Stuff (trivia) that you should have known but didn't...

[LikeDylanInTheMovies]

At the age of 36 I've discovered that

1. Shirley McClaine and Warren Beatty were brother and sister

2. Camels store fat and not water in their humps.

People I've told about my discoveries have universally responded with 'well yeah, everyone knows that'.

Any other factoids you were well behind the curve with?

Better than that Mum, they walk!

Well, kind of. If you were to plant a load of banana trees at one end of a field, then come back a few years later then they'd be at the other end.

What happens is that each plant sends out a runner under the ground. Then a new plant grows from that runner and the original one dies. Over a few years they move from one side of the field to the other.

Also, banana are now all sterile and cannot reproduce without help.

A good point well made Dylan. East Anglia is a very 'singular' part of the country.

Edinburgh is further west than Bristol.

Vienna is further east than Prague - which mucks up the definition of Eastern/Western Europe.

The definition of hardwoods and softwoods has nothing to do with how 'soft' or 'hard' they are to work with. Balsa wood comes from a hardwood tree.

You can easily delete your browser programme and then easily re-download it if it gives you problems (Chrome, I'm looking at you).

Have the Elgin marbles been mentioned yet? I was sure I'd seen photos of these giant Easter egg shaped marbles !!

And Andover-isn't it in Denmark?!

They're not in Elgin and they are not shaped like marbles. Very misleading

It would be awesome if they were in Elgin. The museum in Elgin used to have a Borneon shrunken head which fascinated me.

What's the conspiracy with the Elgin marbles?

The 'No such thing as a fish' thing is because fish don't form a monophyletic grouping - ie if you take the most recent organism that is an ancestor of all fishes, and every single species that evolved from that ancestor, your grouping will include things that are not (what we call) fish. One branch of the fish evolutionary tree gave rise to the tetrapods - amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

Thank you for explaining that a lot more knowledgeably and far more eloquently than I managed Gerund and without saying the word 'fish' quite as many times as I did!

I'm not sure about the Walkers crisps.
Back in the day I remember that almost all salt and vinegar crisps were in blue packets. Cheese and onion were in green.
Walkers were always different.
Walkers were nowhere near as big as they are now.

I did say 'fish' quite a lot! But tricky not to really

Is it true or just a bit of misinformation that they don't have squash/cordial in America?

What IS true about America: it would be pretty unusual to find a kettle in an American kitchen - whereas it's obviously pretty bizarre for us not to have kettles here

For years I thought left-hand drive cars were for left-handed people

All the kettles I've seen in American to shows / films etc have been whistling ones they put on the stove (like my grandparents had). Don't they have electric kettles?

How do they make tea or coffee in American homes?

We lived in America for years & could only find a whistling kettle to buy. None of our friends had kettles but had coffee machines (& didn't drink tea). Work had an urn for hot water (but it was never boiling hot so tea tasted rank!).

The Toyota MR2 was just called MR ("em-ehr") in France, because saying "em-ehr-deux" sounds like "emerder", which means "to put shit on something".

Similarly, the Mercedes Vito van is hilarious if you are Finnish, as it means "cunt".

Jeanna that's crazy. I have a coffee machine and don't drink tea, but couldn't conceive of not having a kettle.

KickAss I think it starts at Sheffield, seeing as Sheffield isn't that far away from the East Midlands as it's close to both Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire... In fact, doesn't the Peak District run through the north- including South Yorkshire, Manchester and Cheshire!

"The North" is anything north of Watford.

My dad said so, so it must be true

(He was from Glasgow)

We only breathe out of one nostril at a time, and every couple of hours it changes over. This is not true, I have been sat with my fingers under my nose and air comes out of both
the marmite thing... I thought the consistency thing was because we use low fat ie: more water content spreads now that made the marmite gloopier.