Thought I’d change the subject from travel for a post or so, having been given a great book recently that has changed the way I think about certain things!

Some of us like to think we know a lot. We spend most of our lives absorbing tidbits of knowledge and simply regurgitating them when necessary; but there are so very many things that we don’t know. Even worse, we think we know them, but we really don’t.

See how many of the following commonly misunderstood facts you really know… maybe you’ll find out that you aren’t quite as smart as you thought you were.

▪ 1. The driest place on Earth is the Sahara Desert.

Yeah, the Sahara is pretty dry. But it’s quite a long way away from being the driest place on the planet. The Sahara may be the largest, but with only around 0.1mm (~0.004 inches) of rainfall per year, the Atacama Desert in Chile is around 250 times as dry as the Sahara, which gets around 25mm (1 inch) of rainfall per year.

However, when you’re talking about ‘dryness’ purely in terms of ‘lack of moisture’, both of these places pale in comparison with the Dry Valleys in Antarctica.

Wait, how can a continent covered in snow be the driest place on the planet, I hear you asking? Well. Due to the katabatic winds (look it up), all moisture evaporates (or rather, sublimates) in a reall hurry, whether it’s water, ice or snow. It’s funny to think that part of Antartica can be considered a ‘desert’, but in terms of dryness, parts of Antartica have not felt rain for more than two million years. That’s pretty damn dry, and makes the Sahara seem rather damp by comparison.

These pictures demonstrate how dry the valleys really are – glaciers move into the region but disappear quickly due to the winds, leaving only a ‘tongue’. Kinda cool.

▪ 2. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.

OK, there’s no way this ‘fact’ can possibly be wrong, right? Everybody knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, right? I mean, come on, right?

Actually, he didn’t. Sure, he turned it from a working prototype into a practical device; but all evidence would indicate that he didn’t actually invent it, even though he filed the first official patent.

The telephone (or teletrofono, as he named his prototype) was actually invented by an Italian by the name of Antonio Meucci, in 1860. Meucci, an unemployed but talented inventor, filed a temporary patent for his device about ten years later – still five years before Bell’s patent for his telephone.

So why is Bell remembered, and Meucci a complete unknown? Well, it’s a bit sad, actually. Meucci fell ill the same year he filed his temporary patent. As an impoverished non-English speaker, he neglected to send his $10 patent renewal fee in 1874.

Meucci had previously sent his invention’s blueprints and working prototypes to the Western Union patent labs – the same lab in which Alexander Graham Bell just so happened to work. Both the blueprints and the prototypes were ‘mysteriously’ lost, coincidentally right around about the same time Bell patented his telephone. Meucci sued him for blatant theft, but sadly died in 1889 before the court case could be completed. Thus, Bell ended up getting the acclaim for arguably one of the most important inventions of the 19th century.

This should now be reasonably common knowledge – as recently as 2004, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution that officially recognises Meucci as the inventor of the telephone. Even Wikipedia lists Meucci before Bell in its telephone timeline. but that’s not stopping parents and teachers alike from telling their kids that the phone was invented by Bell. The thieving Scotsman.

▪ 3. Cinderella’s slippers were made of glass.

OK, so folk tales usually go through a whole lot of changes – this is mostly due to the tradition of oral storytelling, creating a kind of ‘Chinese whispers’ effect, where certain details and elements of stories become distorted and fragmented over time.

However, pretty much wherever you’re from or wherever you first heard the tale, Cinderella loses a glass slipper in her rush to get home from the ball before midnight; which the prince then uses to track her down (suspending for a minute the belief that 2 women living in the same area code could possibly have the same sized feet).

The most recognisable version of the story was written by the 17th century Parisian author of ‘Tales of Mother Goose’, Charles Perrault, using the medieval folk tale that he had heard as a basis. The commonly-held theory is that he misheard the French word vair, meaning ‘squirrel fur’, and replaced it with the homonym verre, meaning ‘glass’. So there you go, Cinderella’s shoes were actually made from squirrel fur (pantoufles de vair).

Or were they? The Cinderella tale is ancient, and versions can be found over 300 years before Perrault’s famous version. The oldest known version comes from the Chinese from about 700AD, in which the slippers were made of gold (which, to be honest, seems to make a bit more sense than either glass or squirrels fur). However, Perrault’s rendition is still the only one that claims the slippers were made of glass.

▪ 4. The aeroplane was the first man-made device to break the sound barrier.

This seems quite an obvious one. Where else would we have managed to reach the kind of speeds needed to break the speed of sound (about 340 metres per second at sea level – around 1,225km/h)?

Funnily enough, the first invention to break the speed of sound was the good old-fashioned bullwhip. They just didn’t realise it for a while. Up until the advent of high-speed photography, everybody thought that the crack of a whip was just the sound of the leather tail hitting the handle, but in 1927 it was proven with photographic evidence that a whip’s crack was actually the result of a mini sonic boom. Here comes the science:

When properly whipped, the whip forms a loop at the handle, which travels all the way to the tip. Since the thickness of the whip tapers off to a slim tip, the loop speeds up on its way along the length of the whip, until it is travelling at more than ten times the original speed. When this speed exceeds around 340m/s – the speed of sound – you (and everyone around you) get to hear that familiar ‘crack’.

It’s also very useful for swinging across gorges in Indiana Jones movies. Not so much in real life; the full weight of a person would generally rip the whip apart. Indy’s whip in the movies was reinforced with steel.

Take a look here for a more in-depth explanation (with videos) on how the ‘mini’ sonic boom works.

▪ 5. The planet Mars is red.

Well, clearly it is. Just look at it. It can’t possibly be any other colour than red; otherwise it means that Val Kilmer movie was not only hideously awful, but also incorrectly named!

Well, generally people remember Mars as the ‘Red Planet’, and it’s always portrayed in popular culture as a dynamic deep red colour. However, what gives Mars this red appearance is actually the dust in the planet’s atmosphere. The planet itself is somewhere between orange and brown to our eyes.

So what about those famous photos from NASA’s Viking rovers from the 70s? Well, funnily enough, the cameras on those rovers were black and white cameras, but the images were run through several colour filters in order to give a result closer to Mars’ ‘true’ colour. Thanks to the more recent images sent back by NASA’s Spirit rover (which arrived on Mars in January 2004), we can see that the planet surface is much closer to an orangey-brown than red.

Kinda rocks your world, doesn’t it?

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References/image sources
Most of the facts were taken from The QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson (©2006 Faber & Faber). Highly recommended book. The internet filled in the gaps.

Pictures lifted from various Flickr accounts and sites found through Google Image search:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bikinibandit/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/madebackwards/
http://www.inkart.com/
http://www.4mybday.com/
http://www.enjoyfrance.com/
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/

How do the Dutch manage to stay so trim? I bet it’s got more to do with the 15,000km of cycle tracks rather than the dietary staples of potatoes and margarine.

Or perhaps it’s because of a ban on foie gras, the controversial French delicacy, which is still “fatty liver” no matter how you spin it (‘a liver that has accumulated a large quantity of lipids through lipogenesis or the transformation of maize carbohydrate and fatty acids’ with ‘unique nutritional and organoleptic properties’… hmm… very unique…)

It may be part of French cultural and gastronomic patrimony, but it doesn’t make it any healthier! I was actually surprised the first time I came to Europe and was confronted by the amount of fatty and deep-fried food on offer. Isn’t this supposed to be from the recent realms of the New World?

But Old World junk food can be as fast as it comes, something I try to push from my mind whilst wolfing down pub fare like smažený sýr (a thick, bread-crumb-coated slab of fried cheese) in a bread roll on the streets of Prague or some hot and oily rösti (potato pancakes) in Germany. I’m still yet to try the deep-fried steak from Serbia, Karađorđeva šnicla (Karadjordje’s steak), or the Bavarian schweinshaxn (deep-fried pork knuckle)!

What really takes the cake – or in this case, the chocolate-smeared animal fat – is salo from the Ukraine. Stereotyped as indispensable for the Ukrainian as vodka for the Russia, salo is a chunk of pig fat. Plain and simple. I think this description best dispels any salo myths: ‘unlike lard, salo is non-rendered pork fat. Unlike bacon, salo has little or no meat.’ Ouch! Talk about a direct hit. Not this, not that, just fat.

“Salo v shokoladi” (salo in chocolate) is a humorous expression akin to the English “chalk and cheese” – but it became reality in a Kiev restaurant a few years ago. This sweet salo, dubbed the “Ukrainian snickers”, is even more gut-churning than a deep-fried Mars Bar.

But as for my favourite of all strange snack foods (with a milder accompanying health warning) is the Russian sirok, which I’ve nicknamed “chocolate cheese.” It’s a little chocolate-coated bar, filled with a light and flavoured tvorog, and best served cold. Sirok is almost like a small chocolate coated ice-cream, but filled with a curd cheese like the French fromage blanc or Italian ricotta. It comes in all sorts of chocolate, fruit or even jam-filled flavours, and I am certain that this was the real scientific breakthrough of the Cold War (forget that space race, the Soviets just mastered cheesy confectionary!)

I haven’t met anyone else who shares my passion for this “chocolate cheese”… although I have a sneaking suspicion that the perpetual popularity of singer Tom Waits in Russia might have something to do with a misinterpretation of his “immaculate confection” song Chocolate Jesus…

‘It’s got to be those chocolate cheeses… makes me feel so good inside…’

It’s inevitable. With the change of seasons, I’m bound to get sick. Especially as springtime looms with its temperature changes and pollen influx, I’ve got a bit of transitional stuffiness to get used to…

Which got me thinking about rich tradition of folk cold and flu remedies in Russia, for there are a whole host of suggestions for every sniffle.

So here are my five all-time favourite Russian cold and flu remedies – and what NOT to do if you actually want to rest, recuperate and eventually be nursed back to health!

1. Vodka
2. Vodka with pepper (do you notice a theme emerging here?)
3. Sunflower oil and milk. In fact, one of the old women who held fort at the dormitories of the university (our don’t-mess-with-me granny) suggested gargling a cup of sunflower oil to my flatmate. She suggested that with each swirl and spit the throat infection would be caught up and sent down the sink in an oily trap. My flatmate, highly sceptical of this approach, instead preferred to…
4. Visit a doctor (but honestly, why go there? You’ll only encounter more sick people!)
5. Nemiroff Ukrainian chilli vodka in a hot cup of tea with honey and lemon juice. This was my preferred method – a failsafe way of injecting a little fire in your belly and throat.

The only problem with three of these five suggestions (I’m sure you can determine which ones), was that they were so darn conducive to multiple dosages in a social context (forget a spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down – just shoot it back and chase it with some delicious snack gifts from the gods of grazing, otherwise known as zakuski). I would take my “medicine” then someone would suggest some more “for health” and then I would find myself going out to a cosy home-away-from-home nightclub, Dacha, until the wee hours…

As my Dutch courage (or pseudo-health) dissipated, I would realise with horror that I had only set back my road to recovery further.

For the record, it took a prescription of antibiotics and sobriety from a doctor in Berlin (who wasn’t afraid to bandy around the word “bronchitis” a few times in diagnosis) to fix what ailed me… but I much preferred the Russian approach!