Quite Interesting

I was watching QI recently and I learned two interesting facts:

1. The Netherlands now has its own version.  I first typed ‘Holland’ but luckily I remembered that an episode of QI explained why that is incorrect.  I’m not going to bother telling you why it is, because I’ve forgotten. 

I checked out the QI website and I don’t think it’s that helpful for the kind of information I was looking for – which other countries have their own version?  But it did steer me towards the QI entry in Wikipedia , the first time I have known that to happen, and this in spite of QI’s regular mockery of the veracity of Wikipedia’s entries.  The answer was The Netherlands only.  (Wikipedia cleverly avoided the Holland trap by saying ‘The Dutch’.)  The only reason it hasn’t been picked up by other countries, apparently, is the issue of copyright of the images broadcast.

It took me so long to type that, I’ve forgotten what number 2 is.  How annoying.

Took a chocolate break and it came flooding back; chocolate is clearly brain food – how else do you explain the number of degrees given out each year to 21 year-olds who believe that three years of eating crisps, chocolate, pizza and Coke constitutes a balanced diet? 

There is – allegedly – a website in America called seeitrot.com, where you can buy a webcam for a coffin and watched your loved one moulder to dust away.  I say ‘allegedly’ because of course I had to check it out, and nothing came up except lots of laments about rotten food, and advice on protecting your boat because salt water will otherwise kill it off.  Didn’t know that either.  This self-educating business is fun.

I found the seeitrot.com thing interesting because of my Mum.  I hasten to assure you I had no desire to watch her rot away – it would have been kind of dull, anyway, because she’s a pile of ash – but she had a phobia of being buried or burned alive in her coffin and  I’m sure she’d have insisted I sign up if she’d known about it.  She made everyone she knew swear to stick a pin in her when the time came, to confirm she was truly dead.  Everyone agreed to do it – well, you have to placate crazies, don’t you? – but only the Hub and I followed through.  Just as well, really as, with that many holes in her, the pall bearers would have had embalming fluid stains on their suit shoulders at the funeral.  Now that would have been interesting.