Radio boffin’s new trivia book
Trivia fans will relish a new miscellany of fascinating facts from radio host John Maytham
HOW many holes are there in a Marie biscuit? Why do cats lie in the sun? How fat would you need to be in order to make yourself bulletproof? These are just a few of the obscure questions listeners have come up with in a bid to stump radio host John Maytham in the popular Rapid Fire segment he presents on CapeTalk.
The answers to these and other questions have now been collected in a fun, quirky and fascinating book. From the sublime to the just plain ridiculous, here are a few gems that are guaranteed to kick-start animated conversations at the dinner table and get trivia junkies scratching their heads in disbelief.
How many holes are there in an average Marie biscuit, what are they there for and how do you count them?
There are between 16 and 23 holes per biscuit, and therefore an average of 19. I was told that there’d been a “hole count” of biscuits made in 43 separate countries. I haven’t been able to find that survey, so – I can’t believe I’m confessing this – I bought two packets and counted the holes in each biscuit. The lowest number was 17; the highest 21.
They’re called docker holes, and they are there to allow steam to be released from the innards of the biscuit during baking, which would otherwise cause them to swell and bubble.
The traditional way of counting docker holes is by spreading a thick layer of soft butter on one Marie, covering that biscuit with another Marie and squeezing them together, and then counting the number of butter “worms”. What body part was added to Barbie dolls in 2000 for the first time? A belly button. This was a short question and answer, but it inspi red a number of (mostly riba ld) comments about “innies” and “outies”, and visits to dusty cupboards to exhume various models of Barbie to check the veracity of the claim. The most popular false teeth in the 1800s were called Waterloo teeth. Why? These were dentures made from teeth taken from the bodies of soldiers who died during the Battle of Waterloo. They were especially desirable because they came from young men, whose teeth would have decayed less than what would otherwise have been available.
They were probably pulled out using pliers and taken back to the UK, where “dental technicians” would have boiled them, shaped them and then fitted them to a denture base made from ivory. How fat do you have to be in order to be bulletproof? A few reported incidents give practical significance to this question. In 2010, 35-year-old Samantha Frazier was shot in the stomach. Doctors reportedly said her extensive layer of belly fat prevented serious injury and possibly death.
In a 1980 shoot-out, eight police bullets hit a Massachusetts suspect weighing 210kg. He was still conscious when he got to hospital. A doctor was quoted saying his vital organs were shielded because “his body fat acted as a sandbag”.
After testing the issue in 2007 a medical team found you’d need a layer of fat 72cm thick to guarantee survival.
A simi lar experiment conc luded you’d have to weigh more than 600kg to be sure of stopping a bullet with your fat. (Turn over)