A useless fact is a joke that happens to be true. It follows the same shape — setup, small pause, absurd payoff — except the payoff has a citation somewhere. Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings. That is not a punchline anybody wrote; it is simply the case, and it is funnier than most things anybody has written.
Fifty below, chosen for uselessness rather than importance. None of them will improve your life. Several will win you a pub quiz tiebreaker, which is arguably worse.
Fifty facts of no practical value
- Bananas are berries. Strawberries are not.
- The Eiffel Tower is taller in summer, because the iron expands in the heat.
- Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
- Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
- A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
- Honey found in ancient Egyptian tombs was still edible.
- Wombat droppings are cube-shaped.
- There are more possible arrangements of a shuffled deck of cards than there are seconds since the Big Bang.
- Sharks existed before trees.
- The Great Fire of London officially killed six people.
- Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn.
- Norway knighted a penguin. He has since been promoted.
- The shortest war in history lasted under an hour.
- The dot over a lower-case i is called a tittle.
- A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
- Nearly all the world’s vanilla comes from a plant pollinated by hand.
- The inventor of the Pringles can is buried in one.
- Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so they do not drift apart.
- Cows have best friends and get stressed when separated from them.
- The average cumulus cloud weighs about the same as a hundred elephants.
- There is enough DNA in one human body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back several times.
- Venus rotates in the opposite direction to the Earth, so the sun there rises in the west.
- Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood.
- A snail can sleep for up to three years.
- A shrimp’s heart is in its head.
- Bubble wrap was originally sold as wallpaper.
- Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner.
- The microwave oven was discovered when a chocolate bar melted in an engineer’s pocket.
- Velcro was inspired by burrs stuck to a dog.
- The first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot so nobody would walk to an empty one.
- Nintendo was founded in 1889 and originally made playing cards.
- The QWERTY layout was designed for typewriters, not for typing speed.
- Pineapples take about two years to grow a single fruit.
- Peanuts are not nuts. They are legumes.
- Tomatoes are fruit, which is why they appear on this site’s foodie edition twice.
- Carrots were originally purple.
- Ketchup was once sold as medicine.
- The word robot comes from a Czech word meaning forced labour.
- The word quiz has an origin story involving a bet, which historians think is invented.
- Nutmeg is poisonous in large quantities, which is a strong argument for restraint at Christmas.
- Lobsters were once considered food for prisoners and servants.
- The hashtag symbol is properly called an octothorpe.
- Alaska is simultaneously the most northern, western and eastern state in the USA.
- Russia has eleven time zones.
- The Netherlands has a village where the streets are canals and there are almost no roads.
- There is a town in Norway that uses giant mirrors to reflect sunlight into the square.
- Iceland has no mosquitoes.
- Antarctica is technically the world’s largest desert.
- The Sahara has snow occasionally.
- The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in a lifetime, and still cannot find the car keys.
How to deploy a useless fact
Never as a correction. The useless fact has one legitimate venue: a lull. Somebody has stopped talking, nobody has started, and into that gap you place a wombat. Offered as a rebuttal it is insufferable; offered into silence it is a gift.
The one rule is to state it and stop. Do not add “apparently” and do not add the source unless asked — the flatness is what makes it land, exactly as with the anti-jokes. If you would rather have jokes that are definitely not true, the fifty as useless as sayings are the house speciality.