Symons - Why Do Farts Smell Like Rotten Eggs?

EVER WONDERED

Why we burp?

What a wotsit is?

Whether lemmings really jump off cliffs?

Why vomit always contains carrots?

And why do farts smell like rotten eggs?

No subject is too strange and no trivia too tough for Mitchell Symons, who has the answer to these crazy questions, and many more.

To all of you who bought the book because of the title, and to all of you who bought the book despite the title.

PICTURE A MAN on a desert island yup, Im also thinking of Robinson Crusoe. Hes been stranded for some time when he finds a bottle. So he gets out his pen and a piece of paper (always assuming that he remembered to take them with him when he got shipwrecked) and writes a message which he puts into the bottle and chucks out to sea.

Several weeks later, someone picks up his message and sends out a ship to rescue him. Surely thats the stuff of stories?

Well, it turns out that the scenario Ive set out might have some truth to it.

For example, in May 2005 Costa Rican officials said 86 shipwrecked migrants had been rescued after fishermen found a message saying Please help us in a bottle they had thrown overboard. The migrants, mainly teenagers from Ecuador and Peru, had been adrift in their packed boat for three days. The vessel had been floating near Cocos Island, a nature reserve over 350 miles off the Costa Rican coast. Its thought that the group was abandoned by people smugglers when the vessel got into trouble. The smugglers stripped the boat of radio and communication equipment when they left it. Without sending a message in a bottle, its almost certain that theyd never have been rescued and would have all died.

In the course of my research, I found a fascinating twist on the message-in-a-bottle story. In January 2008, the chance discovery of a message in a bottle helped two lost climbers in Portland, Oregon, in the US to find their way off Mount Hood after a night spent huddled in a hastily built snow cave.

Instead of writing a message and putting it in a bottle, they came out of their cave to find a plastic bottle containing map coordinates giving their precise location, hanging on a twig with red tape on it.

Luckily for them, it turned out that the bottle had been hung on the tree by participants in a recent geocaching contest (a sort of orienteering) in which people follow GPS coordinates to remote, far-flung locations.

The exhausted climbers spotted it just as searchers called their cell phones which they mistakenly thought had stopped working the night before.

27-year-old Justin Votos and 28-year-old Matthew Pitts were able to tell the searchers (volunteers from Portland Mountain Rescue and the Air Force Reserves 304th Rescue Squadron) precisely where they were, and were then talked down to safety.

So the moral to these stories is: Messages in bottles save lives!

HEAR HEAR! AFTER all, isnt that the whole point of cake to eat it? So why then do people say You cant have your cake and eat it?

The answer is that the expression itself is at fault! It should be You cant eat your cake and still have it i.e. once youve eaten your cake, it will be gone which is obviously true. In fact, put like this, you can see why a parent might say to a child who wants to spend all their pocket money and still have money to save, You cant have your cake and eat it.

Even though it would confuse the child considerably

YES AND NO . There was a McDonald two of em as it happens but they werent responsible (in any meaningful sense) for the success of McDonalds.

The McDonalds legend began in 1954 with a man named Ray Kroc, who was working as a milkshake machine salesman. He visited Mac and Dick McDonalds smart hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California, to sell them some machines, and was so impressed with the quality of everything he saw, from the standard of hygiene to the quality of the food and the speed of the service, that he asked if they would allow him to open a copycat branch under a franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Most fast-food outlets at the time were rather seedy and a magnet for the new teenagers and not the sort of places where families could take young children and elderly relatives out to eat.

In 1961, Ray Kroc, frustrated that the McDonald brothers didnt share his plans for expansion, bought all the rights to the McDonalds operation for $2.7 million. Within a decade he had opened no fewer than 500 American branches. He also issued franchises but buyers were subjected to anonymous inspections to maintain uniform standards: the key to its success was that every aspect of production was tightly controlled. American staff were trained at the Hamburger University near Chicago. The grill men were taught to move from left to right, putting out six rows of burgers. They then had to flip the third row first, then the fourth, fifth and sixth, before the first and the second.

The golden arches were introduced in 1968, by which time global recognition was established. One potato in 12 grown in the US is bought by McDonalds for their fries and the operation is by far the biggest consumer of beef, despite the existence of many other fast-food chains.

Today, McDonalds is the number one fast-food empire in the world, with more than 1,400 restaurants in about 70 countries, and the gigantic golden arches symbol is probably the most recognized brand in the world after Coca-Cola.

38 million people a day eat a McDonalds meal equivalent to the entire population of Spain, including the Canaries!

Indeed, if all the hamburgers produced by McDonalds in a year were laid in a straight line, they would stretch five times round the world or would reach nearly 2,000 times higher than Mount Everest.

FORTUNATELY FOR SPIDERS (though not their victims), their legs are coated in a natural oil that stops them getting trapped in their own webs.

NO, IT ISNT . While its absolutely true that the Romans gorged themselves stupid, especially during banquets and feasts, they didnt have a special place to throw up: they just did it when and where they liked.

The reason why people get confused over this question is because of the vomitorium. They assume that because Romans threw up a lot as a result of over-indulgence and had vomitoriums (or vomitoria), then thats where they did their puking.