bitful

Written Thai does not separate words with spaces except in certain cases.
Streetcar (the company I hire cars by the half-hour) also has a fleet of WV Transporter vans
Madonna bites the top off Cadbury's Creme Eggs and 'sucks the good stuff out'.
People on blood-thinners should avoid broccoli, as it is high in vitamin K which helps [...]

If you let iTunes manage your music library, adding 'Disc Number' information will add the disc number at the beginning of the file names, so that they can be ordered sequentially by disc in the directory.
The Hawaiian alphabet only has twelve letters and a glottal stop.
Georgian has got its own alphabet called Mkhedruli
Each Cremosa ChupaChups [...]

You no longer need to fill in any paperwork to pay a cheque into your account. Just hand in the cheque in your name and your debit card over the counter, and it's done. At least with Nationwide.
Styrofoam cups will be around forever, whereas banana peels biodegrade in just three weeks, newspaper in one month, [...]

Another expression for buttock cleavage is 'Dagenham smile'. Via kottke.org.
Before the 19th century picnics were held indoors.
Sundays between Ash Wednesday and Easter are not part of Lent.
'In the past, children in deaf schools did not have personal name signs, but were given numbers'. Via The Linguistics of British Sign Language, page 235.
'If you own a [...]

7 things I did not know last week

BBC TV programmes end credits have to be center justified.
Simon Amstell co-wrote an episode of Skins.
70 is 21 in celsius, as written on the card I got Dr B.'s dad for his 70th birthday.
Almost all the title sequences in Woody Allen's films are white Windsor font on black [...]

Firefox offers no option to temporarily disable Flash, but you can do that with add-ons (Adblock or Flashblock).
The BBC's definition of 'licence fee payer' includes not only licence holders, but also 'any other person in the UK who watches, listens to or uses any BBC service, or may do so or wish to do so [...]

The British Sign Language sign for the Wal-Mart-owned supermarket chain ASDA is a double pat on the buttock (or on the hip, as the bum officially lies outside the designated area for signing), from the series of ads where at ASDA you 'pocket the difference'.
'Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household [...]

Supermarkets pay farmers as little as 3 pence per chicken. And all male chicks, unsuitable for the egg industry, are killed and turned into pet food. These are just a couple of the facts Jamie Oliver talked about in the first ten minutes of Jamie's Foul Dinners. We recorded the rest but could not bear [...]

'Granola' is not American English for 'muesli'. Granola is crispy baked oats with nuts and honey, muesli is uncooked oats with dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
Online gambling is banned in Australia.
It costs an average of six months' salary to rent an apartment in Japan (including the equivalent of two months' rent as 'reikin', a non-refundable [...]

The original advocaat (creamy egg and brandy liqueur) is thick and often eaten with a spoon, and the liquid version in a bottle is sold as an export. It used to be made with avocados by the Dutch in Suriname and Recife, then with egg yolk in the Netherlands where avocados were not availiable.
Windows Mobile [...]

If your album tracks play in the wrong order on your iPod (but in the correct one in iTunes) and no amount of syncing will fix it, it most likely is because the 'Disc Number' info is not the same for all tracks.
You can put a knocked out tooth back in. Don't clean it or [...]

Noise cancelling headphones that use active noise control work by recording outside sounds and creating an exactly opposite wave to the "noise" waves, which effectively cancels out all the ambient noise.
The 13th root of a 200-digit number always begins with 2, always has 16 digits, and the last digit number is always the same as [...]

String vests provide excellent insulation by trapping air close to the skin.
Eleonora Salvatore Dominguin (better known as a model by her nickname Bimba Bosé) is not the daughter of Miguel Bosé's sister Paola, but of his other sister Lucia. Miguel and his niece sing on his latest album, Papito.
You can count in binary to 31 [...]

I'm glad nobody noticed an unclosed tag in one of my last posts, which meant there were only six things I did not know last week instead of seven.
See? Not a bad thing to have just a handful of very distracted readers. I'd hate the pressure otherwise.
Anyway. Quite glad that item #4 did not show, [...]

Raw/dry denim should not be washed often. If it smells, stick it in the freezer to kill bacteria.
Uffie (one of the many reasons I am kindly requested to listen to my music with headphones at home) provides the vocals for Justice's The Party.
Mayonnaise does not come from Mayonne (France) but from Mahón (Minorca, Spain).
See Wednesday's [...]

Echinacea products made from the leaves and stems are not known to be clinically effective. I just hope the root is as good as they say, because I've been using it to keep a cold at bay for a week now.
Tecknonik (a blend of hip hop and techno dance styles) is a registered trademark, and [...]

Your teeth get smaller as you grow old and that makes your face sag. You can have a dental facelift to increase the size of your teeth and fill out your face.
Band Aid II did a cover of Do They Know It's Christmas? in 1989. I was at the time living abroad and was therefore [...]

Jason 'J' Brown from boy band Five (originally spelled 5ive) is taking part in the new I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! I've always hated the show. But ten years ago I use to kiss the ground J walked on. Thanks heavens for PVRs and fast-tracking through hours of footage at 3x speed [...]

William Fortnum ('Fortnum & Mason') started business re-selling Queen Anne's discarded candles (she wanted fresh ones every night).
Isla Guy Fawkes is one the Galápagos Islands (Ecuador) named after the Briton who attempted to carry out the Gunpowder Plot.
The O2 has a hole to let the Blackwall tunnel ventilation towers through.
Belfast City Airport is named after [...]

You can 'mute' conversations in Gmail so that they do not show in your inbox. Handy for stuff you want to keep for reference but do not need to read straight away.
Volcanoes on low-temperature astronomical objects can have criomagma in the form of slushy ice.
Apple seeds contain a cyanide compound which is released if the [...]

The iPhone (and many other high-end phones) have a water damage sensor: a small white disc inside the headphone jack that gets coloured when in contact with water. [via garoo]
The Sound of Music is based on a true story (with alterations and omissions).
TV Genius (the TV listings and reminders website I use regularly) has launched [...]

There is no goalkeeper in rugby union. I noticed it thirty minutes into last week's France vs. New Zealand, did not dare ask any of the friends I was watching the match with, but silently Wikipedia'd it on my mobile.
In East Germany after the war there were so few men that they had to introduce [...]

With Oyster cards, you do not need a photocard any more
If you simply type 'time' into the search box, Google will tell you your local time. Type 'time' and a city, and it will tell you what time it is there. Type 'time' and a country with several time zones like Australia, and it will [...]

Stephen Hawking is 65 (I would have thought he was in his early fifties).
In Canada, informal hockey games are still called shinny (from shinty, a team sport played with sticks and a ball, now played almost exclusively in the Highlands of Scotland).
YouTube videos can now be forwarded without buffering. You used to need to wait, [...]

The Toblerone logo has a 'hidden' image of a bear (via Gordon).
The word seersucker 'originates from the Hindi words "shir shakkar," meaning "milk and sugar", probably from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth surface of milk and bumpy texture of sugar'.
Ethiopia not only uses a different calendar (the year 2000 [...]

Pale Male (the Fifth Avenue hawk) is known to have sired 26 chicks with four mates. It is not the only hawk in Central Park, and they mostly prefer nesting on buildings (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Trump Park hotel, a residential housing cooperative at 927 Fifth Avenue) rather than on trees.
UK [...]

Venice is to have a fourth bridge across the Grand Canal. Parts of it are being installed this weekend, and it will be completed by the end of the year. It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. View my pictures of Santiago Calatrava's Olympic Agora in Athens.
Madison Avenue symbolises the advertising industry. I had [...]

The UK bans advertising of promoting infant formula for babies under the age of six months. Glamour model Jordan was this week shown feeding SMA formula to her new-born baby in OK magazine, right next to an advert for SMA formula for older infants. Clever, if hardly legal. Sadly, it is not illegal for Jordan [...]

If you play with a cod liver oil capsule for long enough, it will eventually pop and splatter all over your desk and the side of your keyboard. The very same side you probably clutch with your hand when typing and stopping to think. Marvel in astonishment when, three days later, your hand smells of [...]

Emoze plans to extend support for Thunderbird in late 2007.
I've been eating imitation Mozart balls (flat-based Mozartkugeln in a golden wrapper, unlike the perfectly round original Mozartkugeln in a silver wrapper) all my life. Not even made in Austria. I am gutted.
Steampunk (a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction) is a tongue in cheek variant [...]