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

yet more
    female aphids.
     
    A flock of snipe
    is known as a ‘wisp’.
     
    The bee hummingbird
    is the world’s smallest bird.
    It weighs about as much
    as a tea bag.
     

    John Ainsworth Horrocks (1818–46),
    who introduced camels to Australia,
    was also accidentally shot by one.
    He died of gangrene a month later,
    but had the camel executed first.
     
    The Czech general Jan Zizka ordered
    his skin to be turned into a war drum
    after his death. It was beaten at times of
    national emergency, such as the outbreak
    of the Thirty Years War in 1618.
     
    George Kakoma, the composer of
    Uganda’s national anthem, sued his
    government for lost royalties in 1962.
    He won the case and was paid 2,000
    Ugandan shillings, equivalent to 50p.
     
    A ‘jackstraw’ is a 16th-century word for a
    person of no substance or worth.
     

    A boar produces 200 ml of semen
    each time it ejaculates,
    compared to
    a man’s 3 ml.
     
    King George III’s urine
    was blue.
     
    The most times a person
    has been stung by bees
    without dying is 2,443.
     
    A ‘conscientious objector’
    was originally one who
    refused to have their children inoculated.
     

    Skiing
    was introduced to Switzerland
    by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    in 1893.
     
    Nelson Mandela
    was not removed from
    the US terror watch list
    until 2008.
     
    The polar explorers
    Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton
    both explored
    in Burberry.
     
    Two-thirds
    of the world’s population
    has never seen snow.
     

    The French for candyfloss is
    barbe à papa
    (dad’s beard).
     
    The Hebrew for candyfloss is
    searot savta
    (grandma’s hair).
     
    The Afrikaans for candyfloss is
    spookasem
    (ghost breath).
     
    Moer-my gesig
is Afrikaans for
    ‘a face you want to punch’.
     

    Before he became prime minister of
    Australia in 1983, Bob Hawke got into
    the 1954
Guinness Book of Records
    for drinking two and a half pints of beer
    in 11 seconds.
     
    11 of the 12 men
    to have walked on the Moon
    were in the Boy Scouts.
     
    In 1937, comic acrobat Joseph Späh
    survived the
Hindenburg
airship disaster
    by jumping out of the window.
     
    The French for
    ‘window-shopping’
    is
faire du leche-vitrines
or
    ‘window-licking’.
     

    France has 36,782 mayors,
    five of whom are mayors of villages
    that ceased to exist 92 years ago.
     
    In 1992, the rules governing what the
    French may legally christen their children
    were relaxed. The following year,
    the most popular name for baby boys
    was ‘Kevin’.
     
    The French philosopher Voltaire’s
    explanation for why the fossils of
    seashells are found on mountaintops was
    that they had been left there by ancient
    picnickers with a taste for seafood.
     
    The French mathematician Descartes
    had a theory that monkeys and apes
    were able to talk – but kept quiet
    in case they were asked to do any work.
     

    Work
    is three times more dangerous
    than war.
     
    A single human male
    produces enough sperm in a fortnight
    to impregnate every fertile woman
    on the planet.
     
    None of the best-known
    English swear words
    are of Anglo-Saxon origin.
     
    Under the provisions of the
    1912 Scottish Protection of Animals Act,
    the Loch Ness monster
    is a protected species.
     

    Before they were famous,
    Clive James and Sylvester Stallone
    had jobs cleaning out lion cages.
     
    Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson
    grew up believing their grandmothers
    were their mothers and their mothers
    were their sisters.
     
    Olivia Newton-John
    was president of
    the Isle of Man Basking Shark Society.
     
    John Cleese, Michael Caine and Marc Bolan
    all bought Rolls-Royces
    before they could drive.
     

    The last words of Henry Royce,
    co-founder of Rolls-Royce, were:
    ‘I wish I’d spent more time
    in the office.’
     
    When
The Office
first aired in 2007,
    it had the second-lowest audience
    appreciation score on the BBC
    after
Women’s Bowls
.
     
    When Radio 4’s
Woman’s Hour
    began in 1946, it had a male host.
    Early items included
    ‘Cooking with Whale