Pub trivia
Pub trivia
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The Welsh are named in several historical laws. In Chester, they can be shot if seen inside the city walls – but only after midnight. Similarly in Hereford, Welshmen can be killed in the Cathedral close - except on Sundays. And Scots beware too – it is permitted to kill a Scot if spotted in York after dark.
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Famous figures who were almost footballers include Gordon Ramsay (who turned to cooking after a knee injury), Julio Iglesias (who played for a Real Madrid youth team before a car crash ended his career), and the philosopher Albert Camus, who was a goalie for his university team before TB ended his professional hopes. He later said, "what I know most about morality and the duty of man I owe to football."
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A hive of bees must collectively fly 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers to make one pound of honey.
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The oldest rugby club in the world is Dublin University Football Club. Founded in 1854, it is also happens to predate the first ever soccer club, Sheffield FC, by three years.
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The Honduran white bat is snow white with a yellow nose and ears. It cuts large leaves to make "tents" which protect its small colonies from harsh jungle rains. It is one of fifteen other species known to make tents.
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Bees don't need to sleep. They simply reserve their energy by remaining motionless during the night.
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An average human loses up to one hundred strands of their hair every day.
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Caffeine is present in coffee plants as a natural defence mechanism, putting animals off eating the fruit.
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In 1147 Pope Eugenius III decided there were two Thursdays in one week. He had travelled to Paris, scheduled to arrive on a Friday, which is typically a day of fasting. Just so the Parisians could hold a celebration on Friday, Eugenius decreed that day to also be a Thursday.
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Love at first sight appears to be more than a myth, according to sex and relationship expert Tracey Cox. She reckons it takes just 90 seconds to 4 minutes to decide if we fancy someone.
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The only person to have been laid to rest on the Moon is Dr Eugene Shoemaker, a top scientist who had been prevented from becoming an astronaut due to a medical condition. But in death he achieved his dream – his ashes were carried to the Moon by a space probe in 1999.
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Fanta owes its existence to Nazi Germany and World War Two. When the conflict broke out, Germany had problems importing Coca-Cola syrup from the States. This sudden lack of Coke led an enterprising businessman to invent Fanta to fill a gap in the market, and the drink achieved global success as soon as the war was over.
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The Kama Sutra was first translated into English by a group of writers headed by Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who risked prosecution for obscenity when he privately printed it in England in 1883. The book quickly became an underground success, but it wasn't until 1963 that the book was legally published.
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Ever wondered where the golfing term "birdie" comes from? It seems we have an American named Ab Smith to thank. While striding around a course in 1899, he played what he described as a "bird of a shot", which became "birdie" over time. ("Bird" was 19th American slang for anything really, really good. Kind of like "cool" is for us.)
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The world's first petrolheads didn't get behind the wheel – they toggled the tiller. That was the name of the giant sort-of joystick that was used to "steer" first cars around. The steering wheel was introduced in 1899, and within a decade the tillers were history.
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Pompeii is now a world-famous tourist attraction thanks to the eruption in AD79 which preserved it at the moment of its destruction. Today it is estimated that one million people live and work in an area which could be decimated within minutes if the still-active Mt Vesuvius had a medium to large scale eruption.
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Golf was outlawed in Scotland in 1457. James II was the killjoy behind the ban – he was preparing for an English invasion and wanted his citizens to concentrate on useful hobbies like archery. The ban was eventually lifted in 1502.
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It's thought that the phrase "mind your Ps and Qs" has a beery origin. Many believe it stems from the days when ale was ordered in pints and quarts in English pubs, and publicans would "mind their Ps and Qs" when tallying up the sales for the day.
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Wall Street used to be an actual wall. The area was once a boundary of the original New Amsterdam settlement, and the wall was created by Dutch settlers as a defence against attacks by British invaders and Native Americans.
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If you're not a member of the royal family, it's illegal to own a maroon coloured car in Japan.
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Contrary to the old saying, most bats have very good eyesight, and fishing bats have echo location so sophisticated that they can detect a minnow's fin as fine as a human hair protruding only two millimetres above a pond's surface. The African heart-nosed bats can hear the footsteps of a beetle walking on sand from a distance of more than six feet.
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George Lazenby is famous as the man who only played Bond once. But that isn't quite true. He reprised the role in an 80s TV film, The Return of the Man from UNCLE – although for legal reasons his character was only referred to as "JB".
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Mexican actor Emilio Fernandez is one of the unsung heroes of the movie world. In the late 1920s he was approached by a Hollywood art director to pose naked for a full-length sketch. He was reluctant, but the moment made him immortal – the drawing was used to sculpt the Oscar statuette.
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Sixteenth Century Pope Clement VII was so fond of mushrooms that he made it illegal for anyone else to eat those growing in the Papal States, so that there would never be a shortage for his own table. He died in 1534 from eating a poisonous mushroom. Oh the irony.
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As well as being rather too fond of fast food, Elvis also had a fetish for police badges. He was so obsessed with collecting them that he paid a special visit to the White House to pick up a narcotics agency badge from President Nixon.
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Red grapes can make white wine, but white/green grapes can't make red wine. That's because the red colour comes not from grape juice but from the skins, which are left in the mix when red wine is being fermented. So if you want to make white wine from red grapes, you just leave the skins out. Indeed, most Champagne is made using red grapes.
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You won't notice unless you know they're there, but 72 names are engraved on the sides of the Tower just beneath the first balcony. Gustav Eiffel chose the names, which honour French engineers, scientists, astronomers, and many other people we've never heard of.
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Men are twice as likely as women to die of parasite-induced causes. This is thought to be because men tend to be larger and present a greater target.
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Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space in May 1991, when she visited the Mir Space Station as a cosmonaut of the Russian space program. Her 18-month training program included astronavigation. In an emergency she might have had to steer the spacecraft, using the stars as a map.
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Research has shown that the scent of grapefruit on a middle-aged women will make her appear about six years younger to men. However, this perception is not reciprocal and the grapefruit scent on men has absolutely no effect on women's perception.
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The use of animals as pub names harks back to times when literacy was rare, and pictures of swans, horses or dogs were used to mark houses where beer was brewed. The Black Horse became popular in the 17th century as it was the nickname of the popular 7th Dragoon Guards.
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Micro organisms that have been found frozen in perma-frost for three million years have successfully been brought back to life.
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Before the arrival of money, people would barter, using cattle and grain to pay for goods. In about 1200 BC, the Chinese began to use shells as a basic currency. By 1000 BC they had started using metal replicas of the shells.
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A staggering 1.3 billion of the world's population suffer from hookworms, minute monsters that cause anaemia by sucking the blood from the intestinal lining.
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When Pope Paul VI made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964, he was the first reigning pope in over 150 years to travel outside Italy. In sharp contrast, Pope John Paul II visited 129 countries during his reign, which ended in 2005.
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All bowling in cricket was originally underarm. Kent cricketer John Willes is credited with popularising the "roundarm" bowling motion which eventually became the overarm we see today. Legend has it that he was inspired by his sister, who started bowling in this outrageous fashion while playing in the garden because her massive 19th Century skirt made underarm rather difficult.
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King George VI competed at Wimbledon. He took part in the 1926 Championships, playing in the men's doubles ten years prior to ascending the throne.
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The word ‘snooker’ was originally military slang for raw, inexperienced army recruits. This was why Neville Chamberlain once called an opponent ‘a regular snooker’ for missing an easy shot. The word stuck, and was soon taken on as the name of the game.
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According to Ian Fleming, James Bond's parents were called Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix. Both died in a mountain climbing accident when Bond was a boy.
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Due to a clerical balls up, there was no Pope John XX. Pope John XIX was pope from 1024 to 1032, and the next John to be pope was Pope John XXI, who held the position from 1276 to 1277.
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The phrase "great white hope" was invented for US boxer James J Jeffries, who came out of retirement in 1910 to take on Jack Johnson, the first ever black heavyweight champion. Jeffries was the "great white hope" who'd supposedly put the "black upstart" back in his place. Instead, Johnson pummelled him into the ground.
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Ever wondered about the names of pubs in TV soaps? EastEnders’ Queen Vic speaks for itself, and the Woolpack is a popular name for a pub in sheep farming country like Emmerdale, being the word for a bale of wool prepared for sale. But Coronation Street’s Rovers Return is more obscure, named in honour of veterans of the Boer War.
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Only one boxing champion has ever retired without losing a single fight in his entire professional career - heavyweight star Rocky Marciano.
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When Muslim traders first brought coffee to Venice from the Middle East, Italian clergymen condemned it as a drink fit for infidels. But Pope Clement VIII loved the taste so much he decided to "claim it" for Christianity by having the drink baptised in 1600.
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One 19th century British law stipulated that those who successfully committed suicide would be executed. Of course, it was later withdrawn due to a lack of candidates.
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The "toughest US president" crown must go to Andrew Jackson, the seventh man to rule the roost. This swaggering gunslinger fought more than 13 duels in his time, taking bullets to the chest and once killing a rival almost at point blank range. And you thought George W Bush was a cowboy.
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John I of France became king at his birth in 1316 but died five days later.
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The star-nosed mole has developed a peculiar shaped nose to help it find its food. The snout is surrounded by ‘tentacles’, which constantly move around as it searches. The 22 fleshy appendages are crammed with over 25,000 sensors which feel the ground to find anything edible. Once located, the tentacles retract so that the mole can get the food into its mouth.
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Liberia and the Sierra Leone boasted a highly unusual form of currency in the early 20th century. Kissie pennies were twisted iron rods, about 7 to 10 inches long, which were believed to contain souls. If broken, the kissie penny’s soul would escape and it would lose its value as money.
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The average Briton will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for traffic lights to change, five days looking for a city parking space and four months stuck in traffic jams.
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