The Mega Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      • Napoleon suffered from ailurophobia, the fear of cats.

      • Viscount Horatio Nelson chose to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London rather than in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey because he had heard that Westminster was sinking into the Thames River.

      • A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore, where a tree blew over and killed him.

      • Six per cent of motorists said they sometimes leave their keys in the ignition of their unattended car.

      • Napoleon Bonaparte was always depicted with his hand inside his jacket because he suffered from ‘chronic nervous itching’ and often scratched his stomach sores until they bled.

      • The younger of Albert Einstein’s two sons was a schizophrenic.

      • More than 20 per cent of men and ten per cent of women say they’ve forgotten their wedding anniversary at least once.

      • Catherine II of Russia kept her wigmaker in an iron cage in her bedroom for more than three years.

      • One in three male motorists picks his nose while driving.

      • The average housewife walks 10 miles (16km) a day around the house doing her chores. In addition, she walks nearly 4 miles (6km) and spends 25 hours a year making beds.

      • Over 80 per cent of professional boxers have suffered brain damage.

      • Emerson Moser, Crayola’s senior crayon maker, revealed upon his retirement that he was blue-green colour-blind and couldn’t see all the colours.

      • Nearly half of all psychiatrists have been attacked by one of their patients.

      • Xerxes, King of Persia, became so angry at the sea when it destroyed his two bridges of boats during a storm, he had his army beat it with sticks.

      • The Marquis de Sade was only 5 ft 3 in (about 1.6m) tall.

      • Using a fine pen and a microscope, James Zaharee printed Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on a human hair less than 3 inches (8 cm) long.

      • Men change their minds two to three times more than women. Women tend to take longer to make a decision, but once they do, they are more likely to stick to it.

      • Believing that he could end his wife’s incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him, she fainted. Hearing a disturbance, a neighbour came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr Fen kicked her stoutly on the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.

      • About 25 per cent of all adolescent and adult males never use deodorant.

      • Only one person walked from the church to the cemetery with Mozart’s coffin.

      • Some publishers claim that science-fiction readers are better educated than the average book buyer.

      • Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. com, takes at least one snapshot a day to chronicle his life.

      • Women comprise less than 2 per cent of the total death row population in America’s prisons.

      • Martha Jane Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, was married 12 times.

      • Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell had an odd habit of drinking his soup through a glass straw.

      • Victoria Woodhall, the radical feminist who ran for the US presidency in 1872, feared that she would die if she went to bed in her old age. She spent the last four years of her life sitting in a chair.

      • Jesse James would run back home to his mother following a crime. His obsessive love for his mother extended to him marrying a woman called Zerelda, the same name as his mother and one that was uncommon in the 1800s.

      • In 1983, a woman was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.

      • When he was a boy, Thomas Edison suffered a permanent hearing loss following a head injury. One of his ears was pulled roughly as he was being lifted aboard a moving train.

      • While sleeping, one man in eight snores, and one in ten grinds his teeth.

      • The most celebrated levitator in history was St Joseph of Copertino, a dim-witted monk who would allegedly soar into the air whenever he felt religious ecstasy. He had no control over his ‘flights’, which could last for minutes and were attested to by scores of witnesses, including the Pope.

      • Mozart once composed a piano piece that required a player to use two hands and a nose in order to hit all the correct notes.

      • When Napoleon wore black silk handkerchiefs around his neck during a battle, he always won. At Waterloo, he wore a white cravat and lost.

      • The Roman emperor Nero married his male slave Scorus in a public ceremony.

      • The shortest place names in the USA are ‘L’, a lake in Nebraska, ‘T’, a gulch in Colorado, ‘D’, a river in Oregon flowing from Devil’s Lake to the Ocean, and ‘Y’, a city in Arkansas, each named after its shape.

      • In Europe, ‘E’ is a river in Perthshire, Scotland; there are villages called ‘Å’ in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and a ‘Y’ in France.

      • The Pacific Caroline Islands has a place named ‘U’ and a peak in Hong Kong is called ‘A’.

      • Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight saving.

      • The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminium.

      • It snowed in the Sahara Desert on 18 February 1979.

      • Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.

      • 200 million years ago, the Earth contained one land mass called Pangaea.

      • It is illegal to swim in Central Park, New York.

      • At the deepest point (11.034km), an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.

      • The largest wave ever recorded was 85m high near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971.

      • Antarctic means ‘opposite the Arctic’.

      • The largest iceberg recorded, in 1956, was 200 miles long and 60 miles wide, larger than the country of Belgium.

      • The surface of the Dead Sea is 400m below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, which is only 75km away.

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