Cruel Britannia

The last four days have seen a slew of facts about this very sceptred isle, starting back on Thursday (as this seems to always be the day that the learning tails off) when Powys, a county in mid-Wales, was named as the happiest place in the country. I recently went camping in Powys, and have to say I'm not surprised - it's all rolling hills and stony streams, plus in Builth Wells there's a Burger King where they've employed a teenager with an especially dramatic voice to call out the orders. It's a laugh a minute out there. Edinburgh came bottom, whilst the only London borough to score highly was Sutton. I don't know exactly what the science behind this study is, but may I suggest it has something to do with lots of place names on bits of paper and an upturned hat.

Knowledge Towers' home borough, Wandsworth, may not be all that happy, but it's got a lot going for it - a disused power station, an outdoor swimming pool and a labyrinthine railway junction, to name but all. It's also fairly star-studded - Wandsworth residents include the intentionally hilarious Harry Hill, the unintentionally hilarious Ainsley Harriott, tennis gobshite Andy Murray and World's Biggest Badass, Lost's Sayid Jarrah. OK, the actor who plays him - who lives in LA now. Naveen Andrews was born in Wandsworth. That's literally the best thing that's ever happened here.

Heading onto the South Circular and out into the regions, past the residents of Powys, delirious with jubilation, on past the city of Edinburgh, literally collapsing under the weight of its own misery, we arrive at the shores of Loch Ness, a massive body of water famous for its mythical Jurassic inhabitant. If you look at a map of the UK, Loch Ness cuts in a straight line right across the northwest corner of Scotland - I learnt from a repeat of Britain From Above that this is because it follows a faultline, a feature that an expert claimed "without wanting to sound too dramatic" was the UK's equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Which is pretty dramatic. He also mentioned that Loch Ness holds more water than all the lakes in England and Wales put together - a statement that needs no extra gravitas.

For Sunday's slice o' learning, we're moving even further North, to the very edge of the land, the Shetland Islands, nestled somewhere between Iceland, Scotland, Venezuela, Beirut and Switzerland. It's the northernmost part of the UK, and it is also the fattest - although this comes from another less than scientific study which has been rebuked by Shetland MSP Tavish Scott (yes, it's his real name) and the area's health improvement officer (who may have had a couple of sleepless nights recently) who added that the islands have "fantastic" leisure centres, but admitted with a weary shrug that they are slightly under-used. She then returned to her car and sat, gently weeping, munching through a carrier bag full of pork pies.

Flippin' The Kurd

<< Kurdistan's premier comedy double act in action

I'm trying to push up the post count for August by squeezing in a few daily doses before the month closes - I don't have any money, so need to pass the time somehow. Unfortunately, today's subject area is not one that lends itself to my breezy, trivial style. The region of Kurdistan has a history littered with oppression, genocide and misery - I'm throwing out the weak pun of a title as a gesture, but other than that, it's a proud, troubled region that offers little in the way of observational comedy.

Kurdistan is spread across the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

The region is roughly the same size as France, and is only recognised as an autonomous province in Iraq (although right now I imagine you could declare a hotel an autonomous province - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of stability going on for some reason). The chief language is Kurdish (but is possibly not called this in Kurdistan) - split into two dialects: Sorani and Kumanji. Again, interesting, but not something you can see Seinfeld ripping on ("What's the deal with Kumanji?"). Kurds have suffered widespread laugh-free oppression, most notably in Iraq (although that's all better now) and in Turkey, where several rebellions were put down and the region as a whole was declared a closed military zone for forty years, up until 1965.

I know it's been a bit of a struggle today, but the people of Kurdistan have suffered enough, so let's draw it to a close with some more simple, ungilded truths - here are Kurdistan's largest cities: In Iran - Kermansah and Mahabad; in Iraq, Mosul and Arbil; and in Turkey, Diyarbakir, Bitlis and Batman. That's right - Batman. I knew those crazy Kurds had it in them - dig through enough oppression and misery and you'll always find a vaguely topical film reference eventually. Now you just have to get yourself out of the hole you've dug for yourself...

Bank Holiday Bonanza: 11 Tiny People & Trillions of Stars

<< A West Brom/Sheff Weds/Brighton Subbuteo figure, complete with trademark enlarged ball

The final Bank Holiday before Christmas has been and gone (now there's a thought to make you want to boil your own head) but we kick off the learning recall back on Thursday, when I discovered that you can't a gas emergency callout until your meter runs out entirely. I imagine if the house was slowly filling with gas and your twitchy cousin was coming round to play with lighters, they might pop round, but otherwise, they will actually advise you to waste natural resources until you are left without heating and hot water, at which point they will come out immediately (between 8 and 1, anyway). It's quite a society we live in - but what does that matter when we've got Olympic heroes? They're plastered all over the papers lately, looking every inch a group of people that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the notion of celebrity, and the BBC even published a hugely tedious list of details about the medallists - the most surprising piece of information therein was that Herne Hill in South London has a velodrome.

From track cycling to a less confusing and more commercial sport - Subbuteo. I can remember when the flick-to-kick game was at the cutting edge of kids' entertainment (OK, that may be pushing it a bit, but it was popular) and I was building quite a good collection, pitching Wolves/Blackpool against QPR/Reading on my bedroom floor in front of a shiny new plastic Main Stand. Then, from nowhere, it disappeared - I feel it is long overdue a retro revival, mainly because I've still got that Main Stand in my attic somewhere. The name Subbuteo is Latin for 'hobby', and was another reason I liked it - they could have called it Kick, or Offside!, or Goalaroo, but they gave it a non-footballing name under the brilliant pretense that it wasn't actually a football game. Bring it back, toymakers of the land. The comeback starts here.

Sunday's discovery really speaks for itself - there are more air molecules in a balloon than there are stars in our galaxy. By the way, the figure is several trillion - a statistic so mind-blowing and wondrous it makes me want to stick my fingers deep into my ears and repeat pointless facts to myself until the giddy feeling subsides.

Back to the comfortably trivial, if you thought a football-based game that didn't allow you to just play football reached surprisingly dizzy heights, you may also be shocked to discover that Oxo, purveyors of garden variety stock cubes, were at one stage successful enough to build a ruddy great tower on the South Bank, complete with their name emblazoned on the side - except it isn't really. The OXO tower simply features a series of windows arranged to spell OXO - apparently this didn't contravene advertising laws at the time, whereas having an Oxo sign would have done. The Oxo windows represent perhaps the most fragrant flouting of advertising laws of all time - until McDonalds started sponsoring the Olympics. Wherever the book on appropriate advertising is kept, it seems it can be held there with a fat enough cheque.

And finally, today's bit of tat... the theme music from Tetris is taken from a Russian folk song. I know how the first 10 seconds go, before the screen begins to fill with a central pile of descending shapes, and the giddy feeling returns.

The Week That Wasn't

<< Could Kojak crack the case before Bolt finished the 200m? In a word, no.

Home-grown Olympians have been tearing up the record books over in Beijing, so I've been going for a bit of history myself - yes, I've gone a whole week without updating a daily blog, obliterating my previous record of, I dunno, a couple of days less. To get us started, we're travelling back through the mists of time to last Thursday, a halcyon evening which reached it's blissful peak at 9pm, when we watched Traffic Cops and ate a jacket potato. I learnt that skewering a baked potato all the way through makes it cook quicker, which was handy, as otherwise I would have missed the fallout from a crash between "a car... and a house", which physically COULD NOT BE RECREATED. It's not that they couldn't afford it, of course - it just couldn't be done.

Further record-breaking behaviour on Friday night - I found out that Hailie McDaniel was the first African-American actress to win an Oscar. I read this in the back of a quiz book, for there was nobody around to ask me the questions. I did a quiz with myself on a Friday night, which may give me some kind of unwanted title - World's Saddest Twat, perhaps. At least I'm not the only one who's bitter. Forgotten director George Lucas attempted to buy the rights to make Flash Gordon into a film, but was beaten to it. Flash Gordon was made in all it's Blessed-heavy glory, and Lucas skulked off to make something called Star Wars. That was Saturday, the day Usain Bolt jogged to a world record, while I laboured up a canal towpath on a short walk.

As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, my brother pointed out to me that Dmitri, the keytar player from Flight of the Conchords, is in fact the rather droll stand-up comedian Dmitri Martin, who you can see (well, hear) here. On Monday I redirected my gaze towards the Olympics once again - I know it's been an overused feature in recent days, but when I'm sat at home on the sick, in front of the TV, and no matter how hard I press the remote my senses are continually bombarded with cycling, sailing and all manner of prestigious yet entirely unwatchable events, it's pretty much inevitable. If you're not wilting at the sheer scale of this post already, I'll invite you to second guess this fact in advance - what do you think is the most dangerous sport in the world?

If you said crocodile goading, alpine aviation or the motorway 100m, you'd be wrong - it's the pole vault. This is generally due to the poles breaking and competitors being thrust to the asphalt below - like you couldn't have guessed that. I've always been slightly confused by pole vaulters, in so much as I don't understand how you find out you're good at it. Perhaps the great Sergey Bubka was once a painter/decorator back in Donetsk, fell backwards on his ladder in classic Frank Spencer style, and accidentally catapulted himself over an entire row of houses. Perhaps not. Of course, those flash fuckers over in China weren't the only ones bringing home the gold this week - hell no. I'm currently engaged in an epic Scrabulous clash, and am winning a best-of-5 contest 2-1, though frankly it should be all over by now. When you log in to Scrabulous (as I have done approximately 1000 times this week) it gives you a greeting in a random language. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I was greeted with the phrase 'Kia ora' - last heard describing a delicious brand of squash and immediately followed by the words 'oogy boogy boogy boogy' (in an ad that's a lot more racist than I remembered). Kia ora is in fact a traditional Maori greeting - it loosely translates as 'too orangey for crows'.

And so to tonight, 6 days on from the glory of Traffic Cops, and my new hero Usain Bolt has managed to break two world records in the time it took me to post one entry. Bet he's shit at Scrabulous though - no, actually, I imagine he's brilliant at that too. Tonight we watched a very odd 70s film called Lisa and the Devil, starring Telly 'Kojak' Savalas as Leandro, a butler who may or may not be the devil (hint: they superimposed a drawing of the devil over his face to show the incredible likeness). Telly Savalas is of course famous for a. being bald b. "who loves ya, baby?" and c. sucking on a lollipop (this is not a euphemism). Well, tonight I learned that Telly Savalas first sucked on a lollipop in Lisa and the Devil, as he was trying to give up smoking whilst making the film. Later the same year, and still struggling to stay off the tabs, Tel landed the plum role of Kojak, kept with the lollies, and a legend was born.

At Least You're Not A Lobster

<< Get in the pot, Grandpa

This summer, whether you've been schmoozing in a Cannes seafood eaterie, or sweltering on Blackpool beach amongst the sunburnt locals, lobsters may well have been on your mind. It's often a strain even for the most carnivorous amongst us to select a live lobster to be boiled alive for our delectation - it certainly weighs more heavily on the conscience than a munch on a Ginsters pasty. Today's fact may or may not make this gruesome task more palatable for you:

Lobsters can live to 100 years old - but their average lifespan is only 15 years.

On the one hand, you may feel that a century is a solid innings, and that at least Mr. Lobster isn't heading for a bisquey demise while still in their prime. On the other, if said crustacean has battled to over 6 times the average lifespan (imagine if some humans lived to be 500 - the Post Office queues don't bear thinking about) it seems churlish to end their mighty struggle because the salmon's off. Pity the poor lobster - contemplating their own mortality at 14 (possibly whilst listening to My Chemical Romance on miniature iPods), battling gamely on for another 85 years, only to be par-boiled and seasoned into an undignified grave. Our underwater friends truly are tragic figures - tragically delicious, that is.

Round-up: From an Opening Ceremony to a Waste of Money

<< A Marla original and the Olympic firework display: both very impressive, yet deceptive - but does that make them less spectacular? In a word, yes.

If you were in Greater London last Friday lunchtime, and you listened very carefully to the sounds on the breeze, you'd have heard what sounded like a group of fat men sobbing. That, of course, was the board of directors for London 2012, being bombarded by a stratospheric Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Opening ceremonies usually consist of a few weirdly dressed schoolkids pushing a life-size plastic cow round the arena - this had a drum-wielding synchronised army and a man running the entire length of the stadium - in mid air. If there's any consolation for our boys, it's that the reports of digital fireworks and lip-synching kids have taken the edge off proceedings a touch. China didn't want to take any chances with their opening act - it kicked off at 8.08pm local time, on the 8th day of the 8th month, in the year 2008. As anyone who's ever seen that HSBC ad will know (everybody, basically) the number 8 is lucky in China - because its name is the same word used for 'prosperity'.

After the razzmatazz had died down, it was on to Saturday's slightly anti-climactic early events - to have that opening ceremony introducing weightlifting semi-finals was a stroke of hyperbole only matched by The Dark Knight in recent times. It's interesting to find out which obscure events certain nations excel at, as we do in rowing and sailing (hence wall-to-wall coverage of wholly unwatchable sports). For example, Italy's most successful Olympic sport, in terms of gold medals (how else would you measure it exactly) is fencing, and not scooter control, hair care or hot-headedness, as some of you despicable xenophobes may have thought.

Sunday brought two events with even greater caché than the golden Games - my sister's wedding to a lovely Italian bloke (apologies for the awful stereotypes I've had to expose above) and my very own birthday. Now that I've hit 25, birthdays are all about forgetting, and what with the free wine and buffet, there wasn't a lot of time for learning. The best I can offer is that August 10 (for that was the date) is the 222nd day of the year - except this year, when it's the 223rd (damn you, Freak Day). Far from being associated with prosperity, the number 2 is of course associated with poo - what that makes my special day, I'll leave to your discretion.

Monday closed with a fact with my possession that is possibly the most remarkable of the entire quest so far - that we are all made of stars. That's right, Moby wasn't just being cute - quantum physicists have theorised that as all matter in the universe is made from heavy elements, which originated in the Big Bang. In layperson's terms, all matter that came forth from said Bang is technically stardust, and if we're made of it, then you do the maths. It's more a question of definition than of actually being made of stars (I've felt that I'm closer to being constructed of a certain number for most of the day), and it does seem a touch ludicrous, but I'm a few textbooks away from arguing with a quantum physicist, so we'll have to take their word for it.

More hard-to-believe high-jinks this evening, as Knowledge Towers' cinema took in a showing of My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about 4-year-old 'artist' Marla Olmstead, whose parents began exhibiting her abstract works and created a worldwide debate on whether a child could truly create art. The answer, in short, appears to be no, as it seems her father at the very least assisted her with the paintings. I felt a strange mixture of disgust and pity towards the parents - the mother who appeared to sincerely wish to keep her daughter from the spotlight, yet was there, with Marla in tow, at three separate exhibitions; and the father, whose mental state appears to visibly disintegrate as the film progresses, to the point where he takes an innocuous comment from his daughter and transforms into a crater-sized hole to bury himself in.

The film did bring into question the value of modern art; the fact is that the father would have got nowhere painting these pictures himself - the fact that his daughter was credited with the work caused their value to skyrocket. This leads to the suggestion that some paintings have gained value through notoriety rather than intrinsic brilliance - to whit, I can inform you that Jackson Pollock's Number 5, 1948 piece is the most expensive painting in the world. It was sold for $140 million in 2006 - going by the theory suggested above, it may well be made of stars - and for that price, it ought to be.

Sonata For A Good Fact

Just watched The Lives of Others, and like any critically acclaimed European film, there was no escape from learning throughout its duration. The most trivial piece of information I can glean from this weighty film is that the Stasi, the East German secret police, are named after the German term for State Security - Staatssicherheit. I could go on, but I think the room may be bugged, so I'd best change the subject (holds up sign with More Stasi Information Here written on it).

The film was very good, and I'm not just saying that 'cos the director's listening in. Claire didn't like it, but that's down to her being a disloyal Westernite patsy. It's weird to think that the sort of activity shown in the film - suppression of the arts, intimate surveillance, dirty fat blokes in outsized white pants - was going on, in Germany, 20 years ago. In fact, it's still going on all over the world, but y'know, Germany, you can get there on Ryanair, so it's different. In Germany there has been a movement known as Ostalgie (a play on the German word for 'east'), where former citizens of the DDR have begun hankering for the bland food and poor-quality cars of their former nation - not to mention the full employment (if not some of the less appealing aspects of Communist life). There's even talk of a theme park in East Berlin - just make sure you're nice on the Customer Comments card.

Burial Unearthed

<< An artist's impression of Burial: cooler looking than his actual face

Here's something from the very epicentre of contemporary culture - just for a change:



Burial's real name is Will Bevan.



Pretty much all I knew about Burial was that nobody knew who he was - and it seems that the endless speculation has led him to reveal his name, and his face, via his MySpace page. Cynics will claim that it has something to do with him being the favourite for the Mercury Music Prize, which is awarded next month, and can't be given to someone if no-one knows what they look like. Apparently Will (sorry, 'Burial') was driven to 'fessing up by newspaper speculation that he was in fact Fatboy Slim, which is a bit like an uncle walking into your room, hearing the harsh beats through your iPod speakers, and asking if it's the Human League. Imagine how Fatboy Slim, now really quite 90s, would have felt if people had tried to credit his work to, I dunno, the bass player from the Housemartins?



Burial has a song on his MySpace which is well worth a listen, although for an anonymous musician he currently has more references to his true identity than actual tracks on the page, which seems odd. He's currently 5/2 to win the prize, but frankly, if you're prepared to bet on a prize that the Klaxons won, you're an idiot.

Poosday

So it's come to this. All I can draw from my barren imagination is to look up something to do with the day of the week. But then... what else is there to talk about on Tuesday? It's the worst day ever, and here's why. If you work Monday to Friday (as I have the sad misfortune to experience) then on Monday you're still savouring the weekend, and by Wednesday, you're halfway done. Tuesday, on the other hand, is a miserable no-man's-land, with the weekend a dying memory and the next day off a distant dream. When you get in, and put on the telly in a desperate bid to escape the soul-scraping tedium of the working week, what is there to watch? Here's what. Nothing. Occasionally you might find a dire football game on ITV, but aside from that, it's a Doc Martin-centric vacuum of quality.

Now that I've got that off my chest, here's the fact:

In Latin, and in several other European languages, the word for Tuesday translates as ‘Mars’ day’. In English, it derives from Tyr, the god of single combat in Norse mythology.

Wikipedia's entry for Tuesday describes it as the day between Monday and Wednesday - which pretty much says it all. The best thing about it is that it's nearly over.

The Great Outdoors

<< Our summer bolthole in all its glory

A big old round-up today, as I've been camping in Wales for the weekend. That doesn't excuse the lack of activity on Thursday, which was instead due to Summer Heights High being on and laziness. Regardless, I did learn something - that Man City midfielder Elano was the most substituted player in last season's Premier League. Given that he's a Brazilian playmaker, it perhaps shouldn't surprise that he seems to lose interest after about an hour.

On Friday, in between trying to find the campsite in the dark with our petrol running out and trying to pitch our tent in the dead of night, with sleet whistling through the field, cursing at outrageous volumes, I discovered that 80s band Oingo Boingo (of Guitar Hero fame) were fronted by Danny Elfman, who has gone on to write a whole heap of film scores. Further investigations have revealed that Oingo Boingo were originally a theatrical troupe known as The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo, before shortening their name, then shortening it again to Boingo, before finally shortening it to the point where they ceased to exist.

Saturday and Sunday both brought facts from the giant wedge of goodness that is Trivial Pursuit; I know I shouldn't crib facts consecutively from the same source, but there wasn't a lot else to discover in the middle of a field, save that it doesn't take much rain to drench the inside of a tent. So to start with, I can impart the rather hilarious news that Pac-Man was originally called Puck-Man (for he is puck shaped), but was re-named after a few wags decided to scratch the round bit of the 'P' off to make the whole thing sound slightly unsavoury. Pac-Man was, however, originally called 'Pakka-man' in Japan, so it's not too far off. Meanwhile, Sunday brought the revelation that Finland drinks more coffee per person than any other country - must be all those long nights.

And so to today, and we trudge from the verdant splendour of the Brecon Beacons to the concrete horror of South London, with only the distant glimmer of a weekend to keep my spirits from crashing through the floor entirely. I have also discovered that our new tent is, inch-for-inch, roomier and in better condition than our flat - which is disappointing. I leave you, then, with the news that not everyone in this city is living in cramped conditions - for Buckingham Palace has over six hundred rooms. Now that I'm simmering with republican fury, I'm off to enjoy my evening. Same time tomorrow.