The Mega Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham
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ground. As he was falling, the plane started falling too, and he was blown back into his own seat by the wind and was able to land the plane safely.
• Queen Elizabeth I named a man as the ‘Official Uncorker of Bottles’, and passed a law that stated all bottles found washed up on beaches had to be opened by him and no one else, in case they contained sensitive military messages. The penalty for anyone else opening a bottle was death.
• Afraid of growing old, Countess Bathory of Hungary became convinced that if she bathed in the blood of young girls, she could stay young for ever, and so for ten years she drained the blood of imprisoned girls so that she could take ‘blood baths’ in a huge iron vat. After one intended victim escaped, the King of Hungary ordered his soldiers to storm her castle. When they found many dead and some still-alive bodies, they locked the countess inside her room and bricked up the entrance, leaving only a small opening through which she was given food until she died.
• People overwhelmingly tend to marry partners who live near them.
• Charles Darwin cured his snuff habit by keeping his snuffbox in the basement and the key for the snuffbox in the attic.
• Voltaire drank between 50 and 65 cups of coffee every day.
• Manfredo Settala (1600–1680) is the only person in all recorded history to have been killed by a meteorite.
• Rembrandt died penniless with a friend coming up with the £2.85 it cost to bury him.
• Young children are poisoned by houseplants more often than by detergents and other chemicals.
• An Indian emperor was given four wives when he inherited the throne at the age of eight.
• Riverdance star Michael Flatley is also an accomplished concert flute player, a champion boxer and a chess master. He has been listed by the National Geographic Society as a ‘Living Treasure’.
• Pablo Picasso has sold more works of art individually costing over $1 million than any other artist, with 211 Picasso pieces topping the million dollar mark, well ahead of the 168 Pierre-Auguste Renoir works.
• When there is no one else waiting to use a public phone, callers average 90 seconds’ talking, but if someone is waiting, the callers average four minutes per call.
• Men more often dream about their male heroes, bosses, friends or role models than about women.
• Howard Hughes became so compulsive about germs that he used to spend hours swabbing his arms over and over again with rubbing alcohol.
• In 1949, Jack Wurm, an unemployed man, was aimlessly walking on a California beach when he came across a washed-up bottle containing this message: ‘To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937.’ It was not a hoax and Mr Wurm received over $6 million from the Alexander estate.
• W C Fields used to open savings accounts everywhere he went. He put over £500,000 in 700 different banks but couldn’t remember where many of his accounts were.
• Railroad worker Phineas P Gage was working with some dynamite that exploded unexpectedly and a metre-long iron bar weighing 13lb (6kg) went clear through his brain. He remained conscious, but was unable to see out of his left eye. After a while, his sight returned and he fully recovered.
• In November 1972, student skydiver Bob Hail jumped from his plane then discovered that both his main parachute and his back-up parachute had failed. He dropped 3,300 ft (1,006 m) at a rate of 80 mph (129 kph), and smashed into the ground face first. A few moments after landing, however, he got up and walked away with only minor injuries.
• Comedy team Abbott and Costello had an insurance policy to cover themselves financially in the event they had an argument with each other.
• A Japanese priest set a kimono on fire in Tokyo in 1657 because it carried bad luck. The flames spread until over 10,000 buildings were destroyed and 100,000 people died.
• Taxi drivers in London are required to pass a training test based on The Blue Book, with preparation for this test taking between two and four years. Of ten drivers who start, eight or nine drop out before completion.
• The most children born from the same mother, at one time, were decaplets. Born in Brazil, in 1946, eight girls and two boys were delivered.
• The most popular topic of public speakers is motivation at 23 per cent, followed by leadership at 17 per cent.
• One lady had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer so that, even in death, he can still ‘help’ in the kitchen.
• The most popular form of hair removal among women is shaving, with 70 per cent of women who remove hair doing so by this method.
• All pilots on international flights identify themselves in English, regardless of their country of origin.
• The disgraced Lord Jeffrey Archer once worked as a deckchair attendant during the holiday season in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset.
• Karl Marx rarely took a bath and suffered from boils most of his life.
• Early students of forensics hoped that by photographing the eyes of murder victims they would see a reflection of the murderer lingering in the victim’s eyes.
• Some odour technicians in the perfume trade have the olfactory skill to distinguish 20,000 odours at 20 levels of intensity.
• Each morning more than a third of all adults hit their alarm clock’s ‘snooze’ button an average of three times before they get up. Those most guilty of snatching some extra sleep are those in the 25–34 age bracket, at 57 per cent.
• Teenagers often have episodes of anger and negativity in which they slam doors and scream tirades, most of these lasting an average of 15 minutes.
• Adults spend an average of 16 times as many hours selecting clothes (145.6 hours a year) as they do on planning their retirement.
• Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet, didn’t pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with ‘return to sender’ stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb; he opened it and was blown to bits.
• Peter the Great hated the Kremlin, where, as a child, he had witnessed the brutal torture and murder of his mother’s family.
• The shortest human on record was Pauline Musters of the Netherlands. She measured 12 inches (30cm) at her birth in 1876, and was 23 inches (58cm) tall with a weight of 9lb (4kg) at her death in 1885.
• Two German motorists each guiding their car at a snail’s pace near the centre of the road, due to heavy fog near the town of Guetersloh, had an all-too-literal head-on collision. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries, though their cars weren’t scratched.
• About 18 per cent of animal owners share their bed with their pets.
• Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs – all 2,000 of them – escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two helpless protesters to death.
• Couples who diet while on holiday argue three times more often than those who don’t; and those who don’t diet have three times as many romantic interludes.
• Two out of every three women in the world are illiterate.
• In Britain, two women were killed in 1999 by lightning conducted through their under-wired bras.
• Women who snore are at an increased risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
• Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roast turkey from foil packets for their first meal on the moon.