heardsaid

When writing, Charles Dickens would often stand at a mirror and would act out the characters words so that he could get the inflection just ...

On Good Friday, many songs are banned from broadcast on RTE Radio, the Irish public broadcasting company. The most tenuously linked to Easte...

The opening line of Fat Boy Slim's track, 'Praise You' was inspired a collection of Peanuts' strips called 'You've C...

Historically, the length of shoes' toes corresponded to how peaceful the country was. In times of peace, shoes with very long, curly toe...

Humans have been able to tame horses without too many problems; while they buck and kick, the horses will eventually calm down enough to be ...

The maximum length of CDs was based on Beethoven's 9th symphony. [thanks Franchesca!]

When you become a Member of Parliament and take up your place in the House of Commons, you're given your coat peg (just like in school) ...

Franchesca writes: Eating celery results in negative calories.

My Mother was telling me the other that a friend had moved into a new flat so had to buy a new saucer to get more TV channels.

"Facetious" is the only word in the Oxford English Dictionary where all the vowels appear in alphabetical order. "Almost...

The standard venus flytrap can only shut and reopen 10 times in total. It doesn't really "spring" shut; it takes anywhere from...

Here is how Egyptian mummies got their name: "The word "mummy" comes from the Arabic word mumiya which means bitumen. Bitume...

Cardamom, a spice and mild stimulant, can be helpful in reducing nicotine cravings when giving up smoking.

Dimples are really flaws in the musculature of the cheek. That area simply has a divot in the muscle.

If you have a splinter and don't fancy digging it out with a needle and tweezers, use sticky tape instead: smooth the tape over the spli...

Olive oil is the only vegetable or fruit oil that you can safely drink without harming your insides.

You can only use growth rings to count the age of a tree in areas with the distinct four seasons (for example, in most of the US). In tropic...

If you mow dandelions, they will cease to grow taller. Instead, they will grow outwards just underneath the height of the mower blades. Digg...

About a third of the tunnels in the London Underground system are not used. There are around 40 unused stations which have been bricked up, ...

The sport of pole vaulting developed from the Dutch habit of using poles to vault the many dykes and ditches they had to navigate which did ...

Sharks will not attack you unless you're wet.

Your fingernails grow faster than your toenails. And the nails on your dominant hand grow faster than on the other hand. (I saw this on Ri...

When Admiral Lord Nelson was given his fatal wound on board The Victory during The Battle of Trafalgar his first instinct was to conceal the...

WD40 is called WD40 because it was the 40th water displacement formula that the developers tried, and the first one to work.

Real smiles use different muscles when compared with fake smiles, but we're generally rubbish at telling who's putting it on. Real s...

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...