heardsaid

I never can remember which one it is, but now that I know it's a contraction of 'abated breath', it makes it a bit easier to rem...

romanesco broccoli is a vegitable expression of fractals. It looks man-engineered but is apparently quite natural which confirms what I...

Sideways has various wierd similarities with the 80s film Electric Dreams . Virginia Madsen's character name in the new film is May...

Actually, this is common knowledge but it's a snippet I'm fond of so I'll repeat it anyway. The best cure for a headache is sex....

As well as helping cure cramp , bananas encourage the release of a sleep-inducing hormone, so if you're having a restless night, eat a b...

The colour in red wine comes from the skins. Yes, I know. Guess which film I saw tonight.

Oh, how meta is this. Ricky Gervais is on TV, doing his Animals stand-up thing, complaining about people filling websites with useless facts...

Tasmania holds the record for the world's single biggest mass shooting - 35 people were shot dead in Port Arthur on 28 April 1996 and Ma...

Blow-up mattresses make for really bad insulators - if you're sleeping on one in a cold environment, make sure to put a quilt or duvet u...

One of the most critically acclaimed films of last year (#5 on the Metafilter list of Best Reviewed of 2004 ), "Before Sunset" is...

Pudding Lane in London, where the great fire of London started was supposedly named, not for any cookery based reason, but because of the pr...

The police have never managed to find the van full of Phosgene and Methyl Bromide that went missing in London last year. Phosgene was u...

I've heard a rumour, that when the government brings in it's National ID Card and Database scheme , 130,000 V.I.Ps won't be regi...

Virtual economies of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game industry are beginning to have real world implications. Apart from...

An governmental education officer told my brother (the teacher) that the line connecting the dots on a graph of grades cannot be called a ...

A policeman told me that the London borough of Newham has the highest concentration of paedophiles in the U.K.

Well, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a binman (garbage disposal operative) when I grew up as, it seemed to me, they only worked one day a ...

When i was a kid I used to love getting a 99 from the ice-cream van. That crispy cone with the scoop of vanilla ice-cream and the 99 Flake. ...

The debates about whether Shakespeare wrote the canon have a historic precedent. Many centuries before, people began questioning the author...

Here is how Jack Daniels died. He arrived at work early one morning and realised he needed to open the safe in his office. When he tried t...

... is January 24th apparently. Here's the formula 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where: W: Weather D: Debt d: Money due in January...

Lucy Davies, star of Shaun of the Dead and The Office is the daughter of comedian Jasper Carrot. His real name is Robert Davies. He got ...

Sir Sean Connery declined the role of Morpheus in Matrix after he failed to understand the script after reading it three times.

Far from being a fantasy reference, Lynyrd Skynyrd was named after their physical education teacher Leonard Skinner, said to be a great infl...

When Douglas Adams' book Life, The Universe and Everything came to be published in the US first time around, the publishers weren't...

Dutch is spoken in both the Netherlands and Belgium, but for some strange reason, in the Netherlands the word for 'shit' is the same...

The first recorded jugglers in history were in ancient Eygpt, evidence of which was found in the tomb of an unknown prince dating from the e...

The correct response to the greeting "Top o' the mornin' to you!" is "And the rest of the day to yourself!". (Th...

European explorer: Oh heavens preserve us, can you see that big hoppy thing? (to Aborigine) What the devil is that called, good man? Aborigi...

Apparently, déjà vu is caused by a slight delay in the transfer of data between the two hemispheres of your brain. The feeling that you'...

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing reports : "Some people in Kenya rescued a dehydrated baby hippo that had been separated from its herd...

Apparently, characters in the 1960's CBS TV Comedy series Gilligan's Island are based on the seven deadly sins . Lust - Ginger ...

The true meaning of Auld Lang Syne , and the startling discovery (for me) that my ancestor Robbie Burns didn't write it. [via Metafilter...

Although I can't imagine anyone but Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio playing Maid Marion in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves according to Kevin...

According to the Wikipedia , 2005 is the World Year of Physics, the International Year of Microcredit , the International Year for Sport and...

Following on from Stuart's post about Liverpool streets named after Shakespeare characters, there's also a Dickens Street crossed by...

On his death in 1894, writer Robert Louis Stevenson bequeathed his birthday on November 13th to a little girl who had been born on Christmas...

Better than a hangover cure is to prevent one in the first place. Easiest way to do this (other than not drinking so much) is to drink lots ...

An easy way to tell Scotch from Irish whiskey is in the spelling. Scotch Whisky as you can see simply has a 'y' at the end, whereas...

If you suffer from cramps, try eating a banana. Some cramps can be caused by a lack of potassium, a trace element that bananas are packed wi...

According to this month's SFX , the word 'cookie' comes from the 18th century Dutch word kookje the diminutive of kook or cake...

Male reindeers shed their antlers in the midwinter. Which means that if the reindeer which pull Santa's sleigh have antlers they must b...