An A-Z of Things Barely Worth Knowing

It's been a while. I'd like to offer up an excuse, but the basic reason behind such epic tardiness is that I'm lazy, indolent and have a phone that can record around one month's worth of trivia in a handy, new-fangled, "draft text message" form. Anyway, let's crack on. We've got a lot of catching up to do, and what better way to do it then with a dispassionate alphabetical list of 26 unrelated pieces of information. That's right... it's come to this. It's A-Z time!

A is for autoroute, the name for major roads in France. As I can personally relate from a perplexing on-road experience, roads are given more than one number in France if two main roads converge to form them.

B is for brown - the colour of the salt put down in the event of unprecedented Arctic blizzards/one day of moderate snow. Or, in the case of my road, not put down.

C is for Camberwell, the fashionably edgy/dog-rough area in South London famous for its eponymous carrot. Camberwell has long been mooted as the site for a possible extension to the Bakerloo line, and may finally get its wish, as Boris Johnson has suggested extended the brown line on the map as far as Lewisham because, well, it was the first place that came into his head. Camberwell has come so close to getting on the network previously that for several years, the map at Warwick Avenue station showed Camberwell as a destination, never bothering to remove the station when it wasn't built. It's tardiness like that that I aspire to.

D is for Dungeons. The London Dungeons are part of a chain that also offers subterranean fun in Edinburgh, York and Hamburg, to name but most of them. Whether the other branches come equipped with the kind of phenomenal queue not usually reserved for fair-to-moderate attractions, I cannot say.

E is for Everest. At the top of the world's highest mountain you can boil water at only 68C. Handy information to have.

F is for French Roads Again. Parking in Paris can only be paid for via a pre-paid card (like a mobile top-up card) which in turn you can only get in tobacco shops (which are admittedly a lot more prevalent than over here). Try to imagine for just a moment the chaos that this system created for two pasty, doe-eyed British travellers who just wanted to park their car.

G is for Galling, which is the only way to describe the fact that fat-chinned megalomaniac Robbie 'cool for 6 weeks in 1995' Williams has won more Brit Awards than anyone else - 15 in total. The fact that he is miserable beyond his most wretched nightmares is barely a consolation.

H is for Hitler - as anyone with digital TV will tell you, it's hard to avoid learning about Hitler; as a result, I have two mildly diverting facts about the most evil man who ever lived. Firstly, he had terrible table manners, often shouting, belching and annihilating entire races at the table. Secondly, he spared Blackpool in the Second World War despite quite a lot of weapons being built there as apparently, he wanted to keep it as a private holiday resort. Quite frankly, it doesn't seem likely, although the claim is backed up by the fact that Coventry, which made a similar quantity of munitions, received an almighty shoeing at the hands of the Luftwaffe.

I is for India, and Iran. Two misunderstood nations, set to take centre-stage as the world's power base moves east. I don't know anything about them, but what I do know is that the French word for turkey, 'dinde', means Indian, suggesting some uncertainty over their origin. Secondly, Iran's ancient capital was called Persepolis. Neither enlightening nor relevant, but at least a bit interesting.

J is for JML, the company formerly seen on weird mini TV screens in Woolworths, advertising their own handy products, including the childishly named Dryer Balls, and a sponge that cleans your whole house if you leave it in water (maybe). JML stands for John Mills Ltd., a fact I found out from a JML product that I own. It's a vibrating back massager (no giggling at the back). I tried it and it gave me muscle spasms (I said no giggling).

J is also (who'd have thought it? Two Js! this crazy world) for Jongleurs, the nationwide comedy club whose Battersea branch is the one that started it all. Stay tuned for more J-based trivia, except there isn't any.

K is for Kick, the Tesco-made energy drink I have been drinking since the advent of the credit crunch. Prior to crunch time, I drank Red Bull, which started out as a medicinal syrup in a tiny wee bottle.

L is for the Love Bug, a film which was the first to star Herbie the self-driving car. Not to be confused with the Love Boat, the disappointingly pedestrian aquatic soap opera which has a weird knack for appearing in some form whenever I mention it.

M is for Matt Stevens, the England rugby player who has been banned for 2 years for taking a 'recreational substance'. Stevens is orginally South African, though now it doesn't really matter where he comes from, as he can't play for anyone.

N is for Niall. I have discovered from a fairly reputable source (i.e. someone Irish) that nobody pronounces my name 'Neil' in Ireland - only 'Nile' as in Niall Quinn. This revelation immediately followed my being asked to join the St. Patrick's Day committee, and I'm not sure whether this denouncement of my Irishness counts as a withdrawal of the original indication. It had seemed like an easy ride - organising a St. Patrick's Day event? Guinness, outsized green top hats, shamrock and the backroom at O'Neills, surely? Alas, I may never know.

O is for Ouroboros, the symbol of cyclicality and reinvention which features a snake eating it's tail. The word 'ouroborus' is Greek and means, perhaps unsurprisingly, tail-devouring snake.

P is for Park Lane, the desirable street in Central London famous for being the second most valuable square on a Monopoly board, and more recently for being blighted by a gang of dirty squatters who had the temerity to move into a massive house that some rich old bastard wasn't even living in. Park Lane is so called because it overlooks Hyde Park. Those squatters must be enjoying some great views tonight.

Q is for (le) Quatriéme Dimension, the French name for the Twilight Zone. I learnt this from going on the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride several times at Disney. It was a hoot of Paultons Park proportions. Quatriéme Dimension, incidentally, translates as Fourth Dimension, for those of you who can't read.

R is for Reese. The company forever searching for new ways to combine chocolate with peanut butter are owned by Hershey. Will I ever run out of new things to discover about American chocolate?

S is for Skid Row. The address which symbolises humanity's lowest ebb is real, and can be found in downtown Los Angeles. You know you've fucked up when your address is actually Skid Row. What next? A Boulevard of Broken Dreams somewhere in Chicago? Perhaps a suburb served by Shattered Dreams Parkway station...

T is for TSA, which stands for Tenants' Service Authority, and is the new name for the Housing Corporation. May not mean a lot to those of you working outside of housing.

U is for Ultras, those divisive supporters of many European teams who give to the cause by being passionate, vocal and loyal supporters, but who also damage the team's image slightly by being violent, racist and violently racist. Italian club Sampdoria, based in Genoa, had the first fans to call themselves Ultras.

V is for Victoria, the busiest line on the Tube network, and the only line to run entirely underground. The Waterloo & City Line doesn't count. Why? You know why.

W is for wilderness. Nowhere sums up this word quite like the Cotohuazi canyon in Peru. The ancient Incan city of Marpa, situated at the centre of its length, is so remote and inaccessible that more people have been to the top of Everest (possibly to boil water more efficiently) than have laid eyes on the ruined city.

X is for Xplosives (just let me have it... please). The phrase 'damp squib' refers to the fuse on explosives getting wet, meaning that the fuse won't light. Except the phrase to make several appearances when the Champions League returns at the end of the month.

Y is for You're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat, the line from Jaws voted the best cinematic quote of all time by ShortList magazine. This revelation comes at the end of a Top 20 list which summarises nearly a century of film-making into a pointless list of overused lines of dialogue. It did teach me, however, that the line "I feel the need, the need for speed" is from Top Gun. I've never seen Top Gun. People seem to be amazed by this. Why would I want to watch Top Gun? Give me one good reason.

Z is for Zulus, the tribe that continually direct spears towards Michael Caine, despite his repeated, angry pleas for them to cease. In another of Michael Caine's top 'performances', he closes the Italian Job by exclaiming "hold on lads, I've got an idea" as he and his cohorts stand in a lorry teetering on the edge of a cliff (you guessed it, that line featured in the list too). This is because the booty is in the other side of the lorry, so they need to retrieve it. I've actually watched this film and didn't pick up on this. Unbelievable. Apparently some bright spark has suggested that the best way to retrieve the gold without plummeting to certain doom would be to slowly release fuel from the front of the tank. God, I'd rather be idle than spend my time working that out.

Acceptable in the Eighties

<< Tony Hart, 1925-2009

Ah, the Eighties. Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Big mobile phones. Roland Rat. Miners' strikes. Dexy's Midnight Runners. You get the idea. A line of facts sporting flock-of-seagulls haircuts, rooting through their filofaxes and playing with a rubik's cube have got me all nostalgic for a decade that ended when I was seven. Ah, those Eighties memories. Wearing a big jumper and eating an ice-cream (which seems illogical). Watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and needing a poo. Standing alone in a freezing playground. Heady days indeed.

When it comes to those who defined the Eighties in this country, Prime Minister and proletariat crusher Maggie Thatcher is right up there, just behind Phil Oakey and Max Headroom. Thatcher was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, which is entirely unnoticeable in her mangled Victorian accent. MT was in charge for the entirety of the decade. When she wasn't being hated by her own citizens (Poll Tax riots, miners' strikes again, that weird thing on Swap Shop or whatever) she was putting it up nations much larger and more volatile than ours - Argentina, namely. What I didn't realise was that Argentina was under military rule at the time of the Falklands War. A nation run by an army, and Maggie was more bloodthirsty than they were.

Thatcher may have a lot to answer for, but being so intrinsically connected to the Eighties, she was probably at least OK at cutting-edge video game experience Pong. Gordon Brown, if this footage of him being shit at actual ping-pong is anything to go by, would struggle.

The Internet was a global phenomenon launched in the Eighties, although by 1989 only about 12 people were using it. It came into it's own under the jurisdiction of the Eighties' goofy kid brother, the Nineties. Initially, the Internet was called the Arpanet - a fact pointed out by Norwich Union in their desperate attempt to make the loss of identity triggered by their takeover and forcible name change look like a pivotal moment in their destiny. And incidentally, "can you imagine a punk rock singer called Vincent Pernier?" Yes. That's an excellent name for a punk rock singer. Much better than Alice Cooper, who sounds like a vet.

And finally, we bid farewell to an Eighties legend, and perhaps the finest artist in history - Mr Tony Hart. A volatile, experimental genius, Hart was renowned for creating breathtaking silhouette landscapes, only to sabotage his work by tipping vast quantities of glitter glue over it for no apparent reason. He also seemed like a thoroughly nice bloke, who will leave a legacy of shaky camerawork displaying rubbish kids' drawings, comprehensive guides to art and craft that would shame Neil Buchanan - and the Blue Peter badge. Cos he designed it.

The Bleak Midwinter

You know it's upon you when you reach into your pocket for loose change and find nothing but balls of lint, which have frozen into jagged icicles in the arctic temperatures. Or perhaps it's the moment when you fall headlong over the pile of Christmas decorations (which rather than packing away you have opted to allow to slide pathetically into a congealed mass on the floor) and find that ten minutes later you are still there, weeping hysterically. Maybe it's the moment you try to comfort yourself with the notion that the evenings are getting later, as you peer desperately at a dying sun, suffocated by clouds, as driving hail takes chunks out of your skin. Either way, there's a moment for everyone this month then the horror that is January hits you.

It's the month that makes you pine for November - a vacuum of money, joy, sunlight and motivation that feels never-ending. Even the election of a black president, and my team nearly buying the world's best footballer, have raised little more than a wearied grunt in these dark days. I don't know what idiot decided to place a whole week of festivities directly before this god-awful month, but it's created a comedown that takes up a twelfth of the entire year. It's not like February is any better - it just can't get any worse. The only thing to do is keep your head down, hold the tears back and distract yourself until it's Valentine's Day, when you'll have a whole new reason to be miserable.

Read a book - may I recommend J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye? It's a contemporary classic filled with subtle overtones of longing and despair, and is also quite short. Happy Birthday J.D. - 90 on New Year's Day.

Drink until you're happy again - start with Coronas. They look more sophisticated than a dented can of Tennent's Super. Corona is brewed in Mexico, thus adding a much-needed exotic flavour to your midwinter binges.

Go on holiday - Why not explore the Shetland coast? It's 900 miles long. At least you'll be glad to come home.

Lag your pipes - In early colonial America, pipes were made from hollowed-out logs. The fact that water can pass through wood was something I assume they found out in time. Incidentally, does anyone remember a British Gas ad which had a 'sod's law' theme, but said "your pipes freeze on the coldest days?". I'd just like to point out that they freeze because it's really cold - it's not just a coincidence. You think they'd know that.

Watch a documentary which relentlessly exposes the chasm of misery consuming someone more talented than successful than yourself - as I did with Surviving Gazza, a slightly odd title seeing as Gazza isn't actually dead. If nothing else, it taught me that money can't buy happiness, that I liked Gazza a lot more when he was wacky than now he's a suicidal alcoholic - and that Bianca Gascoigne is his daughter.

Stare at Sky Sports News for hours at a time, clinging to the only constant in your life as everything else crumbles like so many Man City transfer negotiations. They might just tell you that Liverpool full-back Insua is Argentinian. Except I just did. And you don't care.

Consider throwing in the towel and heading back to uni to rack up another £15,000 of debt. Why the hell not? We'll all be living in huts soon anyway. Numerus clausus is a system used to allocate university places according to specific characteristics, e.g. race, gender. It was used by the Romans, and has been used for good (redressing the appalling imbalance in the opportunities afforded to women and people from ethnic minorities) and bad (I'm gonna guess... the Nazis).

Go and buy a big telly and rack up another £500 of debt. Why the hell not? We'll all be living in huts soon anyway. Richmond-upon-Thames has more debt per person than any other town in Britain - around £40,000.

Capture a bee and force it to sting you, in order to replicate even an unpleasant aspect of summer - bee stings can remain in your arm for several months. Maybe even 'til summer comes around.

Sit and stare at a wall, feeling unbearably conscious of your most basic bodily functions, such as breathing, blinking and swallowing. The average person produces 1.5 litres of saliva each day, which is unconsciously swallowed again.

Use the internet to book a holiday, gamble obscene sums of money, repeatedly watch a cat sitting on a moving skateboard, or pour out your January bile unto a small, passive white box, and let everyone you know read it. Internet usage in the UK peaks at 6pm on Sunday evening.

Watch soaps. Nobody's more miserable than people in soaps. In their Januarys everyone gets rickets and then the entire street gets torched when a kid's birthday cake topples over. Coronation Street isn't on on Sunday anymore.

Have a birthday. If your birthday isn't in January, just pretend it is. Everyone will be glad of the excuse. It doesn't matter if they know full well it's not really your birthday. Jehovah's witnesses don't celebrate birthdays. Not even in January.

Liven things up with a cold, flu, or exotic vomiting bug. Even the hiccups would break the monotony. Hiccough is pronounced 'hiccup'.

The Final Countdown

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

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

23% of Hawaiians are vegetarian.

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

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

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

Breathing from your diaphragm helps you to project your VOICE.

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

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

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

Conkers are horse chestnuts, rather than regular chestnuts.

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

Cheesecake is a term for an attractive woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in 2009.

Four Festive Facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Quiz

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

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

And the places:

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


The answers are as follows:

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

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

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

Digging For Gold

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

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

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

Epistaxis is the medical term for a nosebleed.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W is the least used letter in the French alphabet.

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

That ought to do it...