Welcome to Christmas 2012 from Mason Zimbler. This year, we'd like to take you on a traditional journey – with a twist. Count down through our gifts of love, and see what interesting facts and figures we have in store for you...
Using your percussive skills could certainly
burn up those Christmas calories, but it would
take over 6 hours of continuous drumming to
work off the average
Christmas dinner.
Is that a bit hard
to digest?
Drumming burns 540 cals per hour
the average Christmas dinner is about 3500 cals
Next time you use the lift at work, imagine if IT kept going for 60,000 miles! Using carbon nanopipes, scientists are working on a ‘space elevator’ that does exactly that. Not even santa goes that high!
one day, Carbon nanopipes could even tether electricity turbines in space or provide a transport cable system for delivering items to the moon
A small step, a giant leap – Neil Armstrong got it right about the nature of human endeavour. But there have been other huge 'leaps' in human achievement since then – some more literal than others!
NEIL ARMSTRONG'S GIANT LEAP (1969)
0.5 metres
Mike Powell's
long jump wR (1991)
8.95 metres
Felix Baumgartner's
spacedive (2012)
24 miles
90 years of crazy crazes
pole dancing
1920s
funky chicken
1950s
locomotion
1960s
the twist
1960s
lambada
1980s
macarena
1990s
zumba
2000s
gangnam style
2010s
Scandalous! That's how the Can-Can was seen when it first appeared in France in the 1830s. Originally performed by couples, it was American musical theatre that inspired the more familiar all-girl chorus-line style – like our nine ladies.
'Cancan' is colloquial French for 'scandal'
the Familiar cancan tune is 'The Infernal Galop' by Offenbach
Milking by hand is not quite as easy as it seems –it takes skill and strong wrists!
But one of our eight maids could milk enough for the cream on a family-sized
Christmas trifle in about 20 minutes.
milking by hand produces about 1 gallon of milk in 20 minutes
I gallon of milk makes about 3/4 pint of cream. 3/4 pint of cream makes one christmas trifle
How many times can you spin round on the spot with the grace of a ballerina before falling over?
Try 32 – if your head isn’t in a spin, you’ve missed your vocation!
Swan Lake has the most pirouettes of any ballet with 32 consecutive spins
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and there's nothing like a freshly-laid egg and soldiers - but how much could you handle in man vs egg?
Soldiers per egg, based on volume
What an Olympic year for Great Britain!
Our athletes proved that skill, talent and sheer determination can produce world-beating results. this year was our best haul for more than a century.
Team GB won 29 gold medals
more than any year since 1908
Which of our four favourite Christmas movie
characters tweets the most? You may be surprised...
What are your chickens telling you? We're no Dr Dolittle, so we can't really answer that, but we're told they speak a different language depending where they come from!
World's largest turtle
leatherback turtle
3m in length and 914 kilos
A turtle dove can
carry 34.2 grams
26,725 doves
THAT'S QUITE a lot!
What on earth is a turtle dove? Well it's kind of a
posh pigeon… But how many of these 'doves' would
it take to carry the world's LARGEST turtle?
