10 ‘quite interesting’ facts

1 Manuel Noriega, Panama’s dictator, would dress his teddy-bears up as paratroopers and display them on his shelves.

Anna: Noriega died in May, and when someone interesting dies, that’s the best time to research them. Obituary writers dig out the weirdest stuff.

2

A Canadian man named Daniel Boria was fined this year for tying 100 balloons to a lawn chair and floating four kilometres into the air. Anna: He was inspired by the Pixar film Up. He got into trouble and had to bail out – luckily, he had a parachute on. The judge said he was “unconscionably stupid”, but I can’t judge him as anything but a hero.

3

A US hot dog company has invented a sausage-drone.

Andrew: Sadly, it was just a PR stunt, because it can only deliver one hot dog at a time, which is much less efficient than land-based sausage-delivery systems.

4

North Korea has so much spare nuclear material they’ve started advertising it online.

Andrew: And they’re giving out their ambassador’s phone number, just in case you’d like to go and collect it up from him.

There was also a small ad in the back of a magazine, which as good as said: “Would you like any uranium?” We find little amusing crumbs of comfort about ostensibly grim stories in the news.

5 This year, 2,000 bees were stolen in Beeston.

James: It’s a silly fact, but it tells you there’s a big beestealing problem that’s going on around the world; there were 400 beehive thefts in just six months. Bees are going extinct. There’s been quite a bit about it in the news, about how they’ve got diseases and aren’t reproducing as much as they should be. That’s why they’re being stolen; it’s supply and demand.

6

Donald Trump spent more days golfing in his first 100 days as president than Rory Mcilroy, a professional golfer. James: I’m a keen golfer myself, but haven’t had enough time to play this year – maybe I should become the leader of the free world.

In February, Mcilroy played a round of golf with Trump, just to see what it would be like to play with the president. Trump has secret service agents in his little golf buggy, and keeps high-powered rifles in his golf bag on the course. He probably is the best golfer to become president; Kennedy was supposed to be talented, but didn’t really have any lessons.

Trump apparently is shooting in the high 70s, but he doesn’t release his scorecards (much like his taxes) so we can’t say exactly how good he is. We also don’t know about Kim Jong-un, though according to South Korean press, North Korean propaganda claims Kim Jong-il got 13 holes-in-one on his firstever round of golf.”

7

The first recorded use of the word “sponge cake” was by Jane Austen.

Andrew: It was in a letter to her sister. I’m not sure we have her response, but it was presumably complete bafflement.

8

A scientist called Neil Gemmell is going to look for the Loch Ness Monster’s dandruff.

Dan: It’s all to do with environmental DNA, a new way of monitoring animals in water. The idea is that skin-flakes come off, so testing a jar of water from a lake can tell you how many species there are in it. He was asked by a Loch Ness Monster “expert” whether it could be applied to the Loch. Jokingly, he said it could, and news outlets leapt on it. It worked out so well in publicity terms that now he’s actually going to do it. It sounds ridiculous, but there’s a lot of serious science underneath it.

9

Crystal Palace FC fans accidentally vandalised their own team’s bus.

Andrew: They’d been playing a game against Middlesbrough, found what they thought was the opposing team’s bus, and wrote “Crystal Palace” on it in massive letters. They did £40,000 of damage, and Crystal Palace now have an extremely well-labelled bus.

10

The world’s leading fortune-cookie writer has retired after 30 years – because of writer’s block.

Dan: Donald Lau worked for Wonton Food Inc, which makes 4.5million fortune cookies a day. He got the job because he had the best English, and has finally stopped because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

In 2005, the company was investigated over a cookie he’d written. It said “All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off ” and on the back was a set of lottery numbers.

Five out of six were correct, which led to

110 people winning the lottery that week.