On the Need to Mock

“And aren’t we all tired of those who claim to know the answer to life, death and the creation being so fucking sensitive about their knowledge? If I knew the answer to it all, if I thought I understood the wishes of the author of the universe and was privileged to understand what happens to us after death, the last thing I would be is all prickly and defensive. ‘Mock me all you like,’ I’d cry. ‘Go on, laugh your socks off, paint crude daubs, make mocking films. They pass me by as the idle wind which I respect not.’

Whether it is deluded pricks chanting Christian slogans like Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo or deluded pricks chanting Islamic ones like Said and Charif Kouachi in Paris the result is the same: in this breast at least arises even more, as if that were possible, contempt for the dumb, semi-literate, ill-founded, unreasoned drivel that forms the basis of their juvenile, crazed and self-defeating actions.”

– Stephen Fry

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Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, previously worked as a cleaner at London Victoria railway station.

The longest duck penis ever found was 17 inches (43 centimetres) in length.

Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.

The film Grease was released in Mexico under the name ‘Vaselina’.

In the autumn of 1940, students at Oslo University started wearing paperclips on their lapels as a non-violent symbol of resistance, unity, and national pride. When the occupying German forces caught on to the fact, wearing a paperclip promptly became a criminal offence.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Territorial Morphology

Do Norwegians feel curiously at home in Chile, and vice versa? Do South Africans have a strange affinity with Italians? And Filipinos with Maldivians?

They should, at least if they’re map nerds: each lives in a country with a territorial morphology – the study of the structure of territories; not to be confused with geomorphology, which studies the structure of land masses; the critical difference between both disciplines are the man-made borders that divide land masses into territories – that closely resembles the other’s.

The two nation’s capitals, Oslo and Santiago, are 7,900 miles (12,700 km) apart; the maximum distance between two locations on Earth, half the circumference of the Earth at the equator, is 12,450 miles (20,036 km). Although they’re on opposite sides of the globe Chile and Norway are each other’s type, morphologically speaking: elongated to the extreme.

From east to west, Chile on average is just 150 miles (240 km) wide, which is the distance from London to Manchester, or New York to Baltimore. But from north to south, it measures 2,700 miles (4,300 km), which takes you from London to Tehran; or New York to Los Angeles. This makes Chile the world’s most stretched-out country – 18 times longer than it is narrow.