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

America.
     
    Einstein
    gave his $32,000 Nobel Prize money to
    his first wife, Mileva,
    as part of their divorce settlement.
     
    The best-selling work of fiction
    of the 15th century was
    The Tale of the Two Lovers,
    an erotic novel by the man who later
    became Pope Pius II.
     
    Tiramisu
    means ‘pick me up’
    in Italian.
     

    The names of the English rivers
    Amber, Avon, Axe, Esk, Exe, Ouse,
    Humber, Irwell, Thames and Tyne
    all mean ‘river’ or ‘water’
    in various ancient languages.
     
    There are no rivers
    in Saudi Arabia.
     
    The Onyx River
    is the only river in Antarctica.
    It flows for just 60 days a year
    in high summer.
     
    The river with the largest
    discharge volume
    in Albania is the Seman.
    About 100 miles north of the Seman
    is the small town of
    Puke.
     

    The gold medals at London 2012
    were the largest and heaviest
    ever awarded at a Summer Olympics,
    but are only 1.34% gold.
     
    In 1979, the Uruguayan footballer
    Daniel Allende transferred
    from Central Español to Rentistas
    for a fee of 550 beefsteaks,
    to be paid in instalments
    of 25 steaks a week.
     
    In 1937, Gillingham FC
    sold one of their players to Aston Villa for
    three second-hand turnstiles,
    two goalkeepers’ sweaters, three cans of
    weed-killer and an old typewriter.
     
    Typewriters used to be known as
    ‘literary pianos’.
     

    The raw materials needed to make a
    desktop computer, including
    530 lb of fossil fuels,
    50 lb of chemicals and
    3,330 lb of water,
    weigh two tons:
    about the same as a rhinoceros.
     
    Exocet
is French for
    ‘flying fish’.
     
    Ancient Scandinavians
    believed that the Aurora Borealis was
    the result of huge shoals of herring
    reflecting light into the sky.
     
    The word ‘döner’
    in
döner kebab
    is Turkish for
    ‘rotating’.
     

    Woodrow Wilson
    kept a flock of sheep
    on the White House lawn.
    He sold the wool and gave the money
    to the Red Cross.
     
    Bill Clinton
    was mauled by a sheep
    at the age of eight and didn’t learn
    to ride a bicycle till he was 22.
     
    Before signing the trade embargo
    against Cuba, John F. Kennedy
    got his press secretary to buy him
    1,000 Cuban cigars.
     
    Ronald Reagan’s pet name for
    Nancy Reagan was
    ‘Mommy Poo Pants’.
     

    After George W. Bush
    was re-elected president in 2004,
    the number of calls from US citizens
    to the Canadian Immigration authorities
    jumped from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.
     
    One of the main contributors
    to the original
Oxford English Dictionary
    cut off his penis in a fit of madness.
     
    The longest palindrome in the
    Oxford English Dictionary
is ‘tattarrattat’.
    James Joyce used it in
Ulysses:
    ‘I knew his tattarrattat at the door.’
     
    The longest palindrome written by one
    poet about another is W. H. Auden’s:
    ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang
    emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name:
    Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’
     

    James Joyce
    married a woman called Nora Barnacle.
    She once said to him,
    ‘Why don’t you write books
    people can read?’
     
    During rehearsals for
Peter Pan
,
    J. M. Barrie ordered Brussels sprouts
    every day for lunch, but never ate them.
    When asked why, he said:
    ‘I cannot resist ordering them.
    The words are so lovely to say.’
     
    Botanists
    cannot tell the difference
    between broccoli and cauliflower.
     
    Rhubarb
    is a vegetable.
     

    Some species of scorpion
    survive on one meal
    a year.
     
    The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul
    has only 5% of the country’s population
    but provides 70% of its fashion models.
     
    The trap-jaw ant
    has the fastest bite in the world:
    its jaws close 2,300 times faster
    than a blink of an eye.
     
    The statue of Winston Churchill
    in Parliament Square is electrified
    to stop pigeons perching
    on its head.
     

    In Bolivia,
    the Quechua word for ‘baby’ is
    guagua
–
    pronounced ‘wah wah’.
     
    A baby echidna
    is called
    a ‘puggle’.
     
    Baby puffins
    are called
    ‘pufflings’.
     
    Baby