QI

My friend Sara has recently gotten me hooked on a British game show called QI, hosted by my favorite person in the entire world, Stephen Fry. The premise of the show is this: Stephen asks random, seemingly unknowable questions to a group of four panelists composed mostly of comedians but sometimes a doctor or professor with an impressively acute sense of humor. The panelists banter and snark and earn nonsensical points for answering questions to which no human being on earth should know the answer, like when Daniel Radcliffe launched into a five-minute explanation of magic in ancient Egypt after he was asked the question "What is the oldest trick in the book?"

Here is a smattering of what I have learned so far:

1. Sharks are the only vertebrate without a backbone.
2. The "present" officially began on Sunday, January 1, 1950.
3. A dormouse is not a mouse. (Nor is it, if you were curious, a door.)
4. There were over 7,000 heads of lettuce on the Titanic when it sank.
5. Louis VII's bad haircut started the Hundred Years' War.
6. Iceland has more Nobel Prize winners per capita than any other country on Earth: 1. (The population is 320,000.)
7. The Eskimo Olympics include a game in which two players each hook a looped end of a string onto their ears and pull.
8. Penguins are too light to set off land mines.
9. Queen Victoria had her ice imported from Boston.
10. When Pope Innocent III sentenced every person in the Netherlands to death for heresy, the Duke of Alba ordered 7,000 pairs of ice skates so that when the Spanish came to invade in the dead of winter, the Dutch could skate out along the canals and fight back.
11. Very rarely are igloos actually made out of ice. They're usually made from caribou hide.
12. Back when Coney Island was the most popular entertainment venue in the world, its longest running attraction was babies in incubators. At that time, there were no incubators in hospitals.
13. In Manhattan, where space was at a premium, Eleanor Roosevelt kept her baby in a cage that hung out her window.
14. Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was actually created in a petri dish.
15. Forty is the only number in the English language whose letters, when written out, are in alphabetical order.
16. "Gymnasium" is Greek for "place to be naked."
17. In the early Olympic Games, medals were awarded for poetry composition. (This fact delights me--a person who will never, as hard as she tries, demonstrate the athletic fitness of a nine-year-old Chinese gymnast, but who can analyze the shit out of a poem written in iambic pentameter.)

Is this not fascinating? Go, get thee to YouTube!