heardsaid

The reason that the film company MGM very rarely features deleted scenes on the dvds of their older films, particularly those by Woody Allen...

Despite being seen as the same, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time) can actually differ by up to 0.9 seconds bec...

The section above the numeric keypad on a computer keyboard which includes the Caps Lock & Num Lock lights doesn't have keys blockin...

Dame Ellen Macarthur was today given the Freedom of the Isle of Wight. Which means she has the right to drive sheep down the High Street in ...

I've often wondered why the families in portrait photographs from the mid-1800s always seem slightly unreal. Apparently because of the ...

Babies produce more noise than pneumatic drills. Babies hit 123 decibels when screaming, whereas a pneumatic drill only produces 119 decibel...

Bob Holness, ex-presenter of teenager quiz show Blockbusters , as well as being the first James Bond (on radio) is also a keen musician. He...

As heard on the radio this morning - All polar bears are left handed. Can anyone confirm or deny?

Virginia Madsen from Sideways is the sister of Michael Madsen from all of Tarantino's films.

I have just been told by a fellow traveller here at 37,000 ft above the icy wastes of northern Canada that although adverts subjectively sou...

The University of Minnesota pay actors to pretend to be patients over an extended period so that Medical Students can get practical experie...

A 'shufti' is a look or a glimpse, and it comes from the Arabic 'saffa' - to try to see.

The real name of Dr Who actor Sylvester McCoy is, in fact Percy Smith.

A popular landmark in Liverpool City Centre is a statue illustrating a Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby . What isn't necessarily known is th...

Wierdly, Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunset is called Jesse Wallace. Jessie Wallace, the actress, played Kat Slater in Eastender...

Apparently if you ever asked the author Henry James for directions, he would often go into the minutest detail of the route you were to take...

On the London Underground, the bit of the District Line running East of Barking has the nickname "Bomb Alley". The tracks here ar...

So I went to see 'Sideways' the other night and I learnt a new word. I laughed when people at the wine tastings kept saying 'var...

every february, just before the start of lent, all across germany "karneval" is celebrated, street carnival of the german kind. i...

After watching through his films again, I wondered what had happened to film director Whit Stillman. During the nineties he created three e...

In the week that Enterprise is officially cancelled, it's interesting to look back at the situation the show was in during the 1970s, wh...

There is growing evidence that Queen Elizabeth I was very far from fulfilling the promise of her nickname. On numerous occasions, her parli...

The use of the word "smashing" to describe something in a positive light - as used extensively in Wallace and Gromit films - comes...

Silent comedy stallwart Buster Keaton didn't smile once in any of his films, letting physical comedy create the mirth. The one time he ...

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. ...