About the news I haven’t heard

There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, says the survey by Technorati. Mine is not in that list yet; they consider a blog as inactive, only if it’s not updated at least once in three months. According to the report, they predict that there’ll be only a 100 million of them those will be still active by the middle of this year. And I hope mine will be there in the list then.

This news, and another 99 of such pieces are part of ‘the 100 things we didn’t know last year’ published by BBC Magazine. One of the few regular readers of my blog sends me the link. And to my very pleasant surprise, there weren’t one single news that I had heard in the last 365 days. It was only a few weeks back, the Supreme Court in my country came up with an interesting ruling on published content for newspapers. Hearing on a PIL against obscene photographs and articles being published, the Court said, such a ban will lead to a situation where the newspaper will be publishing material caters only to children and adolescents, and adults will be deprived of their rightful share of ‘entertainment’. Tabloid of India, one of the only two defendants in the case, of course has no clue what can be an entertaining piece of news. Well, let’s say, they just lack a good sense of humour.

The BBC Magazine publishes 10 pieces of ‘unknown’ news pieces every week. And the above-mentioned link is a collection of those over the past 12 months. It has a survey report by ICMR, which found out that standard-sized condoms are too big for Indian men. Even after erection, I assume. Now, there’s nothing like a standard-size, and the ones available are of the length 150-180mm. It’s the same with the American men too, another study has revealed. I’m expecting them to be available soon in S, M, L, and XL sizes, and all of the XL being sold to be wasted.

Another piece informs me clitoris derived its name from the Greek word kleitoris, meaning little hill. On mons veneris. Obviously, it’s all Greek and Latin to me. And now I know what they mean when say making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

And there’s another report that says for every 10 attempts to climb Mount Everest, there’s one fatality. Arguably, the most expensive way to die. Worth a try, of course, for the ones who can afford.

Seems like life wasn't really any easier for men to make a decision in ancient Rome. Sex workers there used to charge an equivalent price of 8 glasses of red wine then. The ratio of good grapes to good women is still the same, I guess. If prices have anything to do with supply, that is.

Alcohol is the fuel that runs over 2 million cars and trucks in Brazil, another report in the list informs. Not just on the Newyear eve, or not just during the carnival, I hope. And I am sincerely curious to know, whether they can be driven in a straight line when the tank is still full.

15 years was the legal minimum age for women to get married in France, until recently. They made it 18, in 2006. Even now in Manipur, only girls below 15 are considered minor. In the rest of the country, they are minors for another 3 years.

A study is Somerset says that cows do have regional accents. The vets here who aspires for a career abroad may well do an accent training too. And another study reveals that they, the cows, each one of them releases up to 400 litres of poisonous methane every day to our breathing air. That’s enough to put Maneka in a dilemma. Save the cows or save the planet?

Another report says a domestic cat can scare a black bear to run up a tree. And another says in a fight between a lion a polar bear, the bear would win. The lions are challenging the bears, from their dens in Kalahari. The fight is yet to take place because they haven’t yet agreed on a neutral venue, I suppose. But this waiting also helps. Because, yet another study says that thinking about your muscles can make you stronger. Just think how weak you would have been now, if you weren’t thinking about them all these years!

And a study from University of Siena says watching television can act as natural painkillers for children. Paediatricians will be now standing the queue to buy televisions. And if that news gives parents a headache, go and listen to music. Because, another study assures that music can reduce chronic pains by 20%. Now, people who thought that listening to heavymetal gives you headaches, please understand that it would have been 20% more if you were not listening.

Who was that who said television kills the habit of reading? There is a study that says about 6 million people uses subtitles while watching a movie without having any hearing impairments.

Going through the list of 100 unheard news, I also learnt that I am detectorist. It’s the new term for people who are metal detector enthusiasts. Recently, during a high-security film festival I fell in love with metal detectors, and now I know I had actually became only a detectorist. The most amazing thing about the metal detectors is that they can detect your zipper, but not your hard-on. They are fun, trust me. The metal detectors, that is.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, is another term I learnt. It means the fear for the number 666. I don’t have that phobia, but I have another. It’s hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, meaning the fear of long words. It was in one Satyajit Ray movie, I came to know about the word floccinaucinihiliphilfication, which the character in the movie claims as the longest word in English. Apparently, it’s the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and means ‘an estimation of something as worthless’. The record now is with pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which can be also spelled as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. No prizes for finding the difference. It is the name of some lung disease, and may be reading it out loud in one breath might cause it. The thought makes my scary. I googled for phobias and successfully reached a site which has all the phobias indexed, and listed in alphabetical order. And to my great pleasure I found out that I am actually a very brave man. I am suffering from a very few of them listed there. Another one of my phobias that I would like to confess is phobophobia, the fear of phobias.

So, let me too welcome 2007. I couldn’t find any authentic study report on this, but in my firm belief there are an estimated 3.89 billion people who don’t change their calendars on the Newyear’s day. Don’t be one among them, and save your weekends and holidays.

And you may want to visit the following links:

100 things we didn’t know last year

An A-Z list of phobias