Do You Know? January 2021

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Do you know Sweden has a ski-through McDonald’s?

Title photo by Per-Olof Forsberg on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Here’s our latest collection of strange facts to impress your mates:

1. When you first meet people, it is common to forget their names. This phenomenon is the ‘next-in-line’ effect. It happens because people worry about what they’ll say next rather than concentrating on the names of people they’re meeting.
2. Until 1948, 7-Up contained “lithium citrate”, a mood stabiliser used to treat bipolar disorder!

3. The actor Frankie Muniz who played Malcolm in Malcolm in the Middle suffers from transient ischemic attacks – long-term memory loss brought on by a series of concussions and mini-strokes. He no longer remembers being in the show.

4. Pirates probably didn’t wear eyepatches because of a missing eye. It’s much more likely that they were keeping one eye ready to see in darkness so that they could quickly adjust when going below deck.
5. Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, known as Annie Londonderry, was a Latvian immigrant to the United States who in 1894-95 became the first woman to cycle around the world. She only learnt to ride a bike a few days before she set off.
6. A cyberchondriac is someone who scours the internet looking for details of their illnesses.
7. A study using MRI scans showed that the brains of people who exercise moderately look 10 years younger than those who don’t.
8. Scientists at the University of Alberta spent seven years working out that human urine contains 3,079 different chemical compounds.
9. Research has shown that dogs actually like the silly, high-pitched voice their owners use to talk to them.

10. Sweden has a ski-through McDonald’s. Here are 75 other facts about McDonald’s.

11. One in three children can use a tablet before they can speak, a survey found.
12. ‘Kennedy’ means “ugly head” in Gaelic.
13. You can get a stand-up comedy master’s degree at the University of Kent.
14. The term “pipe dream” is a reference to the insane dreams people have when smoking opium.
15. Eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.
16. Before he was a famous musician, Johnny Cash was a military code breaker for the US Air Force.

17. The Guinness Book of World Records recognised Don Gorske in 2016 when he ate his 28,788th Big Mac!

18. A whole orange will float on water, but a peeled orange will sink.
19. The Mandarin word for ‘film’ literally translates as ‘electric shadow’.
20. John F Kennedy’s Eternal Flame in Arlington National Cemetery has only gone out twice since 1963.
21. While filming the movie “Entebbe,” about a hijacked plane, an actual hijack took place and the aeroplane landed at the airport. They filmed the real hostages exiting the plane and put it into the movie.
22. Nearly 2.7 tons of meteor debris hit the Moon each day.
23. On average, the Japanese sleep two hours a night less than the Chinese.

24. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album was in the Billboard charts for 943 weeks. To put this into context, the runner-up is Legend by Bob Marley and the Wailers, which was in charts for 588 weeks!

25. A study found that those who consider their spouse or partner to be their best friend get about twice as much life satisfaction from marriage as others.
26. Prisoners on Alcatraz always had hot showers so they didn’t get acclimatised to cold water and try to escape by swimming.
27. The only difference between fog and mist is visibility: if you can’t see more than 100 metres ahead, it’s fog, not mist.
28. Before 1868, eating meat from four-legged animals was illegal in Japan for more than a thousand years.

29. Al Pacino turned down the role of Han Solo.

30. Russell Crowe turned down the role of Morpheus in The Matrix.
31. The Dutch army had only one tank during WWII.

32. Japanese manufacture Toto built a motorcycle that runs on excrement!

We hope you enjoyed our article “Do You Know? January 2021”. Click here for more strange facts.