Confections for the mind
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I can't resist books like this, full of factoid essays on a wide range of subjects ranging from earwig wee-wees to the density in the asteroid belt. The book is like a box of chocolates. You read one 400-word essay and then another and then another, and the next thing you know you've read the whole book!
A mushroom is the largest living thing (it's almost all underground). The tallest mountain in the world (Mauna Kea, not Mount Everest--you knew that) is mostly underwater. (A fine distinction is made between "tallest" and "highest," but hey we're just having fun here in the spirit of trivial pursuit.) The guillotine of course was not invented in France, and French toast, well, isn't. Most of the earth's oxygen comes from algae, etc.
What Messrs John Lloyd and John Mitchinson do here that many trivial books do not do is elaborate well. For example on the entry about oxygen from algae, they let us know that oil and gas come from ancient algae. (Coal is what comes from ancient swampy forests.) They also mention spirulina, food from cyanobacteria that may one day feed humanity's hungry masses since it "yields twenty times more protein per acre than soya beans." So have another spirulina smoothie. Their entry on where you're most likely to get caught in a hailstorm (the Western Highlands of Kenya) elaborates on the size of hailstones (US record, seven inches in diameter hitting the ground in Aurora, Nebraska at 100 MPH in 2003) and how much damage they cause. But hailstorms can be good. A friend and I got caught in a furious hailstorm lasting maybe twenty minutes a couple months ago in Florida. Result: the car, which was caked with smashed-on insects from a cross country trek, as a result of the hard-driving hail, became as clean as if just out of the carwash! I kid you not.
Most of the juicy info in the book is just delicious, but of course I have a few cautionary notes to share. I like the question/answer format but sometimes, in their effort to surprise, the authors seem to be reaching for it a bit, as in "What's the single largest man-made structure on earth?" Not the Great Pyramid or the Great Wall of China, but the Fresh Kills garbage dump on Staten Island. Or, in "Where's the coolest place in the universe?" A lab in Finland in which a pieced of rhodium was cooled to within a billionth of a degree of above absolute zero. Problem here (aside from fooling us) is, how would they know? Maybe some creatures in the Andromeda Galaxy have cooled rhodium to within a trillionth of a degree above absolute zero.
But I'm nitpicking. A more serious criticism is that some of their information is not exactly accurate. They claim on page 65 that hippos are "strict vegetarians" but anybody who's seen the PBS nature special knows that hippos will muscle the crocs aside on occasion and bite into rotting flesh left on the riverbank. And on pages 105-106 they write that the word "gringos," sometimes used by people south of the border to refer to people north of the border, "is thought to come from the Spanish `griego' (Greek)--hence any foreigner (as in the English `it's all Greek to me')." Actually, "gringo" is a corruption of the words "green grow" ("...the lilacs and so does the rue") lyrics from a popular song sung by Anglos around the campfire at night as they travelled westward in covered wagons during the nineteenth century.
In some cases our clever authors equivocate and seem to have their trivia both ways. On page 19 they write "Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention...," while on page 74 they let us know that Nero (who did NOT fiddle while Rome burned) "also invented ice cream." In answer to the question, "What was the first animal to be domesticated?" they give no clear answer, instead they equivocate between reindeers and dogs around 14,000 years ago. I think most authorities would go with dogs.
Regardless of these minor criticisms, I can recommend "The Book of General Ignorance" as a "betcha can't read just one" sort of fun trivia collection.
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Trivia for everyone's cup of tea
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Yes, I'm a fan of QI, so I knew I would like this book, a gift from a considerate brother and sister-in-law.
The foreword by Stephen Fry is appropriate, as he hosts the QI television programme.
There are over 200 questions, where the obvious answers are so obviously wrong.
Some are silly, like "How long can a chicken live without its head?" (Answer: 2 years, apparently.) Also, it's a relief to know that drinking alcohol doesn't kill brain cells (it just makes it harder for new ones to grow). Hitler's vegetarianism is also debunked (doctors recommended a vegetarian diet for his chronic flatulence). More controversially, it is pointed out that the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary, not Jesus, citing Saint Paul's letter to the Romans. But at least we learn that Santa -- Saint Nicholas -- comes from Turkey.
If this kind of trivia isn't your cup of tea, you know it is for one of your friends or family.
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Read the Questions Carefully and Think Before Answering
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We all have a knee-jerk reaction to blurt out answers to questions about what's the biggest, tallest, most dangerous, etc. But like many of the better quiz shows, the answers often require thinking a little more broadly. "When did the last Ice Age end?" The answer is that we are still in it. But you could easily start to answer with when the last ice age that ended was over.
This reminded me of the oral exam I had to earn honors in college. The three professors started off by asking me which peace treaty ended the Hundred Years War. I thought and thought and couldn't think of one. I told them that answer and felt like a fool. It turned out there was no treaty. So beware of the way questions are phrased.
Despite my warning, the authors caught me several times jumping to conclusions about what the question meant, even though I knew the answer to what was intended. That gave me a good laugh at myself.
The better questions were ones that raised issues of contrast: "What's the largest thing a blue whale can swallow?" It's not as large as you might imagine.
I had fun with the book. It was a good time filler for a long, many-stop plane trip. It would also be a fun read for a few minutes before falling to sleep . . . probably giving you something interesting to think about as you doze off.
My only concern was that one of the answers didn't fit my experience . . . the one about which way the water swirls into the drain in the northern and southern hemispheres. I was actually on a ship once that kept going north and south of the equator, and the direction of the swirls shifted with our location relative to the equator. I'm not convinced this answer is right that it's the shape of the basin and drain that counts for the direction of the swirls. I don't remember seeing any swirls in the southern hemisphere that weren't opposite to the ones I've seen in the northern hemisphere.
As a result, I wonder if the answers came from book or Internet research rather than painstaking research. If so, don't bet your last five dollars on any of the more obscure answers. They might be wrong.
But have fun anyway.
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