Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Quite Interesting @qi.com · 19h

In 2008 there was a federal court case called 'United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins'. The United States lost.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 1d

On the first night sleeping in an unfamiliar location, one side of your brain remains alert the entire night in order to “watch out” for potential threats.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 2d

September, October and November are the only months not mentioned by Shakespeare in any of his works.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 3d

Charles Earl Boles was an 1870s American stagecoach robber who left poems at his crime scenes, signing them “Black Bart”. One verse was:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread,
For honor, and for riches,
But on my corns too long you’ve tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 3d

In Basel, Switzerland in 1474 a chicken mistaken for a rooster was accused of witchcraft after laying an egg. The chicken was found guilty and burned to death.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 4d

Ponyhenge is a collection of rocking horses in an open field in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

No one knows where the ponies come from, or who is donating them - but the herd continues to grow.

(Image: Jenn Forman Orth)

Outside in the snow, a circle of dozens of rocking horses

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 4d

Word of the Day: BLOBBERY - a garden made of shrubs and bushes shorn to look like blobs. (📷: Paolo)

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 8d

The Incas based their measurement of time on how long it took to boil a potato.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 8d

During the 2020 lockdown, birds no longer had to compete with traffic noise. Their songs became softer and deeper.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 9d

American football ‘huddles’ started because players at Gallaudet, a University for the deaf, wanted to communicate in sign language without the other team seeing.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 9d

Salmon wasn’t used in sushi until the 1980s when Norway produced too much salmon and launched ad campaigns in Japan to sell some of their excess fish.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 10d

You have to vote for a few categories before getting to Best Entertainment, but thanks for clicking through!

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 10d

The scientific term for dog zoomies is Frenetic Random Activity Periods.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 10d

QI XL has been nominated for a TV Choice Award in the Best Entertainment Show category! If you wanted to vote for us, which would be lovely, you can do so at www.tvchoicemagazine.co.uk/vote/

A screenshot of the TV Choice Awards voting website

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 11d

In 2008, West Yorkshire authorities renamed Tickle Cock Bridge, Tittle Cott. The original name was reinstated after a group of elderly residents protested. One said ‘I feel we should never alter names and Tickle Cock has a very clear message behind it’.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 12d

Samuel Pepys' diary entry for this day in 1665 recalls a stay at Mrs Clerke's house, where he left a surprise (or two) in the chimney...

A diary entry that reads 'So I to bed, and in the night was mightily troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night), and feeling for a champer-pott, there was none, I having called the mayde up out of her bed, she had forgot I suppose to put one in there; so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice; and so to bed and was very well again.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 12d

In the late 17th century, the librarian of the Vatican wrote a treatise on how Jesus' foreskin ascended to become the rings of Saturn.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 14d

In 1879, ‘Punch’ predicted video calls: In this cartoon, parents ‘set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire’.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 14d

According to a recent survey, Hereford is the British city where people buy the biggest dildos.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 15d

Hans Christian Andersen would mark each time he masturbated with a cross in his diary.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 16d

When Sigmund Freud was told the Nazis were burning his books, he sarcastically remarked, ‘What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.’

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 16d

The earliest recorded use of ‘fuck’ is from a 1310 trial of a man nicknamed ‘Roger Fuckbythenavele’, meaning he was too stupid to know how to have sex.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 17d

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands. DOUGLAS ADAMS

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 18d

Aztec mothers who died in childbirth were regarded as highly as warriors who died in battle.

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Quite Interesting @qi.com · 18d

‘Orchid’ comes from the Greek orkhis, meaning testicle, because of the shape of its tubers. In Middle English, orchids were called ‘ballockwort’ for the same reason.

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