Hanks - Usefully Useless: Everything Youd Never Learn at School (But May Like to Know)

Contents

About the Book

Usefully Useless is a gloriously diverse volume dedicated to the most engrossing trivia in the world. Guaranteed to excite the curiosity and amuse, its pages are filled with the sort of remarkable information you would never learn, but will be overjoyed to discover. Each fact is irresistibly fun and fascinating the essence of anecdote and dinner-party conversation that is essential in the adult world and, above all, usefully useless.

Guaranteed to improve your mind, Usefully Useless contains a wealth of miscellany on a vast range of topics, including Literature, Geography, Food, Science, the Natural World, Sport and Politics from the export of frogs legs to the longest Monopoly game completed in the bath. Usefully Useless provides answers to such eternal questions as:

What was Margaret Thatchers favourite sitcom?

Which British league football teams name has no letters that one could colour in with a pen?

How many calories do you consume when you lick a stamp?

What was the original colour of Coca-Cola?

Which key do toilets flush in?

Find out these answers and many, many more in Usefully Useless, the essential guide to the facts you never thought youd need to know.

About the Author

Mark Hanks is the author of eleven books, including the highly successful Harry Oliver series, and several ghostwriting projects. He lives in Switzerland.

To Bernard Kennedy, a minefield of information both
useful and useless. And to his family, for listening to it.

usefuladj\ys-fl\

capable of being put to use

uselessadj\ys-ls\

incapable of being put to use

Very useless things we neglect, till they become
old and useless enough to be put in Museums: and so
very important things we study till, when they become
important enough, we ignore them and rightly.

Samuel Butler

DEAR READER,

When a person in a group yawns, over half the group will yawn within five minutes.

Yawning is involuntary we do it before we are born. Research has shown that foetuses yawn at 11 weeks.

A child will begin yawning contagiously by the time it is two years old.

Chimpanzees yawn when they see other chimps yawning.

The average human yawn lasts for six seconds, and men tend to yawn for longer than women.

There is a theory that ones ability to yawn contagiously (you yawn when someone else does) is a measure of ones ability to empathise with others. Autistic people have been shown to give no response when watching videos of people yawning.

I HOPE THIS BOOK DOES NOT MAKE YOU YAWN

MARK HANKS

YOU

You spend about half an hour as a single cell at the beginning of your life.

You are most likely to have a heart attack on a Monday. Doctors put this statistic down to people overdoing it at the weekend and the stress of returning to work.

The colder the room you are sleeping in becomes, the more likely you are to have a nightmare.

You have around 250,000 sweat glands in your feet, which is why they can produce up to a pint of sweat a day.

You will produce enough saliva in your lifetime to fill roughly two swimming pools.

You secrete more earwax when you are afraid.

You burn around 3.5 calories each time you laugh (so cheer up).

You have as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee, and each of them has a lifespan of between three and seven years.

You could dissolve razors blades with the acid in your stomach (and fortunately you get a new stomach lining every three to four days).

You give off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil.

You do not have white bones they are different shades between beige and brown.

You will spend around three years of your life on a toilet.

You are more likely to get attacked by a cow than a shark.

You have no stronger muscle than your tongue.

You can calculate your height to within a centimetre or two by measuring your arm span.

You could cover a tennis court with the surface area of your lungs.