Interesting Facts

Seemingly police in Yorkshire have been hiding speed cameras in rural areas - in tractors. (After a spate of accidents, they are trying to catch speeding motorcyclists, but it seemss a bit sneaky to me. I bet they've been having a field day.  (Sorry).)

An  £11,000-a-year private school in London has banned its pupils from watching TV or surfing the internet - even when they are at home. (With a strict no-tech policy, London Acorn School has banned all smartphones, computers, iPads etc., in the hope that the children will learn from the natural world instead. The school, for pupils aged 3 to 18, has also banned television for under-12s, with older pupils being allowed to watch "restricted programmes".  What? No Dr Who?)

According to a study carried out at the University of Glasgow, people in Scotland use more than 400 words and expressions to describe different aspects of snow. (421 terms have been logged including: snaw (snow), sneesl (to begin to rain or snow), skelf (a large snowflake, feefle - to swirl, flindrikin - a light snow shower, snaw-pouther - fine driving snow, spitters - small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow, and unbrak - the beginning of a thaw. Dr Susan Rennie, lecturer in English and Scots language at the university, said: “Weather has been a vital part of people's lives in Scotland for centuries. The number and variety of words in the language show how important it was for our ancestors to communicate about the weather, which could so easily affect their livelihoods.” My spellchecker just melted.)

Ac cording to a survey commissioned by Love Food / Hate Waste, nearly 1 in 5 UK households admits to binning an entire loaf of bread before even opening or slicing it. (Emma Marsh, head of the Love Food / Hate Waste campaign, run by the government’s waste advisory body Wrap, said: “...sometimes if we don’t finish a loaf, it goes stale and ends up in the bin. There are simple things we can do to use it up or store it differently, to reduce food waste and save money.” I often throw away parts of a loaf, but rarely the whole thing.  I usually make breadcrumbs from stale bread.)

According to doctors, James Bond is a functioning alcoholic. (Doctors analysing the Ian Fleming novels say that 007 polishes off the equivalent of one and a half bottles of wine every day. Excluding the 36 days Bond was in prison, hospital or rehab, the spy downed 1,150 units of alcohol in 88 days, which works out at 92 units a week - about five vodka martinis a day and four times the recommended maximum intake for men in the UK. He is also a drink driver. He certainly mixes it up in the films too.  According to recent research Daniel Craig is the booziest Bond yet; knocking back around 20 units in the film. 

Surprise, surprise, fruit is good for you (I can hear my mother now - I told you so.) According to researchers at Harvard if you want to lose weight, you should stop eating peas, potatoes and sweetcorn, and start eating cauliflower, prunes and blueberries. (Surprisingly fruit was twice as good as veg, with every extra portion a day leading to around half a pound of flab being shed over four years. Prunes, apples, pears, strawberries, raisins and grapes, also scored high on the weight loss scale. Blueberries were actually the number 1 fat burner.  I can't stand them, but I need to shed some weight, so maybe I'll just have to take my medicine.)

3rd September Welsh Rarebit Day - Welsh Rarebit is a kind of cheese on toast.