03-03-2022, 15:50
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The oldest extant wooden wheel in the world, discovered in 2002 around 12 miles south of Ljubljana, is between 5,100 and 5,350 years old, roughly the same age as Stonehenge, and older than the domesticated camel.
There's enough gold within the Earth to coat the planet's entire surface knee-deep.
At a length of 2,340 miles, it takes a single drop of water approximately 90 days to travel from the source of the Mississippi River to the sea.
Avocado, deriving from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl, literally means "bollock". The indigenous people of Mesoamerica used the same word to refer to the fruit and their testicles on account of the similar shape.
The word "fizzle", coined in the 15th century, originally meant "to fart silently".
At Belmont Park racecourse in 1923, jockey Frank Hayes rode Sweet Kiss to victory in a steeplechase despite dying of a heart attack in the final straight. His death was discovered when he toppled from the saddle after passing the winning post.
On 3rd November 1906, when the German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer first presented his findings on the pathology of pre-senile dementia at the Tübingen meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatrists, the 88-strong audience rudely dismissed him in their eagerness to hear the following lecture on compulsive masturbation.
Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart fought in the Boer War and both World Wars. In the course of his career he was shot in the ankle, leg, hip, ear, stomach, face and head, was blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, tunnelled out of a POW camp and tore his own fingers off when a doctor refused to amputate them. Describing his experience of WWI, he later said, "frankly, I rather enjoyed the war."
Reverend William Buckland, the first man to give a full and accurate scientific description of a dinosaur, had a custom-made table inlaid with fossilised faeces, and was famous for serving outlandish dishes to guests including panther, crocodile, squirrel pie, horse's tongue, battered mouse, and bluebottle fly. His son, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, continued this tradition after his father's death, treating his visitors to Japanese sea slug, boiled elephant trunk, rhinoceros pie, porpoise heads, and stewed mole. One day, attempting to bring a nine-foot prize sturgeon down to the kitchen, he dropped it down the stairs and it smashed through the door before skidding to a halt under the kitchen table, whereupon "the cook screamed, the housemaid fainted, the cat jumped on the dresser, the dog retreated behind the copper and barked, the monkeys went mad with fright, and the parrot has never spoken a word since."
West Bromwich Albion have taken just five points from their last dozen matches; their poorest twelve-game run at this level of football since the winter of 1995-96, worse even (by one point) than the spell between November 1999 and February 2000 which left the club on the brink of relegation.
Some facts make for better reading than others, but the truth is the truth, all the same.
47 mins Premier here we come
