Interesting fact - the world’s oldest toy is a stick: Wyn Drabble

Wyn Drabble's favourite humour includes the Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers.

THREE KEY FACTS

• Wyn Drabble, a Hawke’s Bay teacher, explores interesting facts inspired by a Peter Cook and John Cleese sketch.
• Drabble highlights that the human circulatory system is over 60,000 miles long and sheds 200 million skin cells per hour.
• He also shares quirky anecdotes, including a woman reporting an ice cream van for uneven sprinkles on her icecream.

Today’s offerings are inspired by a recent revisit to a Youtube clip of a classic Peter Cook sketch with John Cleese.

I often time-travel to times of favourite humour and this most often seems to take me to the Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers.

In this sketch, Cook and Cleese are strangers on a park bench. Cook turns to the newspaper-reading Cleese and says, “Did you know that you’ve got four miles of tubing in your stomach?” He adds that it’s all “coiled up very tightly” but I won’t reveal why that is until the end of this piece.

It set me on a path of looking for really interesting facts, the kind that might be used by those irritating people who say, “Do you want to know a really interesting fact? Well. I’ll just tell you one anyway.”

“Four miles of tubing” almost pales into insignificance beside the first fact that, according to the Franklin Institute, the circulatory system is more than 60,000 miles long. Even longer if you employ the metric system.

Yes, if a child’s entire circulatory system were laid out flat – and here we’re talking not just about the rather inexact “tubing” but all veins, arteries and capillaries – it would stretch for more than 60,000 miles which is even more distance than I covered last year on a 17-hour flight to Doha.

By adulthood our bodies have become home to approximately 100,000 miles of blood vessels which is the equivalent of about 11 trips to Doha (meals and airport taxes extra).

Would you like to read another interesting fact? Well, I’ll write one anyway. A main ingredient of household dust is dead skin cells, Researchers at Imperial College, London, found that humans shed around 200 million skin cells per hour. If we are indoors as we shed, they have to go somewhere so they settle on window sills, bookcases and the like.

Also from the United Kingdom comes the story of a West Midlands woman who phoned the emergency police number to report an ice cream van’s misdemeanour. She bought an ice cream with sprinkles but the sprinkles were on one side only. Yes, one side of her iced confection was absolutely bereft of sprinkles. Thank heavens for emergency phone numbers, I say.

A fact from Christchurch’s Christmas parade last weekend: authorities deemed it necessary for Santa and his helpers to wear seatbelts on their (slow-moving) float. This is the sort of woke officialdom that Mr Claus can do without at this busy time. When asked to comment, the rotund, red-suited man replied, “Ho, ho, ho.”

Having spent many decades in the classroom, I have made extensive use of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (1963) as a shining example of oratory. I was indeed fascinated to learn that more than a decade earlier, while attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, he earned a C for public speaking during Terms 1 and 2.

Beethoven’s education included some maths but it never included multiplication or division, only addition. Once when he needed to multiply 62 by 50, he wrote 62 down a page 50 times then added it all up. If we allow margin for error, Beethoven’s fifth symphony could well be his 62nd. Or his 3rd. Or perhaps it doesn’t even exist.

There are plenty more. It takes a drop of water 90 days to travel the entire length of the Mississippi River. And the world’s oldest toy is a stick. It’s in the National Toy Hall of Fame.

I trust you agree that those are all interesting facts.

And the tubing was crammed up very tightly so “the people in charge could cram it all in”.