Interesting Facts

1st June 193 – Roman Emperor Didius Julianus was murdered. 1495 – Friar John Cor recorded the first known batch of scotch whisky. 1533 – Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen of England. 1794 – The battle of the Glorious First of June was fought, the first naval engagement between Britain and France during the French Revolutionary Wars. 1869 – Thomas Edison received a patent for his electric voting machine. 1910 – Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole expedition left England. 1922 – The Royal Ulster Constabulary was founded. 1935 – The first driving tests were introduced in the United Kingdom. 1941 – The Farhud, a pogrom against Iraqi Jews, took place in Baghdad. 1942 – The Warsaw paper Liberty Brigade published the first news of the concentration camps. 1967 – The groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles was released. 1970 - British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was egged. 1974 – The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims w...

According to The Telegraph, the Nepalese government charged 337 climbers £2.2 million in 2012 for permits to climb Mount Everest. (Climbing the highest mountain in the world is more of a jaunt nowadays. The base camp has wifi internet so that expedition members can telephone their families on Skype. Not exactly what I would have expected if I were ever daft enough to want to climb a mountain. Before you know it, they'll have built a cafe.) Source

The Queen may have shaken half a million hands, but there are other people who have achieved handshake greatness:- (In Atlantic City, New Jersey Mayor Joseph Lazarow was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for a July 1977 publicity stunt, in which he shook more than 11,000 hands in a single day, breaking the record previously held by President Theodore Roosevelt, who had set the record with 8,513 handshakes at a White House reception on 1 January 1907. On 21 September 2009, Jack Tsonis and Lindsay Morrison broke the Guinness World Record for the world's longest handshake, shaking hands for 12 hours, 34 minutes and 56 seconds. This record was broken less than a month later in Claremont, California, when John-Clark Levin and George Posner shook hands for 15 hours, 15 minutes, and 15 seconds. The next month, on 21 November, Matthew Rosen and Joe Ackerman surpassed this feat, with a new world record time of 15 hours, 30 minutes and 45 seconds. At 8pm EST on Friday 14 J...

Over the past 50 years, revolving restaurants have opened in more than 50 countries on six continents, from Colombia to Nepal to Canada. (London's revolving restaurant in the BT skyscraper, previously known as the Post Office Tower was supposed to reopen by 2012 in time for the Olympics. Unfortunately it doesn't look as if it is going to happen now. In fact, it has not been an eatery since 1980 when the the Top of the Tower venue, which was run by the Butlins companys (I kid you not) closed after 14 years. It was shut amid security fears after an IRA bomb exploded in the gents lavatories in 1971. Still if you can't wait to try eating on the move there is a list of the best revolving restaurants here: http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-40766329.) Thanks to  Rehan Ahmad  for inspiring me to look this up.

Nepalese teenager Khagendra Thapa Magar is set to become the world's shortest man as he celebrates his 18th birthday. (Mr Magar comes from a remote village in central Nepal, and he's just under 66cm (2ft 2ins) tall. Up until now he had been the shortest male teenager in the world. He has become a bit of a local celebrity, was invited to meet the prime minister and is a tourism ambassador for the country.)

Each year in Nepal the youths in two villages in the south of the Himalayan country, Parsawa and Laxmipur, save up their choicest insults for a 10-day "cursing festival" that reaches its climax today. (The insults range from, "Monkey face", "I hope your sons are as ugly as frogs," to more culturally relevant insults like, "I hope your buffaloes die of diarrhoea". They should be fine, as long as they don't post their insults on Facebook.)

In Nepal Mount Everest is actually called Sagarmatha. (The Government of Nepal gave the mountain the official Nepali name of Sagarmatha in the 1960s, translated it means "Goddess of the Sky". The Chinese call it Qomolangma, and the Tibetan name is, Chomolungma. We English do like to rename things, and having tried to pronounce those names I can understand why.)

Today is the start of a new year (Nava Varsha) in Nepal. So, Happy New Year to all Nepalese! Nhu Dan Ya Bhintuna! (Nepal has its own calendar which is 56 years 08 months and 16 days ahead of the Christian calendar. From today (14th April) they start the year 2062 BS. The era (BS) is called Bikram Sambat and is named after a King of the valley.)