1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson Page A

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    you are more likely to come across
    a teacher or lecturer
    than someone from any other profession.
     
    Since 1959, it has been legal
    to marry a dead person in France,
    providing you can prove the wedding
    was already planned.
     
    Warmduscher
    is German for ‘wimp’:
    a person so pathetic
    he only takes hot showers.
     
    A survey of
    a working-class area of London in 1915
    found only 12 houses with baths.
    Nine of them were being used
    for storage.
     

    One third of patent applications
    in America in 1905 were
    related in some way to the bicycle.
     
    Every year, a thousand letters
    arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.
     
    In 2009, a retired policeman called
    Geraint Woolford was admitted to
    Abergale Hospital in north Wales
    and ended up next to another retired
    policeman called Geraint Woolford.
    The men weren’t related, had never met
    and were the only two people in the UK
    called Geraint Woolford.
     
    Geraint is the only word spoken
    in England and Wales that rhymes with
    ‘pint’ – though in Scotland you might hear
    ‘behint’ (Scots for ‘behind’).
     

    There are two rhymes in English
    for purple:
curple
, a strap passing
    under a horse’s tail, and
hirple
,
    to walk along dragging
    one leg behind the other.
     
    The African giant pouched rat
    can smell tuberculosis 50 times faster
    than a laboratory scientist
    can identify it.
     
    Electrons move
    along an electricity cable
    about as fast as
    honey flows.
     
    80% of people
    who die from anorexia
    are aged at least 45.
     

    A red blood cell
    can make a complete circuit
    of your body in 20 seconds.
     
    If your stomach acid
    got on to your skin
    it would burn
    a hole in it.
     
    A pumping human heart
    can squirt blood
    a distance of
    30 feet.
     
    When we blush,
    our stomach lining goes red too.
     

    Christopher Columbus
    suffered from arthritis in his wrist
    as a result of a bacterial infection
    caught from a parrot.
     
    John Wayne
    once won Lassie the Dog
    in a game of poker.
     
    The founder of match.com,
    Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend
    to a man she met on
    match.com.
     
    At Ronnie Barker’s memorial service
    in Westminster Abbey in 2006,
    four candles were carried
    instead of the usual two.
     

    Despite playing the Fonz
    for ten years in the sitcom
Happy Days
,
    Henry Winkler never learned
    to ride a motorcycle.
     
    The maize needed
    to fill a single Range Rover’s
    petrol tank with biofuel
    would feed a person
    for a whole year.
     
    J. R. R. Tolkien
    typed the 1,200-page manuscript of
    The Lord of the Rings
trilogy
    with two fingers.
     
    Quantophrenia
    is an obsessive reliance
    on statistics.
     

    The first published crossword
    was called a word-cross.
     
    The hand jive was invented
    at the Cat’s Whiskers club in Soho.
    The premises were so small and cramped
    that there was only enough room
    for people to dance with their hands.
     
    Feeding curry to a sheep
    reduces the amount of
    methane in its farts
    by up to 40%.
     
    More than half the trash
    collected on the summit of Ben Nevis
    is banana peel.
     

    You could listen to a radio on the Moon
    but it’s virtually impossible
    aboard a submarine.
    Radio waves travel
    much more easily through space
    than through water.
     
    Areas of the Moon include
    the Ocean of Storms,
    the Marsh of Decay
    and the Lake of Death.
     
    By law, buskers in Dublin
    must have a repertoire of
    at least 20 songs.
     
    The opposite of plankton is
nekton
–
    creatures that move through water
    at will, rather than merely drifting.
    Fish, dolphins and humans are nekton.
     

    When John Hetherington
    ventured out in public
    wearing the first top hat,
    it was considered so shocking that
    children screamed, women fainted
    and a small boy broke his arm
    in the chaos.
     
    In October 2008,
    inflation in Zimbabwe
    reached 231,000,000%.
     
    The average car in Britain is parked
    for 96% of the time.
     
    Casanova
    was a librarian.
     

    India has almost 155,000 post offices:
    more than any country in