's my favourite'.

Not really; the only other Hanks soundbite comes courtesy of thelondonpaper, which I picked up on thenorthernline; when talking about the nude scenes in his new film, Hanks explained that he took his female co-stars out to dinner, so that 'by the time we had to strip down and get in the hot tub, it was just another day in the office' which is frankly downright creepy. Tom Hanks (who incidentally is my girlfriend's all-time worst actor, and with good cause) is not the only American celeb to foolishly get involved in the world of soccerball; last year we had Sly Stallone sitting nonplussed in the stands at Everton, and who could forget the great Michael Jackson debacle at Exeter a few years ago. Hanks takes the biscuit I think, for the manner he whipped the scarf out in an attempt to appeal to English audiences; he must have had it lined up in the limo with a bowler hat, a cup of tea and the picture of the Queen, trying to decide what was hot right now in this weird little country.

The Queen & Umbrellas

Rihanna: You can stand under her umbrolla >

Not much time for fact-finding today, seems like everyone's woken up from Christmas hibernation and I suddenly have a lot of work to do and a lot of bills coming through our tiny letterbox (why can't they make bills the same size as Amazon packages? I'd gladly wait for a bill to be redelivered). Anyway I was curious as to why umbrellas are called brollies for short, instead of brellies, so I thought I'd look that up quickly (pre-meditated learning is, of course, within the rules) and found that someone had asked the very same question on Yahoo! Answers, and had had 6 replies. I felt the giddy rush of an impending answer to my conundrum, but was left disappointed by the responses, most of which were 'it's an abbreviation of umbrella', a response so glib it makes me want to track down the poster and set about them with a cricket bat, upon which would be the question written in highlighter pen. Maybe NOW you'll read it properly. Anyway, moving on; as my brolly question remains unsolved, I'll go with this startling piece of information, courtesy of London Lite, the free evening paper with 'ink that WON'T come off on your hands' and news that WON'T come off on your brain. The story was about female guards at St. James' Palace. I wondered why on Earth the gender of palace guards should be remotely newsworthy until I read the following:

The first female guards at Windsor Castle patrolled the gates only last year.

Wow, sexism and the monarchy - my two favourite embarrassing, outdated institutions, together at last! Apparently they've been drafted in because all the chaps are off fighting illegal wars, so don't panic, it's not like they're being put on an equal footing based on ability, heaven forfend. Let's just hope they're not too busy thinking about kittens and baking to let their guard down. And I know London Lite isn't exactly a broadsheet, but the article doesn't question why women haven't been allowed to guard the stupid monarchy's stupid palaces, or why the Sexual Discrimination Act doesn't seem to apply to them. It's more 'look, girls in uniforms' which is pretty disgraceful.

God it's really getting to me. Why are they called brollies?

Dermot Murnaghan & Circadian Rhythms

Metro came through for me again today, this time with their '60-second interview' column, a peek into the life of a minor celebrity that I today enjoyed whilst trying not to look at a businessman of a certain age talking to himself (no, there was no Bluetooth headset, and even so, he wasn't saying words). It featured breezy newscaster and official Dullest Man in Britain, Dermot Murnaghan, talking about how he's gone to Sky News from the BBC so he can get up two hours later, which shows refreshing honesty, as well as possibly suggesting that Derm's lost his zest for news.

Anyway, he backs up his flagrant laziness by claiming that he was having to get up at 3.45am, which is 'when your Circadian rhythms are at their lowest'. Circadian rhythms? Now the only time I'd heard this phrase before was in an REM song, and I mistook it for 'cicadian rhythms' as in 'rhythms made by cicadas', which I took to mean fast and high-pitched, like the theme to Alvin and the Chipmunks. But a quick scoot through - you guessed it - Wikipedia, has informed me that is in fact a fancy term for your body clock, i.e. a 24-hour biological cycle, present in animals and plants as well as humans, which is constant and unaffected by temperature change but does respond to external stimulus, hence your body clock slowly adjusts when you take a plane into a different time zone.

So Derm wasn't talking turkey, although his claim that 3.45 appears to be a fabrication; the link above claims that it is in fact 2am, although it does also state that 8.30am is peak time for bowel movement. When you consider that Murnaghan is usually introducing the weather at this point, it's a horrifying thought. Maybe that's why he's starting later. Anyway, according to the afprementioned circadian doodle I'm six minutes away from a sweet shot of melatonin, which should leave me feeling nicely toasted, ready for action in eleven-and-a-half hours' time...

Anthony Costa & OCD

<< Anthony Costa: 'Wind that iron up!"

There are many great powerhouses of informative literature that still thrive in the modern world; the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, or Time magazine. And lest we forgot possibly the greatest of them all: Reveal magazine. This week's issue (which I read but did not buy, I do have an anonymous reputation to keep) featured a few chunks of ground-breaking news, including the revelation that Wayne Rooney's fiancee ain't too happy about him chatting to teenage girls about threesomes (you think she'd be delighted) and Claire bloody Sweeney unveiling her amazing new diet, where she lost as much in a week as I lose each time I do a poo. However, I shouldn't mock too heartily as it has provided me with the following:

Anthony Costa, formerly of the boyband Blue, suffers from OCD.

That's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and our Tony's got it bad, although you wouldn't know it from this not-exactly-sensational early anecdote: "If I've used the iron, I have to unplug it and wrap the lead round it". That's not really OCD, more like not wanting to burn your house down. Many of Costa's examples seem to lean more towards organisation rather than obsessive compulsion, but I don't want to be too unfair because it's a pretty difficult thing to live with, so if he feels it's a problem (which is half of the condition I guess) then good luck to him, I just wonder why he wants to splash it all over a magazine. Oh, he's going on tour! Tickets are still available.

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Today being a lazy Sunday, me and my girlfriend went over to Crystal Palace Park to have a look at the stone dinosaurs that apparently lurk around the gardens. They're dotted in and around the banks of the lake, frozen in the middle of their Jurassic horseplay. While they're fascinating additions to the landscape, we assumed that their purpose was for entertainment; we were wrong. A sign in the park informed us that the stone dinosaurs were scuplted by Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins under the instruction of Sir Richard Owen, a 19th century biologist, and were constructed and displayed at Crystal Palace in the first public exhibition

Owen: He was a shit exhibition demonstrating the nature and existence of prehistoric life. The prehistoric trail at Crystal Palace Park is basically the original Jurassic Park, admittedly with prefab inanimate dinosaurs, but still pretty amazing considering that we were expecting a couple of crap statues. These statues are the original dinosaurs, the ancestors of every imagined prehistoric beastie you've ever seen. And what's more (and this is the bit I'm putting it in bold, because I think it sums it up nicely):

Sir Richard Owen, co-creator of the fake dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, invented the word 'dinosaur'.

He invented dinosaurs! What a guy. There are fifteen in the park and there were supposed to be three more (including a dodo) but Owen got his funding cut, which at the time made me feel sorry for him. However (sigh) even the most rudimentary investigation into Owen's life and work on Wikipedia has led me to understand that he was s malicious, arrogant shit of the highest order who ripped off the ideas of another biologist by the name of Gideon Mantell (who apparently came up with the first idea of a dinosaur; the last dinosaur was, of course, Denver) and had an ongoing beef with Charles Darwin. So now I don't feel so sorry for him, and I'm also not convinced that he came up with the word or the idea of dinosaurs; but that kind of makes a point about learning new things; they're quite often wrong, and as you dig deeper, you find out lots of other new things, which are also reasonably likely to be inaccurate, and so the cycle continues. For instance, I learnt through my dinosaur-based learning today that The Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936. When I woke up this morning I thought the Crystal Palace was still standing, and was surprised to find it replaced by a TV mast and a running track. Not as interesting as the dinosaurs though, and the shithead who stole other people's ideas (allegedly) and made a concrete Lost World out of them in the heart of South London.

The Big Bang

A slow day for facts today; I toyed with including a news story about how energy-saving lightbulbs could be dangerous when broken, but I concluded that it would probably be unethical to put something down that I already knew to be total bollocks. It's funny how anything that's environmentally friendly mysteriously suffers from dubious safety concerns which are then splashed all over the news., but I digress.

As the sun went down I felt the first waves of fact-finding panic, and turned to the grandiosely-titled Book of Space, which came free with a Sunday paper a few weeks ago. There were lots of corking bits of info which I glibly digested before Christmas, but I did stumble upon this doozie:

The Big Bang lasted for half an hour.

Now I know what you're thinking, but bear with me. It's really got more to do with the physics of the expansion of the universe, and what scientists propose caused this expansion, based on the position, direction and velocity of matter in the universe. What these clever chaps propose is the following: the universe began as an infinitely hot, infinitely small, infinitely dense 'something', which then expanded like a balloon, rather than exploding outwards as most people assume. Scientific calculations (of the kind that make my brain turn 360 degrees in it's clammy shell) suggest that atoms began to form just 3 seconds after this singular mass began to expand, meaning that the mass would have had to cool down several billion degrees in those 3 seconds.

That's basically the best scientific theory we have for the nature and existence of the Universe. And I thought the lightbulbs thing was bollocks. I don't mean to pour scorn upon ideas I can barely understand, but fuck it, it sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Maybe God made it after all. One of many differences between God's creation of the heaven and the earth and this blog is that God rested on Sunday, whereas I will be poring over the Observer's Sunday supplements, looking for something, anything, of any interest to anyone. See you then.

Harry Hill

I got today’s piece of factual detritus at 12.15am this morning, whilst perusing the Clapham, Balham & Tooting Guardian (it’s basically the local free paper):

The comedian Harry Hill lives in Battersea.

Now I’m aware that this is really not that surprising, but I always find it amazing when I discover that a celebrity lives in reasonable proximity to myself. In this instance, the celebrity in question is someone I have a lot of time for, and they live in my London borough. It feels ridiculously uplifting, like my choice to live in the cheap, grimy end of the borough has somehow been justified by a famous and talented person’s presence in the leafy, desirable enclave at the furthest point possible within the same borough. I’ve only been in London for 3 months, so I can only assume I will slowly become attuned to the presence of the rich and famous around me, along with vastly inflated prices and unspeakable rudeness.(I still say thank you when someone makes room for me on the Tube. What a bumpkin). When, after 2 weeks in the big smoke, I saw John Torode off Masterchef Goes Large stumbling past Balham tube, possibly after a particularly hefty ‘plate of food’, it rocked my world.

I think it stems from coming from a small town which was a celebrity-free zone, with the exception of David Gower, who was alleged to live in the area and became something of a legend. We’d see a flash of silver hair through the window of a passing car. Was it Gower? Could it really be him? We never found out for sure. Sometimes we’d see the guy who played Inspector Wexford at the market. It was like Elvis had strutted in, resplendent in white jumpsuit, to pick up some satsumas. I still don’t feel like I’ve adjusted, and reading that article made me realise that I still hold celebrities in higher esteem than everybody else, which sort of surprised me. So I guess that’s what I’ve really learnt. But the original information serves a further purpose; Harry Hill used to do McDonalds ad, and much as I admire the rest of his work, he needs to pay, and if he’s reading, I WILL FIND YOU HILL, even if I have to knock on every door in Battersea. And then I’ll send you a polite complaint.

Yo

Metro came good again (weekdays are looking like a cakewalk already) although as I get more savvy at hunting out those sweet facts, I hope to broaden my sources a bit. But I'm still in those tricky first few days, so this'll do nicely. It concerns the word 'yo', previously known to me to have two meanings: firstly, an exclamation to draw attention to oneself or an item one wishes to comment on i.e. 'yo, I'm waiting outside Superdrug' or 'yo, this sea bass is line-caught'. Secondly, yo, when followed by an apostrophe, can be a colloquialism for 'your', originating from the U.S., as in 'I read yo' thesis' or 'go cry to yo' mama'. However, it appears I am mistaken; Page 20 of today's Metro claims that:

Yo is being used colloquially to refer to 'his or her' and may fall into more widespread use as a word to identify non-gender specific possession.

I suppose an example would be that 'would the owner of a silver Golf, registration S261 THG, please move his or her vehicle from the ambulance bay' would become 'would the owner of a silver Golf, registration S261 THG, please move YO vehicle from the ambulance bay', which certainly has more urgency. It's not clear from the article whether it could also be applied to 'he/she' or as I prefer, '(s)he' ('he/she' just looks a bit tokenistic, like we're letting the ladies in on their own language), as in 'if the player answers correctly, YO moves forward two spaces'. I can't see that working, to be honest.

Apparently there have been a few attempts to bring such a word into the English language, including ter, ip, thon and zie. Which leads me to ask: what's wrong with 'they' and 'their'? That seems to work for me. Yeah, I know it's not grammatically correct, but hey, sue me, language geeks. If any language geeks out there would like to take it further, they can comment below. Ha!

Divorce

Day 2, and I’m bringing you my first report from what may well become the hub of my trivia collecting activity – my workplace. I got my learning done good and early today, courtesy of page 19 of Metro. So here’s a piece of information that eight million people read four hours ago. Up-to-the-minute topical and rare gems here on Quest for Knowledge.

Belarus has the highest divorce rate in the world, with 68% of marriages ending in divorce.

Belarus is followed closely by Russia (65%) and Sweden (64%) although it doesn’t state whether these are in fact second and third in the world. They also attempt to draw a correlation between cold weather and divorces, which seems pretty spurious to me. By the way, Britain has a divorce rate of 53%. I should probably do some work now.

A Disclaimer

By the way, I haven't done the IQ/General Knowledge tests - I felt that I was making the whole thing too scientific, and it also occurred to me that retaining pieces of (by and large) useless information is highly unlikely to make a significant difference to my IQ. I'll just stick to learning things, for the time being.

American Samoa

And so, we begin. New Years' Day is always quiet so learning opportunities have been thin on the ground, so I'll start with this dubious piece of fact, given out by Gethin Jones at quarter past midnight:

American Samoa is the last place in the world to see in the New Year, and does so at 11am GMT.

This bit of information troubles me principally because I'm not entirely sure whether I knew it already, as I was aware that it would be one of the Pacific Islands. I had not accounted for my brain being unable to recall existing knowledge, so this sort of creates a grey area. However I considered what answer I would have given, were I asked 'where is the last place in the world to see in the New Year?' and I concluded that although I could have given one of the Pacific Islands as a guess, I didn't previously know that the answer (according to Gethin) is American Samoa. So it counts.

More of the same, same time tomorrow!