Things I Learned Today - 25th March 2019

Image taken from traintimes.org by Matthew Somerville

- There is now an incredible live map of the trains on the London Underground.

- On Friday, NASA will be conducting the first all female space walk.

- Dorset prisoners have been smuggling drugs inside dead rats.

- The NHS set up a Centre for Internet Disorders last year.

- Backgammon is among the oldest board games in the world.

- The Royal Mint is creating a series of coins which commemorate the Chinese Zodiac.

- Ancient Greek physicians prescribed shocks from electric fish for treating gout, headaches and 'prolapsed anus'.

- Alton Towers have opened the UK's first 'rollercoaster restaurant'.

Things I Learned Today - 24th March 2019

King David the Builder

- Today is the 75th anniversary of the Great Escape.

- Astronomers have discovered over 4,000 exoplanets.

- The UK is going to open its first new deep coal mine for over 30 years.

- Men are typically much more generous when attractive women are around.

- Georgia was once ruled by a king known as David the Builder.

- Daniel Craig played Lara Croft's love interest in Tomb Raider.

- Oprah Winfrey's name is spelled 'Orpah' on her birth certificate.

Things I Learned Today - 23rd March 2019

A 1993 Macintosh TV (Wikimedia Commons)

- New York City is trialing a shuttle service that uses driverless cars.

- The Red Hot Chili Peppers live streamed a gig from the Pyramids of Giza.

- Donald Trump's cabinet has a Bible study group.

- One of Apple's commercial failures was the $2,097 Macintosh TV.

- The UK has a National Food Crime Unit.

- 80s popstar David Van Day is now a Tory councillor in Essex. 

- An Australian conservation charity may have faked the rediscovery of an endangered parrot.

Things I Learned Today - 22nd March 2019

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

- The UK is officially the 15th happiest country in the world according to the UN. (Finland is at the top of the list.)

- MPs in the Canadian House of Commons sit at desks which you can hide snacks in. The Prime Minister had to apologise  yesterday for having eaten a chocolate bar.

- On average, China has been building one large coal power plant every week since 2016.

- Chemnitz in Germany used to be known as Karl Marx Stadt, and still has a huge monument to him.

- Italian football team A.S. Roma have started a Pidgin English Twitter account for the club's Nigerian fans.

- An energy drink in Zambia became popular after it was found to have the same key ingredient as Viagra.

- The word 'opera' derives from the Latin for 'work'.

- Baking a periodic table of cupcakes is a surprisingly common thing to do.

Things I Learned Today - 21st March 2019

Photo by Calvin Bradshaw from Wikimedia Commons

Here follows my second ever installment of things I learned today:

- There is such a thing as a lunar rainbow, or 'moonbow'.

- An e-petition has achieved enough signatures to crash the e-petition website. (E-petitions were originally launched in the UK as far back as 2006.)

- Apparently, Julianne Moore was supposed to star in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, but was fired because she wanted to wear a fatsuit and a fake nose.

- Over 4,000 different people have successfully reached the top of Mount Everest.

- Italy is set to sign up to China's new trillion dollar 'Silk Road' trading scheme, putting it at odds with most of western Europe.

- A local councillor from Cambridge has finally quit after living in Scotland for 10 months. Officially, he only had to attend a council meeting once every 6 months.

- A car broke the sound barrier back in 1997.

- Hertfordshire Council is going to auction 60% of its modern art collection.

- Plymouth is now home to the UK's largest bronze statue, which is based on an actor rehearsing for Othello.

- Prince Albert of Monaco competed 5 times in the bobsleigh at the Winter Olympics.

- Jay-Z's nickname 'Hova' is a reference to Jehova ('J-Hova').

Things I Learned Today - 20th March 2019

As a heavy consumer of news and other general facts, I have decided to share a few of the things I found out about today:

 - Today is the United Nations International Day of Happiness.

- Since November in the UK, it has been possible for certain organisations to raise 'super-complaints' against the police. The second ever case of this was today.

- Mexico has only one legal gun store, with most of the guns used to commit crimes being smuggled in from the US.

- Saudi Arabia will soon be home to the world's tallest building, and it will be exactly a kilometre in height.

- Germany doesn't take part in the EuroMillions draw.

- William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same day - 23rd April 1616.

- The capital of Kazakhstan has been renamed Nursultan after the President who resigned the post yesterday.

- Robots will serve food and drinks, and perform other duties at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

- 90% of the royalties on Ariana Grande's latest single will go to the estates of Rogers and Hammerstein.

I hope these facts are of some interest to everybody out there. Until next time...

General Knowledge Quiz

Some good news in that a local pub has asked me to potentially run a pub quiz for them. However, the bad news is that the people I have so far tested this General Knowledge round on say it is 'too difficult' despite managing to get 7/10 of these correct. Are they right? Would appreciate some feedback on this from anyone.

Connections

1. Eric Blair was a leading left-wing author and journalist who later became highly critical of Communism in the Soviet Union. Under which name did he write Animal Farm in 1945?

2. Born Samantha Sheffield in 1971, which common nickname is given by the media to the wife of the Prime Minister David Cameron?

3. What material is famously made in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and is protected in legislation by an Act of 1993?

4. The lives of which famous gangsters, who died in an ambush in Louisiana in 1934, were later immortalised in a film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, with their death scene described at the time as ‘one of the bloodiest... in cinematic history’?

5. Located in West Bridgford, which international sports ground is the home of Nottingham County Cricket Club?

6. Elizabeth Hurley has reportedly claimed that which 60s interviewer and DJ who died in 2009 was one of the chief influences on the Mike Myers character Austin Powers?

7. A fruitful trip to Prague inspired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write an opera about which famous fictional Italian womaniser in 1787?

8. What was the full name of the final series to feature the character Edmund Blackadder, in which he held the rank of an army captain and continually tried and failed to escape the trenches of World War I?

9. In which Biblical location would you have found both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?

10. What connects the answers to all these questions?