Interesting Facts

The UK government paid social media giant Facebook 113 times more in taxpayers’ money for advertising than Facebook paid in corporation tax in the UK. (Government departments spent £489,329 in the 2014-15 fiscal year for advertising on Facebook, who only coughed up £4,327 in corporation tax. They only had to pay such a tiny amount because they recorded a £28.5million loss in the UK, but at the same time they handed staff £35million in share bonuses. Increasingly it seems that the job of governments is to be cleverer than corporations, but I want to know the answer to one question, "What on earth were they advertising?")

According to linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer Disney films are dominated by men when it comes to dialogue. (Pocahontas, Mulan and The Little Mermaid were all named after the main female character, but that didn't help: In Pocahontas 76% of the dialogue was from the men, it was 77% in Mulan  and 68% in The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast had male characters speaking 71% of the time, while in Aladdin it was 90%. Early Disney films such as Snow White had fewer speaking roles but spread them equally between male and female characters, and in Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty women seemingly had more dialogue than men. To be fair it's not just Disney. In the film The Avengers, none of the female characters talked to each other at any point.)

According to educational charity, the Sutton Trust if you have a private education, you are considerably more likely to get to the top of British public life. (Their research shows that Oxbridge graduates are over represented in top jobs in fields as diverse as the law, politics, medicine, journalism, and even acting. In 2014 the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reported that 59% of the Cabinet were Oxbridge graduates (compared to the average of less than 1% of the public as a whole). This recent research shows that although only 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately, with just 12% having been taught in comprehensive schools. Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said: “As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success." Sir Peter, I think y...

People in the UK are eating 3.5 million ready meals - wait for it - a day. (According to analysts Kantar Worldpanel for trade mag The Grocer, Brits munched their way through £3.2 billion worth of chilled or frozen dinners in 2015. Family favourites are shepherd's pie, lasagne and chicken tikka masala, with traditional British meals accounting for £1.3 billion of sales. Italian meals £610 million, Indian nearly £400 million and Chinese meals £281 million. We are turning into a nation of microwave chefs.)

According to a study carried out by Action on Sugar hot drinks can contain at least as much sugar as a can of Pepsi or Coca-Cola. (In some of the worst cases the drinks tested contained 20 or more teaspoons of sugar. For example, a large Chai Latte can contain around 80g of sugar: according to the NHS, the maximum intake of added sugar per day for those aged 11 and over is about 30g or seven teaspoons - a can of Pepsi or Coke can contain around 9 teaspoons. The drinks assessed included flavoured coffees such as mochas and lattes, hot fruit drinks and hot chocolates from coffee shops and fast food chains.  98% of the drinks they tested would have to carry a red food label for high sugar content.)

Tesco supermarkets have decided to only sell straight croissants. (Why? Well because UK customers have complained they cannot spread jam properly on a traditionally curved croissant. Now you probably know that the croissant is a French pastry, but what you might not know is that the word is French for crescent, and if you look crescent up in the dictionary you will see that it describes the curved sickle shape of the waxing or waning moon.  Oh dear, this is becoming an interesting word post. Anyway, although I am suspicious of their reasons (it's far more likely that it's simply cheaper to produce straight pastries), Tescos should be able to sell their boringly straight pastries, but they shouldn't call them croissants, they should call them tout droit instead.) PS - I am aware that no self-respecting French person would put jam on their croissant.

Hamburg, Germany has banned coffee pods from all state-run buildings as part of an environmental drive to reduce waste. (In fact, the inventor of the American version of the coffee capsule, John Sylvan, has admitted he regrets ever inventing them due to their environmental impact:  Some pods contain 6 grams of coffee, but have 3 grams of packaging, and because they are made of mixed materials, combined with organic content, they are extremely difficult to recycle. Imagine if cars were sold like that.)