Twenty-four things we learnt this year

Margaret Thatcher used to serve dinner party guests an interesting-sounding “mystery starter”. It was a combination of two packs of cream cheese, a teaspoon of curry powder and a tin of beef consommé. All “mixed together and topped with a black olive”. (The Sunday Times)

Vegan guys are not attractive. A study published in the journal Sex Roles found that men on plant-based diets were widely perceived as “physically weaker and less masculine”, by both men and women. In a “clear case of vegan-on-vegan prejudice”, the study even found that a number of female vegans thought their male counterparts were “unmanly or weak”. Sorry, herbivores. “If even vegan chicks think you’re a wimpy soy boy for spurning animal products, what hope is there?” (Vice)

Pigeons were the internet of their time. In 1850, Baron Julius Reuter used squadrons of homing pigeons to bridge a 76-mile gap in the burgeoning telegraph networks spanning Europe, flying “market-moving financial news” from Brussels to Aachen in Germany. (Air Mail)

King Frederik of Denmark, who took the throne in January, loves a party. In 2014, the then crown prince was spotted at the Burning Man festival in the Utah desert dressed in “a flower-embroidered kilt, a gold waistcoat, a necklace and a pair of motorcycle goggles” – and insisted on everyone calling him Hamlet. Not for nothing do Danes call Frederik the “Rock ‘n’ Roll King”. (Evening Standard)

Keir Starmer’s £167,000 salary is pretty low by his predecessors’ standards. Adjusted for inflation, Neville Chamberlain’s pay packet in 1937 was a whopping £815,000. (The Independent)

Lake Lucerne in Switzerland could blow up at any moment. The Swiss army spent years dumping old munitions into the nation’s lakes, often failing to remove the fuses. Since the government realised the rather obvious risk of having lakes full of live bombs, they have offered £45,000 in prize money for the best idea to get them out. It’s going to be a big job: there are 3,300 tonnes of munitions in Lucerne alone, and another 4,500 tonnes in the waters of Neuchatel, which the Swiss air force used for bombing practice until 2021. (BBC News)

Theresa May used to get mistaken for an adult film star called Teresa May. She first realised this after her promotion to the Conservative front bench in 1999, when she started receiving letters of congratulation from “appreciative young men”. One typical missive read: “We’ve been watching you on television for years, congratulations, good to see someone from that background getting into Parliament!” The two women went on GMTV later that year for a joint interview. They were both extremely complimentary – “I’m sure she does her job well,” the politician said of the porn star – and enjoyed their chat so much that they went out for coffee together afterwards. (X/James Heale)

About one in 10 Icelanders publishes a book in their lifetime, compared to one in 5,000 Americans. The average Icelander reads more than two books a month, and a blockbuster title can sell as many as 14,000 hardback copies – equivalent to nearly 4% of the country’s population buying it. One explanation is their “ancient storytelling tradition”, which goes back some 800 years to the Icelandic sagas. Another is needing something to do during those 21-hour winter nights. (Air Mail)

The grandson of America’s 10th president, who was born in 1790 and took office in 1841, is still alive. One of President John Tyler’s 15 children, Lyon, was born in 1853, when his old man was 63. Lyon and his second wife had two sons, the younger of whom was born in 1928, when he was about 75. That son, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still going strong at 96. (Mental Floss)

A retired workaholic man in Japan is described as a nureochibazoku (wet fallen leaf) because, lacking hobbies and friends through over-work, he follows his wife around like a wet leaf stuck to a shoe. (The Economist)

More girls in the UK now play football than netball. Just 15.4% of schoolgirls know their goal shooters from their wing attacks, compared to the 16% who prefer a kickabout. Running, gymnastics and hockey have also declined in popularity, while swimming, cricket and skateboarding are on the rise. (The Sunday Times)

A surprising number of English words are derived from Italian place names. Jeans comes from the Ligurian port town of Genoa, and milliner from Milan, a city renowned in the Middle Ages for selling bonnets. Some say pistol has its roots in the Tuscan city of Pistoia, “famous for its gun-smithing”. And sardonic comes from Sardinia: in around 560AD, the historian Procopius wrote that people who ate the Sardinian herb Ranunculus sceleratus, or “cursed buttercup”, had fatal convulsions that had “the appearance of embittered laughter”. (Engelsberg Ideas)

Chinese premier Xi Jinping doesn’t forget his old friends. In 1985, aged 31, Xi went to study agriculture in Muscatine, Iowa, where he made friends with the Lande family. When he visited the state again in 2012, as China’s vice president, he dropped in on Mr and Mrs Lande at their home. And during his trip to San Francisco in November last year he invited the couple to California – along with several other “old friends” from the Hawkeye State – for a slap-up dinner. (Business Insider)

Duckface, the character played by Anna Chancellor in Four Weddings and a Funeral, was originally called “F***face”. The filmmakers worried that the movie – which begins with Hugh Grant saying “f***, f***, f***, f***, f***ity f*** bugger” – contained too much swearing, so changed the name at the last minute. (Air Mail)

Being a world leader isn’t great for your health. A 2015 study which looked at elections in 17 rich countries, going back as far as 1722, found that the winners died an average of 4.4 years earlier than the losers. (The Economist)

When World War Two broke out in 1939, Londoners set about killing their pets. Within four days, some 400,000 cats and dogs – 26% of the capital’s furry friends – had been slaughtered. Crematoriums were overrun with corpses; animal welfare charities ran out of chloroform. “None of this was done out of any real necessity.” Supplies weren’t yet scarce, and the government hadn’t ordered the cull “for the greater good of the Empire” or anything. It was just a mass action that arose, seemingly spontaneously, in a population “terrified by the new reality of war”. (LA Review of Books)

We’re all saying Mount Everest wrong. The mammoth mountain is named after Welsh geographer George Everest, whose surname was pronounced “EVE-rest” – the emphasis on the first syllable, which rhymed with “leave”. Everest himself thought the peak should be known by its local name, Chomolungma, meaning “goddess mother of the world”. (Mental Floss)

The Iron Lady had an iron bladder. During the 1979 election, the pioneering journalist Ann Leslie asked if the Tory campaign bus could make more frequent lavatory stops as her bladder had been weakened by giving birth. Margaret Thatcher gave her a withering look. “No one needs to go more than twice a day,” she said. “I go first thing in the morning and then at night and it’s quite enough.” (The Times)

Harry Truman was very protective over his daughter’s singing career. In 1950, The Washington Post’s music critic wrote a withering review of one of Margaret’s concerts, saying she couldn’t sing “with anything approaching professional finish”. The following day, the US president hand-wrote the critic a letter. “I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert,” it read. “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you will need a new nose.” (Air Mail)

F Scott Fitzgerald was never sure about the title for The Great Gatsby. He asked his publisher just weeks before the publication date what the delay would be for renaming it Under the Red, White and Blue, and also considered names including Trimalchio in West Egg, Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, and The High-Bouncing Lover. In the same vein, Pride and Prejudice was almost First Impressions; the working title of Dracula was The Dead Un-Dead; and Catch-22 was initially Catch-18, and then Catch-11. (Mental Floss)

In Victorian times, the way you positioned a stamp on an envelope allowed you to send coded secret messages. Placing it in the bottom right-hand corner asked “when are you coming to see me?” Tilting the stamp to the left in the upper right-hand corner was a way of saying “I’m longing to see you”. This postal vernacular quickly became a way to conduct long-distance flirtations in a time of rigid morals: skewing a stamp to the left in the top left-hand corner of the envelope sent the recipient a kiss, while sticking it upside down meant “I love you truly”. (SitePoint blog)

American engineers once wanted to develop a “gay bomb” that would make enemy soldiers homosexual. The idea, dreamt up in the 1990s at the cutting-edge Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, was to release an aphrodisiac so powerful that enemy troops would be overcome by an irresistible desire to go to bed with one another. A document titled “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” reveals that scientists requested $7.5m to develop the weapon, though, perhaps sadly, it never saw the light of day. “Never has the slogan ‘make love, not war’ been more apt.” (Le Point)

When Richard Davis invented the bulletproof vest in the early 1970s, he had a hard time convincing anyone it would really work. So he did what anyone would do: put one on and shot himself. The gag worked so well as a sales pitch that Davis ended up shooting himself, at point-blank range, 192 times, sometimes followed by a cheerful: “Easy as pie, guys!” (Smithsonian Magazine)

The most common prime ministerial star sign is Libra: David Cameron, Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher all share it. Rishi Sunak is a Taurus, like Tony Blair. Keir Starmer is a Virgo. (Popbitch)