Back Yard of the Universe

Hello fact-fans! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here due to my schedule as a fictitious person being a bit full. To make up for it, here are some nuggets of trivia from my Book of Super Amazo-Facts, available soon in a bookstore near you (or within 500 miles).

• In an unaired episode of The Flintstones, Fred suffered a psychotic episode and savagely beat his boss, Mr. Slate, to death with a diplodocus leg-bone. This was later re-written as the 1993 Michael Douglas film Falling Down, though thankfully all scenes featuring The Great Gazoo were completely removed.
• A trained stingray in Los Angeles by the name of Stanley can mime the words to T’Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It) by Fun Boy Three featuring Bananarama (that’s the song that features them, by the way, not the stingray).
• Contrary to popular belief, it is not possible to open a tin of cat food by staring at it really hard (unless you happen to be Superman).
• American Charlie Briefcase has been stuck in a revolving door for the past seventeen years. Charlie, only son of a Detroit twig-maker, entered the door at Old Joe Joeson’s Old Time Department Store on 6th Avenue, Milwaukee, three days after his fifteenth birthday. Thanks to a combination of inbreeding and perseverance, Charlie has been spinning around the door ever since, either unable or unwilling to leave. Every Christmas and birthday his parents have thrown presents at him as he revolves by, and he is fed by a complex series of pipes and pulleys specially designed by Sir Clive Sinclair.
• Sherlock Holmes never used the phrase ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ in any of the original Conan Doyle stories. However, in an unpublished manuscript uncovered in the mid-1980s after a sizable dose of bad opium he does accuse Watson of ‘teabagging’ Moriarty.

More soon!

The ancient Spartans believed that eating their own feces would make them immortal. It didn’t, of course, and probably had a bit of a negative impact on their chances of breeding.

Tokyo, Japan is home to the world’s most advanced bus shelter. Complete with super-high-speed Internet access and real-time readouts of approaching buses, the so-called UltroShelto is a true marvel of the information age. The shelter is also able to provide its inhabitants with customised advertising based upon what it perceives to be their age and gender, calculated using a series of sophisticated techniques including facial recognition, height and weight analysis and painless blood sampling.

Britain’s most advanced bus shelter has two seats.

Some dolphins possess a high enough level of intelligence to play chess, though they much prefer Ker-Plunk.

Doctors are warning of an outbreak of Pralineism, where patients suffer from the delusion that they are John Cleese. The illness starts off subtly with victims spontaneously asking what the Romans ever did for us, but this soon progresses to silly walking and an obsession with cheese. As the syndrome takes hold, patients will find themselves unable to pass cars without the compulsion to attack them with branches, and will hallucinate pieces of game pie stuck up in the corners of rooms.

There is currently no known cure for the illness, though after the stage where the sufferer believes themselves to be a barrister having an affair with Jamie Lee Curtis, it stops being funny.

The earliest forms of double-glazing used to block specific radio frequencies. This had the bizarre effect that all homes with the thicker windows were unable to receive any radio programme hosted by bearded DJ Dave Lee Travis. Threatened legal action by the BBC led to the addition of tiny metallic filaments into the glass which negated the issue.

Early drafts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth discovered in Anne Hathaway’s garderobe show that originally the eponymous Scot was meant to be plagued by visions not of the ghost of Banquo, but by a giant rabbit called Harvey. The 1944 Mary Chase play and later film adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart are entirely unrelated and their existence is due solely to a great cosmic coincidence.

The Broville Crumbotron is the world’s most sophisticated toaster, containing in-built artificial intelligence that automatically works out how long to toast the bread for. The Crumbotron takes into account a vast number of factors, including time of day, your body temperature, the weight of the bread, and distance from the Equator, to name but a few. The calculations carried out are immensely complicated, and based on Schrodinger’s Laws of Quantum Toasting. Due to the complexity, the toaster is outfitted with several server-class multi-core processors, and requires fifteen large fans operating at a constant speed of 25,000RPM just to prevent it catching fire. The Crumbotron has an RRP of £750,000 and is available from Argos.

During the latter stages of World War II, the Nazis hatched a plan to invade Britain using clowns. Anachronistically codenamed Operation Charlie Chalk, the sinister plot involved dropping numerous Volkswagen Beetles from the air that would land in specially-targeted ’soft spots’. With each Beetle containing on average around 350 clowns, Nazi generals believed that they could overrun Britain in under a week using a terrible combination of slapstick, custard pies and big shoes.

Thankfully the plan was thwarted by the Enigma Code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, and the Germans went back to their traditional methods of shooting at us.

Zany staff members at the ‘Specs of Gold’ opticians in Walthamstow have created the world’s first varifocal aquarium. Mr Magoo, the tank’s resident goldfish, appears the size of a small piece of plankton whilst at the bottom, yet seems like a great white shark when at the top (apart from the fact that he’s a different colour, obviously). The tank was mistakenly put in for this year’s Turner Prize, and made it to the short-list before being dismissed as not stupid enough to win.