Assorted Facts 13
Elizabeth I of England had a bath at least four times a year.
The smallest county in England is the Isle of Wight. However, it is only the smallest county for half a year due to tides.
Most of the swans in England are free and do not belong to anyone, only mute swans are owned by the Queen. Apart from the royals, the only other people who can eat swan are Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge on June 25. Swans have a fishy taste, although the best-tasting ones are fed on oats.
The most common cause of death for swans is electrocution.
The Oxford History of England is about the history of the British Isles. "England" was often used to mean not just itself, but the other countries in the British Isles and even the British Empire.
The word "England" comes from the Angles of Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany.
If Jesus returns, you want to be living in Bedford, because this is where the Garden of Eden was, and is therefore the only place that will survive the Second Coming, according to the Panacea Society. This religious cult has brought a house in Bedford for Jesus to live in called "The Haven", and several houses in the Castle Road area.
If you find your goldfish floating on its side, it means it is suffering from swim bladder disorder. It comes from being overfed.
The biggest squid in the world is the Colossal Squid. It is believed to be the world's biggest invertebrate. Its eyes are 1 foot in diameter.
The only athlete in the history of the Olympic Games to be given a personal mention in the closing ceremony is Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards in 1988. However, there is now a rule dubbed the "Eddie the Eagle rule" which states that all athletes taking part in the Olympics must be in the top 30% of their sport.
Roland the Farter was a flatulist to Henry II and would fart for the King on Christmas Day. The King enjoyed his act so much, he gave him 30 acres of land.
20% of human beings sneeze when they stare at the Sun.
If you put earwax on top of a pint of beer or stout, the head would disappear because of the oil in the earwax. If you squirt washing-up liquid in a pond where water boatmen are standing, they will sink.
Q-Tips or cotton swabs were invented by Leo Gerstenzang, when he saw his wife using cotton wool on the end of toothpicks to clean out their babys ears. He called them Baby Gays. Unilever produce 22.5 billion cotton buds a year.
You can tell your child is yours by the earlobes. Like eye colour, hanging or attached earlobes are inherited from your parents. Hanging earlobes dominate attached ones.
The best way to date a cod is to kill it, examine the earbones, and you can tell their age to a day. Alexandre Dumas once claimed that you could walk from France to America on cod.
Elephants have the biggest ears of any animal in the world. They do not however improve their hearing, and are mainly used for cooling purposes. They are also used for aggresive displays.
A bit of rough music would stop you from beating your wife. It was a punishment used in the English countryside where the villagers made noise using metal objects in the middle of the night, that would drive the criminal out.
It is hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle simply because it is too big. Jesus was being literal when he said it and it was a common phrase at the time. Similar phrases appear in the Torah and the Quran. Rich people tried to create get-out clauses when they read this, so they came up with the idea it was a gate into Jerusalem, and that it was a mistranslation of the Greek for rope.
At the coronation of George IV, all the diamonds in the Crown Jewels were hired because they were so expensive at the time.
A Four-eyed fish has two eyes. They are divided into two, so they are looking upwards all the time.
Statistically, you are very unlikely to die in a plane crash, there are more survivors of plane crashes than casualties every year. The main problem in crashes is that under pressure, people try to open their seat belts like those in a car.
The parrot famously said, Pieces of eight, because the Spanish dollar was split into eight pieces. Two bits equalled a quarter of a American dollar, and two bits is still a nickname for a quarter.
Robert Newton, the first actor to play Long John Silver in a sound version of Treasure Island invented the stereotypical pirate voice. He is considered a Patron saint of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Tony Hancock first became well-known as a Robert Newton impersonator.
The Nazis were against fox hunting because it was cruel and immoral. Adolf Hitler was put on a vegetarian diet, because of his flatulence, but he was not a vegetarian. The Nazis were worried that people wouldnt like them if they counterfeited pounds that were made in concentration camps, that tried to disrupt the British economy, so they backed out of the plan.
The Jury of Matrons would determine whether women who were pregnant were pleading the belly and had to wait if they could be hanged or not.
You can beat a lie detector by having exciting thoughts, clinching your anal sphincter (there are actually two of them, the internal and external one) without clenching your buttocks, or to relax completely when being asked control questions, such as your name or address. You cannot use lie detectors in the UK or USA courts. The FBI claim they are about as reliable as astrology and tea leaves.
The lie detector was invented by William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman.
The best way to trick a female spy into blowing their cover is by getting them to swear in their own language, particularly during childbirth, according to Heinrich M?ller, the head of the Gestapo.
Harry Houdini hid an elephant behind a mirror as part of a magic trick. Houndini used to debunk psychics, but this cost him his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle. Some people now believe that he did not die from a punch to the stomach, but of appendicitis, which was worsened by the punch. Some people want Houndinis body exhumed to see if he was actaully murdered by spiritualists.
As a joke, Arthur Conan Doyle once sent a five letters to five friends that read, We are discovered, flee immediately, to see what they would do. One of them disappeared and Conan Doyle never saw him again.
Harry Houdini could pick up pins with his eyelashes.
You can tell when you have run out of invisible ink by covering the paper with lemon juice or milk, and heating it to see what was written. Mansfield Smith-Cumming or C, founder of MI6, discovered you could also use semen as invisible ink.
Many of the paintings by Marcel Duchamp were discovered to contain semen in them, because he mix semen with his paint.
A bank robber from Pittsburgh in 1995 was caught by the police because he thought that by putting lemon juice on his face, he would be invisible.
Toilet paper helped win the Cold War because the Russians did not have much of it. So the Russians instead used secret documents, and spies stole the documents from bins, as part of Operation Tamarisk. The spies complained that they had to dig through all sorts of unpleasent items such as amputated limbs. However, this resulted in their spy masters asking them to steal the limbs to see what kind of shrapnel the Russians used. Operation Tamarisk was supposedly very successful, and without, there might still be a communist Russia.
You could use Gummy bears to rob a bank by melting them down, making a fake finger and leaving a false fingerprint.
There is an enzyme in pineapples called bromelain that can destroy fingerprints. It was used as a plotline in an episode of Hawaii Five-O. This enzyme could also be used to get rid of mouth ulcers.
The best thing to do in a falling lift is to cushion yourself by lying on top of a fat person, however, it is very unlikely that a lift would fall as all of the wires are capable of holding the lift, and they have emergency breaks.
In the Empire State Building, a lift did have all its wires cut when a B-25 bomber collided with the building in 1945 and the propellers cut the wires. However, the breaks worked and the passengers in the lift were saved.
The country were you are most likely to see a tornado is the United Kingdom, not the USA as most would think. On November 21, 1981, 104 tornadoes hit the UK during the day.
It does not matter what colour your clothing is in a hot environment. In many hot climates, black clothing is preferred although this does not warm one up notably.
No edible oysters produce pearls. The largest pearl was found in a giant clam. In the middle of a pearl, you will find the sarcophagus of a nematode worm or another such organic creature.
House dust is mainly made up of dirt and grit, but it varies according to place, season and other factors such as pets, but not as many think, human skin and dust mites.
Men are better than women at multiple choice exams.
Fainting goats help protect flocks of sheep by allowing the rest of the flock to escape from predators like wolves,whilst it is eaten. Older more experienced goats faint against walls to prevent themselves from being eating.
The jumping French lumberjacks of Maine have a rare disorder called Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, which lead to investigations into what became known as Tourettes syndrome. Symptoms of the disorder include obeying any order given to you suddenly and the need to repeat foreign phrases constantly.
In case Russia invaded Germany, the British Army placed bombs around the Rhine, but because it was so cold, chickens would lay on top of the bombs to keep the electronics warm and keep them working.
The chemical composition of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, usually referred to as Ecstasy or E, was designed by the Germans to heal wounds during World War I.
The Germans checked to see people who were claiming to be neutral Belgians were not French spies by getting them to count. Seventy, Eighty and Ninety are named differently in French and Dutch.
The biggest thing in Europe that you can get for 170000 dollars a night is Liechtenstein. Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein wanted more power, and said that if he was not given it, he would sell Liechtenstein to Bill Gates. He got more power, but he later claimed he was only joking.
Britains railways were built by the navvies. They had to be trained for a year, fed on a diet of beer and meat and could out-perform any other manual labourer.
Originally, American trains were so light that when they went off the rails, the passengers simply lifted them back onto the rails themselves.
Originally, a railway station was not built in Slough in England because people at Eton College were worried that students would take the train to London and visit prostitutes.
To artificially inseminate an elephant, you need an ultrasound rectal probe, a light emitting tube, a bicycle helmet, protective clothing, a large amount of Vaseline and a wheelbarrow.
A vampire bat is most likely to bite your big toe.
The biggest load of rubbish in the world is the North Pacific Gyre, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex.