www.ditl.org

Not jokey as such, but fun or amusing or at least surprising...


Pablo Picasso’s full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.

Sharks existed before trees did.

If you have 2 legs, then you have more than the average number of legs for a human.

Oxford University predates the entire Aztec civilisation.

On average, cows kill more American citizens than terrorists do.

The largest purchaser of explosives in the US is the US Army. The second largest is the Disney corporation.

The ultimate aim of a game of Golf is for the players to play as little Golf as possible.

It is impossible to "live in the now". The only thing any human being ever experiences is the past.

There was a time when trees had evolved, but the funguses and creatures which consume wood had not. Dead wood piled up in incredible amounts, and since the Oxygen content of the world was around 35% at this time, the resulting wildfires were immensely larger and more ferocious than their modern equivalents.

If you travel due north, you will eventually be travelling due south. And if you travel due south, you will eventually be travelling due north. But if you travel east or west, you will travel east or west forever. (Unless you stop!)

To whatever extent Lobsters can think, the Lobsters in the Tianic's kitchens would have regarded the sinking of the ship as a miracle.

If you think about it, there was an occasion on which your parents put you down... and then never picked you up again.

Your odds of dying on the way to buy a lottery ticket are far higher than your odds of winning the lottery.

There is a standard medical procedure by which wives can recover a sperm sample from their dead husband. It involves sticking a metal rod up the corpse's backside and shocking his prostate. Women whose husbands die early use it to have a child that is his biological offspring.

If a pregnant woman has a heart attack, her body will use stem cells from the fetus to help repair it.

We are closer to 2040 than we are to 1998.

In 1998 a Missouri man deliberately damaged a levee, flooding 14,000 acres, to stop his wife from getting home so that he could have sex with his Mistress in the house. He was sentenced to life in prison.

If you live in the US, statistically you have a higher chance of dating Taylor Swift than you have of dying of Bird Flu and Ebola combined. (The odds of either one combined, not the odds of dying of both diseases together!)

The US Navy is teaching sailors to use celestial navigation again, in case GPS is disabled by an enemy during a war.

Contrary to popular belief, any part of your tongue can taste any kind of flavour.

No, we do not only use 10% of our brain.

Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.

There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entire continent of America, North and South, to a depth of one foot.

If the sun was shrunk down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way galaxy on the same scale would be the size of the continental United States.

Swedish blood donors get a text message every time the blood they donated is used to help a patient.

At the age of 18, you have about 3,400 weekends left to live.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer to the modern day than it was to the Stegosaurus.

As far as we know, writing was invented three times - in China, the Middle East, and Central America. It was imported from those places to everywhere else.

For the publicity the Bond movies have brought them, Aston Martin have agreed to give Daniel Craig a brand new car, every time they bring a new model version out, for the rest of his life.

Cleopatra was closer in time to the Moon landings than she was to the construction of the great pyramids.

There is a hotel in Japan that has been in business continually for over 1,300 years. It's also been run by 46 consecutive generations of the same family.

By holding $181 billion of cash reserves abroad, Apple has avoided paying $59 billion in taxes in the US.

It's been estimated that at any given moment, about 1% of the world's population is drunk.

The information content of a human sperm is about 37.5 Mb. At that density of information per volume, a typical hard drive would hold well over 40,000 Tb.

NASA estimates that more than 2,000,000 lives have been saved using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels.

A Swedish student once spent $27 on bitcoins and subsequently forgot about them. When he remembered to check years later, they were worth over $880,000.

In the NHS, newly qualified Doctors join the organisation around August. Veteran Doctors refer to it as "the killing time".

Macau's gambling area is five times the size of the one in Las Vegas.

It's been estimated that if you read all the terms and conditions you agreed to, it would take you 76 days per year of doing nothing else.

Stephen Hawking once gave a talk in Japan, and was asked in advance by the organisers not to mention that the universe could collapse billions of year in the future in case it caused a slump in the stock markets.

On Titan the air is so thick and the gravity so low that you could strap home-made wings to your arms and fly.

Koala bears are not bears. And they have two penises.

A guy once tried to mug David Copperfield. Even though he had his mobile phone, passport, and wallet on him, Copperfield used sleight of hand to make the mugger think that all his pockets were empty, and the man walked away with nothing.

Sheep that are sheared don't recognise one another afterwards, and will spend several days fighting to re-establish the dominance hierarchy of the flock.

A New Zealand trucker once tripped and fell onto a high pressure air valve. It punctured his thigh and blew it up to three times normal size. He barely survived, and it took him three days to burp and fart the excess gas from his body.

The best selling product of all time is the Rubik's cube. The second best is the iPhone (all models).




The number of different ways a deck of cards can be arranged is 52!... that is 52x51x50x49x48... all the way to 1.

Written out, that number is 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

That number is so large it's far beyond human comprehension. To gain an idea of how big a number that is, imagine doing the following.

1) You go to the equator, and start a timer that counts seconds.

2) You take a step along the equator.

3) You then wait... until your counter reaches one billion years.

4) You take another step.

5) You keep taking steps at the rate of one every billion years until you've walked around the entire equator. (Special arrangements are needed for the wet bits.)

6) When you finish walking around the equator, which has taken you well over 40 million billion years, you take a single drop of water from the Pacific ocean.

7) Keep doing this until the Pacific ocean is completely empty of water. (You'll have to dam it off first.)

8) When you're done with that, put down a piece of paper on the ground.

9) Refill the Pacific and then repeat the entire process of walking around the world and taking drops of water out of the Pacific ocean until it is empty again.

10) Once it's empty, add a second piece of paper on top of the first.

11) Keep repeating this cycle, gradually building up a pile of paper.

12) When the pile of paper reaches the sun... scrap the whole pile thing and start over.

13) Repeat ALL of the above... 1,000 times over

14) Look at the counter... and realise the total elapsed time in seconds is only 1/3 of the total required to equal the combinations of a deck of cards.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer to the modern day than it was to the Stegosaurus.

I always found this one to be so cool.

M&Ms were invented for the US Army in WWII so that soldiers could be given chocolate in a form that wouldn't melt in tropical conditions.

The Washington Monument is capped with an aluminium pyramid in an example of conspicuous consumption - at the time, aluminium was much more expensive than gold.

A sloth can hold its breath for longer than a dolphin.

The image most people have of the Sahara desert is endless sand dunes, but in fact over 70% of the Sahara desert is bare rock.

Vikings would put animal bones into their molten iron, thinking it forged magical swords. Historians believe the carbon in the bones turned the iron into a form of steel, making those swords stronger than iron ones.

The classic Southern US "Iced tea with sugar" drink was another sign of conspicuous consumption - all three of those items were expensive in that time and place, so having all of it to hand in one drink was a sign of wealth and generosity.

The last time Liechtenstein had an army, it consisted of 80 men. The army fought in the Austro-Prussian war and returned with 81 men, as they made a new friend during the war and brought him home with them.

Pirates wore an eye patch so that when they went into the darkened interior of the ship they could switch it across and have a dark-adapted eye ready to go.

The myth that carrots improve eyesight was spread by the RAF so that night fighters directed by radar could be explained as pilots having excellent night vision because of their diet. Carrots were chosen because they were quite plentiful even during the food-scarce days of the war.

If you have one skeleton inside you, you have less than the average number of skeletons per human being. (Think pregnant women.)

The guy who greenlit Lost was fired because the show was so expensive to get going.

There are thirty times more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Everyone in the world could own over four hundred trees each.

Denmark has had to inform US Presidential candidates that they are not in fact a socialist country on three different occasions.

Up until the 1950s there was a common belief that if a woman ran more than two miles, her uterus would fall out.

The iconic symbol of the American West, the Pony Express, was only in service for 19 months.

In the early years of photography, there was a very high demand for photographers to take pictures of dead people. Relatives would have the corpse photographed as a keepsake to remember them by.

The shortest war on record was fought between the British and Zanzibar. When the Sultan died, an anti-British politician declared himself the new Sultan, without British approval. Royal Navy ships in the harbour shelled his palace until he surrendered 38 minutes later. A new pro-British Sultan was imposed. Afterwards the British forced the Zanzibar government to pay for the ammunition the ships used up.

Viagra can keep cut flowers standing upright for up to a week.

In the 18th century you could get free admission to the London Zoo if you brought along a cat or dog to feed to the lions.

A woman can get pregnant whilst she is already pregnant.

Computer keyboards typically have many times the bacteria of a toilet seat.

Honey never goes off. Archeologists have found pots of honey that are thousands of years old and still perfectly edible.

The Turritopsis Nutrivcula Jellyfish is the only known creature that is biologically immortal; they never die unless through injury or accident.

Ants outnumber humans by 1.6 million to 1. Curiously, the combined weight of all ants is about the same as the combined weight of all humans.

Whilst Indian elephants have long been domesticated, nobody has ever tamed an African elephant.

The little groove under your nose is called a philtrum. It's there because the two sides of your face develop independently in the womb before coming together; that's the join.

Clock hands go clockwise rather than anticlockwise because in the northern hemisphere where clocks were invented, that's the direction the shadow on a sundial moves.

Here's some Transformer-related ones.

1. the first female Transformer to appear in any media was Chromia.

2. The character Cheetor has both the first lines in Beast Wars and the last lines in Bast Machines, providing bookends for the Beast Era.

3. In Beast Wars, the characters Dinobot and Airazor never directly interact.

4. In the original Generation One run, Bumblebee received more toys than any other character, getting a toy shipped out for seven of the eight years back then.

5. According to Hasbro, the Diaclone toy for Sunstreaker was the first car-to-robot toy designed.

I know, I'm necroing this thread, but:
The longest word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard with the left hand is "stewardesses".
Rubber bands last longer in the fridge.
In the Unitrd States, there are two recipes for banana pudding, both as a result of the Civil War. One is a Northern recipe and one is a Southern recipe.

My recipe for Banana pudding is:

1) Remove yellow bit
2) Eat