Hitler and him got on so well!

Bob Holness played sax on Gerry Raf..... I'll get my coat shall I?

I feel a little ill now.

...to get to Hitler.

I wonder was being called "Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie" part of the essential criteria in the job ad for Lady In Waiting back then?

That or Hermione Bumphrey-Twaddle, or Glissando Withering-Flummage, or Grezelda Clodsbiddle-fFeatherynge-fFeatherynge.

Ok I know that in recent times, thanks to things like QI, the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down judgement to the gladiators has always been wrongly interpreted (We now know thumbs up = death, thumbs down = life).
I discovered this interesting fact several years ago when I illustrated a small games & puzzles book about gladiators for the British Museum.
I remember,when it came to me doing a little drawing to illustrate this fact (the text didn't mention that it had always been interpreted the wrong way round), I queried this point several times - Are you sure (British Museum) that you haven't made a mistake?

Anyway my point now is - Has anyone considered the ramifications?

Every time you see Macca with his traditional "thumbs up" to the cameras
what he's really saying is, to quote the the Armstrong & Miller Show,
"Kill Them! Kill Them All!"

My interesting fact is - MACCA IS EVIL!! BEWARE!!

I mean, if you, umm, needed it.

is one of only two people in Chiswick licensed to handle nuclear waste.

Apparently...

Allegedly

Ukuleles are commonly associated with music from Hawaii where the name roughly translates as "jumping flea". According to Queen Lili'uokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch, the name means “the gift that came here”, from the Hawaiian words uku (gift or reward) and lele (to come). Developed in the 1880s, the ukulele is based on two small guitar-like instruments of Portuguese origin, the cavaquinho and the rajao, introduced to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira and Cape Verde. One of the most important factors in establishing the ukulele in Hawaiian music and culture was the ardent support and promotion of the instrument by King David Kalakaua. A patron of the arts, he incorporated it into performances at royal gatherings.

Altogether now...plinky, plinky, plinky, plinky...

had a very healthy shark population, and I do mean the kind that swims.

on warm summer days old ladies are legally obliged to open a tupperware box containing boiled egg sandwiches.

Do not like water

happens.

...or hippopotamuses? Anyway, they're more closely related to whales than they are to any other land mammal.

was engaged to Rosamund Pike:

and is now married to Anoushka Shankar:

I want to know how he does it.

....were refused entry to the 1950 World Cup because some of their players had played barefoot in a game played at Ilford v France in the 1948 Olympic Games and they didn't wish to wear boots in the World Cup either.

lost all feeling in his feet due to a childhood accident involving a treehouse and Children's magic set. To make sure he put his footie boots on the correct foot he marked them with a R or L in tipex on the tongue of the boots.

...Andrew Motion has no kneecaps, because he fell off a bicycle and smashed them.

Once had the highest concentration of licensed premises in the UK.

And a lot of naughty ladies of negotiable affection.

is a serious artist, apparently;

http://www.brillianttv.co.uk/timmymallett/interests-painting.html

It's a mammal.

"Drawing from my vast, though admittedly unresolved catalogue of general know-it-all, facts of interest etcetera, corroborated, corroboree: a sacred or warlike assembly of aboriginals, may I.. remind you of the exploits of one William Barker of Manchester? In the 1890s, Billy cleared a canal thirty-five feet wide, making a running jump, jack-knifing into a second to land, perfectly dry, on the other side

of every 200 atoms in your body 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen and 19 are carbon.

99.5% of the world's habitable space by volume is off limits to human beings.

if you sunk a well to the core of the earth and dropped a brick down it, it would take 45 mins to hit the bottom.

if the ozone were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just 2 millimetres or so thick. thats why its so fragile.

if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly - but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.

the average distance between stars in the universe is over 30 million million km.

on a diagram of the solar system to a scale, with the Earth the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away, and Pluto two and half km distant and about the size of a bacterium so you couldn't see it anyway.

Makes you think a bit doesn't it?

the On The Buses actor, was an original member of Atomic Rooster.

Bought that new Max Hastings book the other week, All Hell Let Loose, about WW2...

When an Anglo-American force invaded French Algeria & Morocco in Nov 1942, the French didn't just say, 'Oh, hi, come in,' but resisted the invasion of what was then sovereign Vichy French territory. In Morocco, Americans "incurred 1,500 casualties in early actions ashore" while American aircraft attacked French gunnery positions. It took two days for General Eisenhower to broker a ceasefire.

The task force was split into three parts: two American, one British - the Brits were aiming for Algiers. It basically came in 'behind' the Afrika Korps - Montgomery's 8th Army had been fighting the Germans & Italians in North Africa further east for some time. Six months later in May 1943, the surviving Axis forces surrendered and the Allies took 238,000 prisoners.

Aka beloved patriarch Uncle Phil in the sitcom "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" also voiced Shredder in the original Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon.

gave express orders not to bomb Senate House, Bloomsbury (University of London's library) because he wanted to use the building after the invasion of Britain as his headquarters. The building was the inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth in the novel 1984; during WW2 it became the Minstry of Information and Orwell's wife Eileen worked there. Orwell's novel Animal Farm (written in 1944 but not published until 1945) was effectively neutered by the Ministry of Information for 18 months for fear of upsetting Stalin.

I was round visiting my parents today and when a text alert (the Nokia default) sounded on my phone my father (who did a stint in the army in the '50s) said "do you know that's Morse Code for SMS?". He's 78 now and while he does use a mobile phone he's not familiar with the acronym SMS- he just recognised its similarity to SOS.
Maybe this is widely known (not the bit about my father) and I'm going to be feeling foolish shortly.

You have to follow Stephen Fry by law.

...the woolly Mammoth was still alive well into the 'historical era' (overlapping with civilisations in Egypt, Babylon, etc). Albeit that the last remnant - believed to have survived to c.2000 BC - were to be found on Wrangel Island, an isolated place north-west of the Bering Strait, not discovered in the modern era until the 1860s.

Hence no Mammoth hieroglyphs on any pyramids or ziggurats.

It's a piece, or more accurately, a phrase taken from a piece, composed for the classical guitar by Franciso Tarrega. It's in 3/4 time, and its name is 'Gran Vals'.

It's played by tens, possible hundreds, of millions of people every day and almost every single one of them has no idea of what it is they're listening to.

Can you guess?

And no cheating on Google.

... Paphitis is still addicted to dwarf porn.

Liked to do it with dead people.

According to David Icke.

http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/55533-death-of-a-showman-jimmy-savill...

The reason it does freeze at this temperature is because of nucleation — ice crystals form and spread because they are seeded by things like dust particles, bacteria or even imperfections in the container.

Given a sufficiently pure water sample and a high-enough quality container, you can cool water down to about -40°C before it turns to ice.

had a bunch of Zappa 8 tracks in his Rolls-Royce. According to his son.

...Arctic foxes is 'a skulk'.

Who knew?